STAT+: UnitedHealth, CVS push back on Medicare plan to curb remote patient monitoring — SkimNews
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- UnitedHealth Group, CVS Health, and Kaiser Permanente each submitted letters to the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services opposing a proposal that would require remote patient monitoring care to be delivered by direct employees of the billing practice, effectively barring contractors.
- The CMS proposal targets billing for tracking patient health via connected devices such as blood pressure cuffs, scales, and blood glucose meters used to manage conditions including hypertension, diabetes, and heart failure.
- All three opposing organizations operate both insurance and care-delivery businesses, complicating the payer-versus-provider framing of the dispute.
- UnitedHealthcare, the insurance subsidiary of UnitedHealth Group, recently moved to stop paying for most remote patient monitoring "due to insufficient evidence of efficacy" — a stance that sits in tension with UnitedHealth's opposition to the CMS contractor restriction.
Why it matters: If finalized, the contractor ban would dismantle the outsourced staffing model many practices depend on to deliver RPM at scale, narrowing patient access to connected-device monitoring for chronic conditions. UnitedHealth's split posture — fighting to preserve contractor-staffed RPM at the practice level while its insurer arm tries to drop RPM coverage on efficacy grounds — exposes a conflict between its payer and provider businesses that competitors and regulators are likely to scrutinize.
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