Public Health Emergency Telehealth Services to SNF Residents

CMS keeps on providing useful information as the COVID-19 pandemic drags on. In fact, the rebuilding efforts shall continue until a significant vaccine emerges to the scene and puts an end to this virus. When America, on one side, faces the challenge of COVID-19 testing kits shortages, on the other, it is the people who must work on their emotional resilience to continue to survive the 2020 pandemic.

Emotional resilience, the art of managing one’s emotions through the crisis has become even more crucial.

Coming back to today’s topic, the COVID-19 Public Health Emergency (PHE) does not relax the overall requirements for Skilled Nursing Facility (SNF) Consolidated Billing (CB); however, CMS releases a set of CPT telehealth codes for coverable time segments as long as the crisis lasts.

New Telehealth Reimbursement-ready Codes

Telemedicine codes like:

99441,
99442, and
99443

assign three different time evaluations of telephonic Evaluation and Management (E&M) services by the provider. Physicians must bill for these services under Part B when providing care to an SNF’s Part A resident.

After such an announcement by CMS, Medicare Administrative Contractors (MACs) will reevaluate claims – for codes 9941, 99442 and 99443 – with service dates on or after March 1, 2020, that were denied because of SNF CB changes. You just have to sit tight and wait for the collections column to fill up. In case there is a provider medical billing service working on your behalf, they will update you once payments come through.

For those of you who have received payments from an SNF for telehealth services, it is obligatory to return them to the facility once the MAC repurposes your claim.

With COVID-19 still around, these changes had to be released eventually. On the whole, CMS finalized three payment rules for Medicare on July 31, 2020; they concur with payments for Inpatient Psychiatric Facilities (IPF), Skilled Nursing Facilities, and hospices.

We only wrote details for one of them – for SNFs.

CMS depicts an increase in total payments to SNFs by $750 million for FY 2021 or a 2.2 percent increase compared to FY 2020.

To know more about telemedicine’s remedial effects during the pandemic, we crafted a piece on our blog section: Telemedicine Emerges as Cure Outlet Amid the COVID-19 Outbreak. It gives you an outline of where we are headed to with remote visits.