In a recent blog post titled, Beyond Meaningful Use/Stimulus — EHR is a Revenue Enhancer — Time to think BIG!, we featured our new virtual office visit feature. The response to the blog post has been remarkable. Physicians were interested in learning more about how virtual visits work with Medicare patients. As a service to our providers, I have attached a letter from Medicare that clarifies their position regarding charging patients “on a cash basis” for this service.

The bottom line:

1. Medicare pays for “telemedicine” only in certain cases when the provider is a “distant site practitioner” (see our prior blog)
2. For providers who don’t meet the “distant site practitioner” standard, the service is a “non-covered service” and charging “on a cash basis” is within the provider’s right
3. An Advance Beneficiary Notice (ABN) is not required, but the provider may issue a voluntary ABN to the beneficiary indicating that the service is non-covered by Medicare

Using video-based virtual office visits make taking care of home bound seniors easier — Who says doctors don’t make house calls anymore? With MediTouch EHR a virtual house call is just a click away! Continue reading…

We will be authoring a couple of blog posts on how MediTouch EHR® can enhance revenue for your practice. Most EHR/EMR vendors publicize Meaningful Use as the sole revenue enhancement methodology related to adopting an EMR/EHR. It takes a special kind of EHR/EMR vendor to create software that goes beyond the typical tactics with regard to increasing your practices revenue line. Again, we are not speaking about ways that EHRs save money — they do, but that is not the emphasis of our next couple of blog posts, the focus is the top line.

Telemedicine, e-Visits, Virtual Office Visits — You pick the title… We have the solution

If you have read some of my previous blog posts you may have guessed that I just can’t get EHR related issues off of my mind. At a party or a barbeque I can’t help but do market research regarding how my friends and family feel about new ideas that our team is considering, regarding EHR and patient portal software. One question I like to ask people is:

“Would you pay around 2-3 times your co-pay to get medical care for certain non-emergency health issues and NOT have to visit the doctor’s office?”

I always get a yes.

So, per my very small sample size, our team concluded that if we could find a way to integrate an electronic visit or virtual office visit within the MediTouch® system, then our doctors would be able to provide a service that is in great and growing demand. And, of course we have found that method!

Regarding terminology, we will use the term virtual office visit rather than e-visit or telemedicine, because we think it best describes the services that can be provided via MediTouch EHR and the YourHealthFile® Patient Portal.