RPM and Medicare in 2026: An introduction and terminology

The U.S. Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) published the draft 2026 Medicare Physician Fee Schedule with some potential changes planned for remote physiologic monitoring (RPM) and remote therapeutic monitoring (RTM). Lucienne Marie Ide, MD, PhD, is founder and CEO of Rimidi, a company that works with that modality, and the author of an analysis of the 2026 schedule. Here she offers an introduction to remote patient monitoring, which also is shortened to RPM in industry literature.

Medical Economics: Overall, or in a general sense, how would you describe the state of remote patient monitoring in the U.S. health care system right now?

Lucienne Marie Ide, MD, PhD: I feel like it is reaching a level of maturity. You know, when the codes were first introduced, CMS made little adjustments here and there, and we've had several years now of stability in those codes and really mainstream adoption of remote patient monitoring.

So we all sort of interchangeably use remote patient monitoring and remote physiologic monitoring, and abbreviate both of them, RPM. So, as the name implies, monitoring some physiologic parameter of the patient, weight, blood pressure, blood glucose. Then you have remote therapeutic monitoring, which was introduced a little bit after RPM, and is focused really on musculoskeletal and respiratory conditions. And it doesn't have to be specifically their physiologic data. It can be medication adherence type data as well.