The Annual Wellness Visit has been a challenge for many physicians to implement. This is largely due to the time involved in producing a compliant report. A compliant report entails taking a comprehensive patient history and providing the patient with a written action plan that can be placed in their hands to take home covering both short and long term action items.
The initiative from the Affordable Care Act was to enable physicians to adopt a more preventive approach to the Medicare patient population. Through early identification of patient risks and chronic conditions, adequate treatment and testing can be applied before higher cost care is required and minimizing the risk of catastrophic events such as falls.
The impact for long term health savings is significant and patients are responsive to the program. At Ancillary Medical Solutions, we partner with Total Recall to provide a comprehensive preventive program for your Medicare patients.
The office can be supplied a technician to completely run the program. Alternately, for offices with lower volume patients a technician can be trained in house. The Encounter of Care with the patient entails an Annual Wellness Visit assessment as well as further preventive testing as indicated. This includes a pharmacogenetic screen, cancer screen and neuro cognitive tests where these are indicated. The additional pull through revenue beyond this testing is also typically upwards of $100 to $150 per patient.
The cadence of visits that result from the Annual Wellness Visit can see revenues from $350 to $700 per patient. Offices seeing 50 or more Annual Wellness Visit patients per month can expect revenue increases of $20 000 and more upward each month. In addition, if your office implemented falls testing for seniors a further $350 per patient could be anticipated. With one in three seniors expected to fall this year, providing falls testing also makes sense.
The Annual Wellness Visit and associated preventive testing will reduce hospitalizations and help keep patients at home and safe for longer. Implementing a preventive approach empowers patients to take some proactive measures for their own health and safety. The Neuro cognitive screening will also help identify the 70 to 75% of currently undiagnosed dementia and pre dementia patients.
The Annual Wellness Visit is good for business by providing physicians with the Quality Measures to safeguard reimbursements including PQRS, HEDIS and Meaningful Use. The Annual Wellness Visit will add more to these measures than any other single facet of care.
With other programs, the vendor may do their best to get the patient to your office, leaving you to still handle a lengthy visit with the patient. With Ancillary Medical Solutions, all you need to do is have your patient attend the office and 95% of the workload is handled by our vendor.
The office bills and receives the reimbursements. Utilizing a supplied technician also frees up your staff to attend to your other patients building in practice efficiencies. If you are still stuck in a dilemma about how to produce a compliant Annual Wellness Visit, speak to one of the Certified Ancillary Consultants at Ancillary Medical Solutions to help you decide on the best solution for your office.