Telehealth Palliative Care Support Leads To Medicare Cost Savings

Using telehealth to provide palliative care support to rural family caregivers (FCG) is a low-cost and feasible intervention for transitioning consumers from hospital to home-based care. The eight-week transitional palliative care (TPC) intervention costs $395 per rural caregiver when the services were facilitated by a registered nurse, $337 when facilitated by a social worker, and $585 when facilitated by a nurse practitioner.

The Medicare reimbursement scenarios included Transitional Care Management (TCM) and Chronic Care Management (CCM) CPT codes. Average Medicare reimbursement using the TCM CPT code was $322 for high-complexity and $260 for moderate-complexity consumers . . .