Medicare Changes...

Exceptions for Twelve Month In Person attendance Telehealth Rule:

• Patients that have tested positive for COVID 19.
• Patients experiencing homelessness
• Children less than 12 months old
• Patients receiving care through an AMS
• Patients attending for mental health services
• Sexual and reproductive health services (including GP O&G services)

As a qualifier, patients testing positive are recommended to still register their positive RAT with the Services NSW app. Similarly, patients attending for mental health reasons should also be billed mental health items (likewise for sexual health and O&G services).

New Medicare Items...

MBS Item 123 (level E face-to-face attendance) is not contingent on MyMedicare registration - a correction from last month's bulletin after clarification from DHHS!

The new triple incentive items are automatically applied to relevant item numbers through Best Practice - at this stage, a patient's MyMedicare registrations are listed in the 'Comment' field in Best Practice.

The MBS Quick Reference Guide has been updated to include these items. Please check the Teams General Channel for more information!

Practice Workflow Changes/Improvements...

MyMedicare - registrations can now be performed at the front desk; send a message through the 'note to reception' field when billing in Best Practice.

In the patient notes, use the autofill .MyMedicare to populate the consent for record keeping.

Chronic Disease Clinics - as part of a quality improvement and effort to better manage chronic disease in general practice, CSMP is investigating the possibility of running a rotating chronic disease clinic:

• At present, data extraction tools indicate that there are close to 1500 active patients that qualify for GPMP/TCA based on diagnostic criteria.
• We have allocated patients based on their frequency of attendance with a 'regular' GP, with a list to be reviewed by a GP for eligibility/appropriateness.
• GPs would nominate patients for contact, as well as any number of Saturdays in order to see their nominated patients for either GPMP/TCA and/or Health Assessment.
• CSMP would supply a nurse for observations/assessment, or whichever elements of the GPMP the GP would view as useful, thus making the process more streamlined.

Running clinics on a weekend has a range of benefits, including allowing patients that would otherwise be unable to attend do so, as well as not interrupting the usual clinical work done during your work week, as well as a range of financial benefits for GPs.

Participation is obviously completely voluntary, but we hope that such a service is one that which GPs might avail themselves. Also bear in mind that from November, 2024, patients will need to be registered for MyMedicare in order for them to be given a GPMP/TCA.

Shingrix Clinic - with limited doses available at present (30 per month), we are running nurse-led Shingrix clinics for eligible patients 1 day per week, rotating across the month. This may change with potential increasing availability of doses, but we recommend letting patients know that there may be a long wait before receiving their vaccine.

Coming Events...