Medicare would begin to pay physicians $41.92 a month next year for managing a patient with two or more chronic diseases outside of face-to-face office visits, according to a proposed physician fee schedule for 2015 released last week by the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS).
Last year CMS authorized a new billing code for chronic-care management to compensate physicians for tasks such as developing a care plan, referring patients to colleagues, and working with home-care agencies that are inadequately reimbursed under current evaluation and management (E/M) payment codes. CMS scheduled the code to take effect in 2015, but did not assign a dollar amount to it.
The proposed fee schedule for 2015 shows physicians the money, down to the cents. If a medical practice had only 20 Medicare patients who qualified for the new chronic-care management fee, it would gain an extra $10,000.
