Question

Do we need to change the way we capture consent for bulk billed Telehealth items based upon the Federal Government legislation?

Solution 

• Verbal Assignment
• Written Consent
  
  

Telehealth consultations

For all Telehealth consultations, you can capture patient's agreement to bulk bill the items before your practice is paid the Medicare benefit in the following ways:

Verbal Assignment

• For Telehealth services, Patients can provide verbal agreement during a consultation if you are not able to obtain written agreement.
  • The provider needs to document this agreement in an approved form (DB4E or DB020) by typing in ‘patient verbally agreed’ in the patient signature field and sending a completed copy of the approved form to the patient.
• You can learn more about verbal assignment of benefit arrangements for telehealth services in the following PDF fact fact sheet.

Written Consent

• At the Telehealth consultation, tell the patient you wish to bulk bill Medicare for the service. To do this the patient will need to:
  • Automatically have the patient agree to the service being bulk billed through a digital form, which you can do easily using HotDoc's Bulk Billing Consent service.
  • Or, manually send an email to the patient with the details to their nominated email address as per Services Australia's guidance, and have the patient reply to your email, which will be considered a signature agreeing to assign the benefit.

For more information on this, please refer to the MBS Fact Sheet section from MBS online located here.

Further information about written consent

For Telehealth consultations, written consent can be obtained for both phone and video consultations using HotDoc's Bulk Billing Consent service.

The HotDoc Telehealth Video feature also allows you to send the patient a notification to consent to bulk billing for their appointment during a Telehealth Video consult.

• The practitioner will select the relevant item codes during the video consult, and this is sent to the patient within the video. The patient selects 'I agree' to assignment of the bulk billing Medicare benefit.
  
  
• HotDoc will then save this as a PDF to your practice management software. 
  See: Where can I locate PDFs from HotDoc in my clinical software?
  
  
• To view this journey and set up Telehealth Video appointments, please see the following articles:
  • Getting Started with Telehealth Video Consultations
  • How does a practitioner start a Telehealth Video Consultation?
  • Telehealth Video - The Patient Journey
    
    

    What the practitioner will do during the consult

    What the patient will see during the consult