Qardio Support
Welcome to the mid-Summer CCM Pays podcast for 2020. I’d like to focus again on aspects of providing Remote Patient Monitoring services. By the way, if you are doing CCM without RPM, you are missing out on a great opportunity to better manage hypertensive patients and increase practice revenue by at least the amount you make with CCM alone.
RPM pays very well. The 99454 code pays about $69 monthly. We need to plan to provide platinum level support for these patients when the monthly payment is not that much less than your one-time cost for purchasing the unit. Our practice is to help patients at no additional cost whenever they have any difficulty with their Qardio unit. I say Qardio unit, because we have chosen to use the Qardio Arm in our implementation of RPM.
If a patient has a problem getting the system to work, we try to troubleshoot by phone if possible. If that doesn’t work, we have the patient bring in both the Qardio arm unit and the mobile device the patient uses with it. Oftentimes we only have to bluetooth pair the unit to the mobile device following an accidental erasing of the Qardio from the Bluetooth devices on the mobile phone or pad. Other times we find that the pairing is fine, but the Qardio device has an error. Sometimes just having the patient reposition the unit in a more medial position on the arm and allowing a loose fit of the cuff fixes the problem. Sometimes the unit just needs fresh batteries. Other times we find a leak in the cuff or mechanical pump failure evidenced by a unit which never achieves a pressure high enough to measure the patient’s systolic pressure. When we come across a mechanical failure, we just exchange the unit for a new one and re-pair the patient’s mobile device with the new unit. We have even had success with getting replacements from Qardio by emailing support with the model numbers of the defective units.
I cannot overemphasize how great RPM has been for hypertensive management and practice revenue. If you don’t already have your own in-house RPM program, visit RPMpays.com to learn how to start your own program without having to share any of the revenue with outside parties. Thanks for listening.
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