The Transformative Impact of Patient Apps in Healthcare
This article originally appeared in Healthtech Build News on August 9, 2021.
COVID has opened the floodgates and allowed the ecosystem to evolve rapidly. A lot of the recent acceleration has to do with the reimbursement of services. We have had the technology for years but reimbursement rates, policies and regulations were not following suit. Therefore, organizations were nervous about tackling the issue and not willing to invest time and resources to do this.
CMS released CPT codes late last year for RPM and more recently, they released CPT codes for Remote Therapeutic Patient Monitoring. There is some overlap in these codes. We’re just beginning the discussion and the good news is that CMS is aligned, although there is still a lot of vagueness in the regulations.
While CMS is restructuring how you get paid for these types of digital services, the FDA and other bodies are reviewing better ways to approve them, notify about new products, and how to build products from the ground up in a substantially more cost effective way. This is generating a lot of interest in the market and prospective customers.
