Home Health & Hospice Week

Medicare has a new app that may be helpful to your tech-savvy patients and their caregivers. On Jan. 28, the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services launched a “What’s Covered” app that “lets people with Original Medicare, caregivers and others quickly see whether Medicare covers a specific medical item or service,” CMS says in a release.

The app is part of Medicare’s eMedicare initiative, started last year.

“As of 2016, about two-thirds of Medicare beneficiaries indicate they use the Internet daily or almost daily,” CMS notes in the release. “Questions about what Medicare covers are some of the most frequent inquiries that CMS receives. There are approximately 15 million page views annually for coverage-related content on Medicare.gov and 1-800 MEDICARE receives over 3 million coverage related calls each year.”