WASHINGTON — Medicare will begin paying next spring for home monitoring programs that track patients with heart failure between doctor’s visits, under a final payment rule published Friday.
The rule covers devices such as connected scales, blood pressure cuffs and small patches that record heart rhythm, along with the clinical time needed to review the readings. Medicare estimates about 400,000 patients could be enrolled in the first year.
Heart failure is one of the most common reasons older Americans are admitted to the hospital, and many are readmitted within a month. Early warning signs, like quick weight gain from fluid, often show up days before a patient feels sick enough to call.
The questions
Cardiologists who spoke with Bedside said they welcomed the payments but had questions about the details.
The biggest one is who reads the data. The rule allows the monitoring to be run by outside companies under a doctor’s supervision. «A reading at 2 a.m. that nobody looks at until Thursday isn’t monitoring, it’s storage,» said Dr. Beatriz Holloway-Kim, a heart failure specialist in Denver.
Earlier trials of home monitoring for heart failure have had mixed results. Programs that paired devices with nurses who called patients quickly tended to do better than those that relied on alerts alone.
What happens next
Medicare said it will publish quality measures for the programs within a year and could change payments based on results. Several device makers have already announced plans to offer monitoring services to cardiology practices.