April 5, 2023
Note: the figures below are from a single month, March 2023, at one clinic. They are actual billing numbers rather than a projection, but they are one practice’s experience and not a promise of what any other clinic will collect.
Dr. Andrew Gorecki runs Superior Physical Therapy in Traverse City, Michigan, and also co-founded MovementRx. At the end of each month the practice runs its billing report, and he wanted to show what the March numbers actually looked like for remote therapeutic monitoring.
That month the practice logged 336 hours and 21 minutes of monitoring performed by its remote providers, at a cost of $10,090. Total RTM revenue for the month was $36,780.10, leaving roughly $26,690 in profit.
A meaningful contribution for the practice, and it landed during what is normally a slow stretch of the year.
Two things are worth pulling out of that.
The first is that the cost line is labour. Not software. 336 hours of clinical time is most of two full-time months, and it is what the treatment management codes actually reimburse. Any RTM projection that does not carry a labour cost of roughly that shape is not describing a real program.
The second is the margin. Outpatient physical therapy runs on thin margins, and a contribution of this size against a normally quiet month is the difference between holding staffing steady and cutting it. Dr. Gorecki has been direct that this is what RTM revenue has funded in his practice: paying key staff more, keeping the doors open through slow periods, and competing with hospital systems that collect more per code than an independent clinic does.
What this does not tell you
It does not tell you what your clinic would collect. Payer mix, locality adjustment, enrollment volume and engagement rate all move the number, and all four differ from practice to practice.
It also does not tell you whether the model that produced it will still be payable in 2027. CMS has proposed restricting Medicare payment for RTM monitoring performed by clinical staff who are not direct employees of the billing practice. If that is finalized, the arrangement behind these numbers changes. We wrote about what the proposed rule actually says separately.
What this means for your clinic
Take the shape rather than the figure. Monitoring hours are your real constraint, labour is your real cost, and the revenue follows engagement rather than enrollment.
If you want to see what that looks like against your own caseload, the RTM calculator will get you a directional answer, and you can request a demo if you would rather build it with your actual payer mix.