Here is a thing that happened in a lot of clinics every single month for four years, and almost nobody wrote it down.
A therapist opens the RTM dashboard. Four patients are flagged. She reviews the data on all four, calls two of them, adjusts one home program, and sends a message to the fourth. Total time, fourteen minutes.
Fourteen minutes of real clinical work. Billed as nothing.
Because until 2026, the first treatment management code in the RTM set was 98980, and 98980 starts at 20 minutes. Nineteen minutes and you were working for free. That is the gap 98979 closes.
What CPT 98979 covers
98979 is RTM treatment management for 10 to 19 minutes of clinical time in a calendar month. It is new for 2026. It sits below 98980, which covers the first 20 minutes, and 98981, which covers each additional 20.
The interactive communication requirement did not go away. You still need at least one real exchange with the patient or caregiver during the month. 98979 lowered the time threshold, not the standard of care.
Why the twenty minute floor was the wrong shape for rehab
The 20 minute floor made sense if you pictured RTM as intensive management of a complicated patient. Some RTM patients are that. Most are not.
Most of the caseload in an outpatient physical therapy practice is a patient who is doing fine. They log their exercises, their pain is trending the right direction, and what they need from you once a month is a look at the data and a short conversation to keep them going. That is eight minutes of review and a six minute phone call.
And here is what I watched happen in practice. Once a clinic realizes that patients under 20 minutes produce nothing, one of two things follows.
The honest clinic stops monitoring the easy patients. They focus the minutes where there is a billable event, which means the compliant, improving patients get less attention than they should. That is a clinical decision being driven by a billing threshold, and it is exactly backwards.
The other kind of clinic finds a way to make every patient a 20 minute patient. I do not need to explain why that is a problem. Any auditor who pulls a chart where every RTM patient in the panel lands at exactly 20 to 22 minutes is going to have questions, and they should.
98979 removes the pressure in both directions. Short interactions get captured as short interactions.
Ten to nineteen, and how you prove it
A lower threshold raises the documentation bar, not lowers it. That is the part I would want a clinic owner to sit with.
When the only code was 98980, the question was binary. Did you hit 20 minutes or not. Now there are three tiers, and the difference between billing 98979 and 98980 is nine minutes of clinical time. If your documentation cannot defend which side of that line a given patient fell on, you have a problem you did not have last year.
Practical version. Your note needs the actual minutes, not a range and not a checkbox. It needs what you reviewed, what you found in the data, what you changed, and the date and nature of the interactive communication. If a clinician is reconstructing this from memory at the end of the month, the number is not going to hold up.
Time tracking that happens at the moment of the work is the whole ballgame here. Not a spreadsheet somebody fills in on the 30th.
Watch the calendar month, not the enrollment date
This one bites people every year and 98979 gives it one more place to bite.
The treatment management codes run on the calendar month. Not a rolling 30 days from when you enrolled the patient. So a patient enrolled on the 22nd gives you nine days in the first month and then a fresh month starting the 1st. Those nine days might produce twelve minutes, which is now billable as 98979 where before it was billable as nothing.
But it also means a patient whose monitoring you think of as one continuous episode may split across two calendar months at two different tiers. Your workflow has to close out the month cleanly. If it does not, you will get claims that no reviewer can follow.
Note that the device supply codes do not work this way, which is a large part of why people get confused. 98977 and 98985 are about days of data transmission and carry their own 30 day gap rule between submissions. 98979, 98980 and 98981 are about clinician minutes inside a calendar month. Two different clocks running at the same time on the same patient.
What this does to your program math
Run this against your own panel rather than taking a number from me.
Pull last month. For every RTM patient, find the total clinical minutes. Sort into three buckets: under 10, 10 to 19, and 20 or more. The middle bucket is the one that was invisible before this year.
When I have done this exercise with practices, the middle bucket is usually larger than anyone expects, and it is almost entirely made up of patients who are doing well. Which is a strange thing to discover. Your best-responding patients were the ones generating the least revenue.
The under 10 bucket is worth a second look too, but for a different reason. If a lot of patients are getting less than ten minutes of attention in a month, that is not a billing finding. That is a program finding. Somebody is not getting monitored.
Our own adherence sits around 78 percent, against a commonly cited national figure near 30 percent for remote monitoring programs, and the reason is that a licensed clinician actually makes the call. Those figures are from our internal analysis, they are preliminary, and they have not been peer reviewed. But the mechanism is not mysterious. Contact drives adherence. The monitoring is the product.
What this means for your clinic
Three things to do this month, and none of them require a new vendor.
Make sure your documentation captures actual minutes at the time of the work, so you can defend 98979 against 98980 on any given chart.
Make sure whoever bills your RTM claims knows that 98979 exists and knows it is treatment management, not device supply. The two new 2026 codes get mixed up constantly because they arrived together.
And go look at your under 10 minute bucket. If it is big, the answer is not a code. The answer is that nobody has the hours to do the monitoring, and no addition to the code set is going to fix that.
If you want help sorting out which of those three you are actually dealing with, request a demo and we will look at your caseload together. If you would rather run the numbers yourself first, start with the RTM calculator.