What about commercial payers?
While CMS has issued its Medicare guidelines, commercial insurance companies can also set their own rules about covering telehealth services. Many of them have rushed to update their policies to allow office visits to be billed via telehealth.
Unfortunately, each payer can set its own rules about whether to cover telehealth and if the place of service 02 and/or modifier -95 is needed. UnitedHealthcare is covering telehealth visits for all of its Medicare Advantage, Medicaid, and commercial accounts.
Humana also is covering telemedicine for urgent care needs. Some private insurers are continuing to offer virtual visits with their contracted telehealth provider, not with the patient’s own physician. It is likely that this will change in the days ahead, but it means practices must check their payer policies and pay attention to the emails they receive from the payers. If patient foot traffic is slow, this may be a good time to call each payer to not only find out their telehealth rules, but to also learn what else is being suspended during the COVID-19 pandemic.
This would also be a good job for an employee to do from home versus coming into the practice.
None of the payers are limiting the diagnosis code for telemedicine services. The patient does not need to have a cough or fever to have telemedicine covered. Any diagnosis or condition is eligible to be billed via telehealth.
The waived restrictions by Medicare are in place only as long as the government state of emergency. Commercial payers are also describing these as temporary. However, it may be hard to put the genie back in the bottle. Medical practices and patients may find that these visits are just what the doctor ordered.
COVID-19 testing
Although testing is still not widely available, the American Medical Association has developed a CPT code for the test:
- 87635: Infectious agent detection by nucleic acid (DNA or RNA); severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) (Coronavirus disease [COVID-19]), amplified probe technique
CMS has also developed codes for testing for this new coronavirus. One (U0001) is specifically for tests done in the CDC lab. The second (U0002) was for other labs, but it seems likely that the CPT code will replace it.
In February, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration issued a new policy for certain labs to develop their own validated COVID-19 diagnostics. This second HCPCS code could be used for such tests when submitting claims to Medicare or other insurers.
The hope by CMS is that having these specific codes will encourage further testing and improve tracking of the virus.
This article first appeared on Medscape.com.