Billing changes for patient E-Visits and telephone calls

As more patients seek care from their own homes and digital devices, health care providers are communicating more often via secure message and telephone. To account for this shift, patients and their insurance companies may be billed differently going forward.

Beginning June 4, UC Davis Health patients will begin to receive a bill for E-Visits. An E-Visit is an online “visit” that does not require an appointment; instead, a patient can have back-and-forth communication with their provider through MyUCDavisHealth messages.

A health care provider may bill a message as an E-Visit if:

• It cannot be answered in a simple way, or
• It is not related to a recent prior visit, or
• It takes 5 or more minutes of their time to respond, or
• In order to respond to the patient’s message, they need to make a clinical assessment or medical decision, and review the patient’s medical history

This service expansion will usually cost the same or less than a scheduled visit. Billing for similar unscheduled telephone calls will begin in July.

For providers, responding to long or complex patient messages takes time on top of scheduled clinic hours. These messages often introduce new symptoms or issues, which may require research and/or a new clinical assessment.

If medically appropriate, providers may now respond to and manage patient care requests via MyUCDavisHealth in the form of an E-Visit, instead of requesting the patient schedule a video or in-person appointment. Each E-Visit can involve back-and-forth communication with your provider through secure messages over the span of one week.

More health care groups around the country have begun billing patients for longer, unscheduled communications. As patients become more comfortable using online tools and messaging, providers have adjusted to their preferences. To account for this evolving market and physicians’ workload, UC Davis Health leadership has determined billing for E-Visits and unscheduled phone encounters is the financially responsible solution to continue to offer patients multiple choices for accessing care conveniently.

In June 2023, UC Davis Health began providing physicians with Relative Value Unit (RVU) credits for MyUCDavisHealth messages that met the criteria for billable E-Visits. (Health insurance companies use RVUs to determine how much to reimburse providers.) The final necessary step is to begin billing patients and their insurance for these services.

Patients who have used E-Visits in the past will see a MyChart homepage message alerting them to the policy change for similar services in the future. More information can be found on the UC Davis Health website.