CMS continues addressing questions about CCM

Last week, the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) hosted a national provider call on payment of chronic care management (CCM) services, codes for which went into effect this year. The call reaffirmed a lot of what CMS has previously stated in the Federal Register and that the AAFP has summarized on its web site.

One new piece of information gleaned from the call is the fact that rural health clinics and federally qualified health centers are not authorized to bill Medicare for CCM at this time. CMS staff indicated that they hope to change that in 2016. On the call, CMS staff also highlighted that they have published a fact sheet on CCM(www.cms.gov).

For those who missed the call, an audio recording and written transcript of it(www.cms.gov) will be posted in approximately two weeks. A copy of the slide presentation(www.cms.gov) used during the call is already available.

– Kent Moore, Senior Strategist for Physician Payment for the American Academy of Family Physicians