RPM and Medicare in 2026: When remote patient monitoring joins artificial intelligence

AI can enhance efficiency in health care by identifying data patterns and delivering actionable insights to clinicians that might otherwise go unnoticed. However, as AI reduces the time required for certain tasks, there’s an open question about how to adjust physician reimbursement to fairly account for complexity, not just time, which may prompt changes to the Current Procedural Terminology coding system in future fee schedules, said Lucienne Marie Ide, MD, PhD, founder and CEO of Rimidi, a company that works with RPM, and the author of an analysis of the 2026 schedule.

Medical Economics: How do you anticipate AI will change remote patient monitoring?

Lucienne Marie Ide, MD, PhD: More than anything, it will bring efficiency to it. AI, computers in general, are better than human beings often at seeing patterns and data. At least, they do it more efficiently than we do. And so I think the ability to serve up insights to the learned intermediary, the nurse, the physician, the pharmacist, that might not otherwise be apparent to them, will be extremely helpful. And back to the Physician Fee Schedule aspect of it, I think we're going to have to, at the same time, think through, how do we compensate for, AI assisted technologies? Because, as you know, many of the sort of the basis for the CPT system is time and complexity. And so if we improve efficiency by using AI, and that decreases the amount of time, does the physician then get paid less for that intervention, even though the complexity may be the same? So there's a lot to work through there and I know there are groups currently looking into that and working on that as we speak, probably not for 2026 but I think for 2027.