RPM in 2026: Optimizing days of the month for patient care

Reimbursement for remote patient monitoring (RPM) depends largely on how much time a physician spends working with a patient, both minutes in the day and days of the month. Lucienne Marie Ide, MD, PhD, founder and CEO of Rimidi, a company that operates remote patient monitoring and chronic care management systems. Here she continues describing how RPM coding rules will change in 2026.

Medical Economics: Online you wrote that the split allows for billing in cases where beneficiaries may have acute conditions or are more stable and require shorter monitoring periods. Can you describe those two scenarios and explain why those are important?

Lucienne Marie Ide, MD, PhD: This has been the debate of, like, how did we get to the 16 days plus, right? And for a patient to be enrolled in RPM, the enrolling provider needs to find that it's medically necessary and will medically benefit that patient. Well, there are patients I think where it is medically necessary and beneficial, but they don't need to be taking a measurement every other day of a month, necessarily. This could be the case with obesity management. It could be the case with some patients with hypertension management that you're not looking for that sort of daily trend. Maybe you're looking for a weekly trend in readings. So, that's kind of one use case, the patient, who will benefit but doesn't need the frequency of reading necessarily. The other would be those maybe more acute use cases where you know, two weeks or less, in the month, this patient just had an event, you need some short-term monitoring, and this is a modality that could support that. So, it really does broaden the population of patients who can benefit from this kind of care.