RPM and Medicare in 2026: Why flexibility matters for patients and physicians using remote monitoring

Every patient is unique, and physicians use their clinical judgment to guide the best treatments and interventions to help patient health. That applies to remote physiologic and remote therapeutic monitoring. Lucienne Marie Ide, MD, PhD, is founder and CEO of Rimidi, a company that works with RPM, and the author of an analysis of the 2026 schedule. Here she continues discussion about the importance of flexibility in RPM time requirements for 2026.

Medical Economics: Why is greater flexibility in RPM billing beneficial for physicians and patients? Continued discussion.

Lucienne Marie Ide, MD, PhD: I think it's important for us all to, like, remember that foundationally the purpose of RPM is to improve outcomes for patients. That's why CMS pays for this activity, is because they believe that proactively monitoring and managing patients outside of the clinic will improve their outcomes, and ultimately reduce cost. If you think about a population of patients, they don't all need the same intervention, right? Not every medical condition is the same and requires the same amount of monitoring. So you could compare, for instance, diabetes, where maybe it's appropriate that a patient needs to check their blood glucose every day to, you know, weight loss, where they don't necessarily need to weigh themselves every single day. And so having this flexibility in the number of days of readings or in the amount of time spent allows for clinical judgment on the part of the provider of, what kind of intervention does this patient need? It allows practices to sort of triage patients and be a little bit more strategic with the time that their clinical team is using to engage their population and really provide appropriate level of care to each patient who's in the program.