Remote patient monitoring in 2026: New rules from Medicare

Lucienne Marie Ide, MD, PhD, founder and CEO of Rimidi, a company that operates remote patient monitoring and chronic care management systems, introduces some remote patient monitoring coding changes that the U.S. Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Serviceswill implement in 2026.

Medical Economics: Can you explain what's changing for 2026 in regard to remote patient monitoring?

Lucienne Marie Ide, MD, PhD: Sure, we're really excited, it's probably the biggest changes we've seen in RPM — and there are changes in RTM as well — in a couple of years. So, these programs that were first introduced in 2019 had a couple of changes the first few years, they've been very stable. But the two new codes that are being introduced are really to address some pain points that have been identified around how many days out of a month, a patient needed to take measurements, and then, how much time they needed to be monitored in order for those activities to be billable. So CMS has introduced a new code (99445) that allows for billing of two to 15 days of measurements, so that is a complimentary code to the current code 99454, which is for 16 or more days. And then kind of in parallel, they’ve introduced a code to pay for 10 to 19 minutes of monitoring and management that is similarly kind of the sister code to the 20-plus minutes of monitoring. So big picture here, we and many other people in industry are happy because I think this expands the population of patients who are eligible to participate in and benefit from remote patient monitoring programs.