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Thursday, 23 July 2026 |
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| Companies that help doctors keep tabs on their patients at home are freaking out after Medicare's proposal last week to gut remote patient monitoring, or RPM. |
| The plan is a total about-face from the Trump administration’s previous, full-throated support for RPM. In 2019, CMS put in place new billing codes that vastly expanded the use of remote monitoring. |
| But as RPM use ballooned, so did worries about fraud and abuse. The Office of Inspector General at HHS found that Medicare paid $536 million for the service in 2024, a huge jump from $15 million in 2019. But 43% of patients between 2019 and 2022 didn't receive all components of monitoring — education, connected devices and treatment management. The OIG, a federal watchdog, said that raised questions about whether the service was being used as intended. |
| That’s why CMS is proposing to cut payments for remote monitoring, and more drastically, to ban third-party vendors from monitoring patients on behalf of health systems. |
| Chris Altchek, who heads up one of those vendors, Cadence, told me CMS should do something about the low-quality monitoring programs out there, but he said the proposed approach will make tech-enabled chronic care much harder for healthcare providers to deliver. |
| Altchek said there are other levers CMS could pull. For example, it could require healthcare providers ordering remote patient monitoring to be part of an accountable care organization on the hook for the total cost of care. That way, providers have an incentive to avoid low-quality services. It could also force RPM programs to meet certain standards, like integrating with the electronic health record and providing 24/7 clinical coverage, he said. |
| Altchek added that if CMS moves forward and pulls support from RPM, it could make it harder for the agency to get other innovative programs, like ACCESS, off the ground. Health systems invested heavily in new care models around monitoring based on the Trump administration’s championing it. How could the industry count on CMS going forward if it undoes all that
progress? |
| - Shelby |
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Payouts Balloon |
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15 |
Nearly $15 billion was paid out by insurers to healthcare providers in 2025 as part of arbitration under the No Surprises Act, according to an analysis by the Wall Street Journal. That amount tripled compared to 2024. |
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This week in health Тech |
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Despite the crowded market for AI scribes, Nabla still has “a lot of room to run,” newly named CEO Brian Manning told Shelby. Nabla has expanded beyond ambient scribing to transcribing dictation, writing up lab orders, coding and supporting clinical decisionmaking with recommendations. “We're focused on this notion of rolling back all the administrative work that's been created in the last couple of decades. We think that's a big enough problem to solve for now,” Manning said. |
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Whoop hired Ami Bhatt as its new chief medical officer. Bhatt previously served as the inaugural chair of FDA's digital health advisory committee. This is the first time Whoop has filled the role since 2022, after Patrick Carroll’s brief two month stint as Whoop’s CMO before returning to Hims and Hers, where he currently serves as CMO. |
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Worldwide made. Thanks for reading.
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