6 Steps For Business Leaders to Get Ready for RTM in 2026
RTM is sweeping across the rehab industry, with new CMS codes proposed to increase reimbursement in 2026. Now is a great time to get started if you haven't already. In our new article, learn 6 best practices for implementing RTM at your organization.
October 16, 2025
8 min. read

RTM is sweeping across the rehab industry.
New codes have been proposed for remote therapeutic monitoring (RTM) in 2026 that will significantly increase reimbursement amounts. These changes were proposed in the 2026 Physician Fee Schedule Proposed Rule and may be finalized in early November of this year. Organizations are getting ready for RTM to remove the training wheels and fully come online. It’s a truly exciting development for the rehab industry.
Let’s take a look at six best practices for getting started with RTM and how Medbridge supports your practice so you can benefit from this important monitoring intervention.
Why Ignoring RTM Leaves Money on the Table
At Medbridge, we have an incredible RTM platform for you to dig into even if you haven’t used this monitoring intervention before. The most important thing is just to get started building up the digital health muscle at your organization. Standing up a service doesn’t happen on its own—it takes work to get it done right. Some organizations have tried quick fixes to increase their reimbursement, but that approach isn’t effective or sustainable.
Quick fixes don’t generate revenue for your organization; they generate revenue and data for your vendor. But working with the right partner can help you generate true value from RTM by transforming the culture in your clinics, improving your therapeutic alliance with patients, and becoming what the APTA calls “the digitally-enabled physical therapist.“
I’m here to tell you that your competitors aren’t waiting—they are moving ahead. Medbridge has been flooded with calls and demo requests from organizations preparing to launch an RTM program in 2026. We’re so excited to help move the industry forward, but we are also concerned that many organizations are still waiting on the sidelines, unsure of the big picture or the organizational changes required. It can’t be business as usual anymore—it’s time to take a leap forward and ensure that your business can compete.
PT clinics that ignore RTM at this point are leaving money on the table and jeopardizing their own profitability.
Every organization is different, of course, but when you’re ready, we are here to help you modernize your services and support you through this culture change. Digital health is here, and it’s proven to be effective and popular with patients. So let’s take a look at six things you can start working on today to get ready for 2026!
6 Steps to Get Ready for RTM in Your Organization
1. New Code Awareness
Many organizations have heard something about the proposed changes, but might not be fully aware of the details. Leadership at your organization needs to be plugged in and should fully understand the business opportunity, barriers to adoption, and clinical impact for patients.
Organizations will need to consider where they’re starting from and the digital competency of their staff. RTM is a few years old now, so it’s a great time to start learning best practices from the experiences others have had and are sharing with the industry.
Medbridge recommends: Review our recent webinar with Rick Gawenda to find out more about the proposed changes for 2026, including two new codes for MSK care and how they might be far easier for your organization to operationalize in 2026 due to the new, less stringent requirements.
2. Reality Check—Patients Want Digital Exercise Programs
Many clinics are still providing printed home exercise programs to patients who don’t ask for them and promptly discard them. Instead, offer a digital option to patients first and see if that will meet their needs before offering the print version. Data shows this is an important moment in the physical therapy encounter that often predicts engagement and final outcomes.1
While some patients might prefer print, you can expect that most of your patients probably prefer a digital program that supports their progress and keeps them engaged in their care. Your competitors already offer this by now, and they have started collecting data on their outcomes to show to their referral partners.
Medbridge recommends: Start collecting your current rate of HEP digital sharing and discuss with your staff how digital sharing benefits patients, with organizations seeing higher engagement and a better experience. Set a goal for improving your digital sharing rate, both as an organization and for clinicians at their performance review.
3. Define the Population to Consider the Business Case
Organizations should consider which types of patients at their organization would benefit clinically from RTM, the policies of their payers, and how to offer the service to patients in the most consistent and effective way. Successful organizations standardize best practices for easier implementation as well as better compliance, results, and analysis.
Medbridge recommends: Review your payer mix, including the percentage of Medicare, Medicaid, and your largest commercial payers, to understand how much reimbursement might be available. The APTA recently published information on which 25 states’ Medicaid programs are reimbursing RTM, and the AMA has a commercial reimbursement guide as well. We also recommend that you review your payer policies and reach out to your payers where coverage is unclear. It’s a great opportunity to lobby on behalf of your patients for access to these new services.
4. Get Staff Buy-In
For busy clinicians, extra clicks, documentation, and work can be a tough ask. That’s why the platform matters. It needs to be easy—but more than that, it must be effective. Patients need to see value from it for clinicians to continue using the tool. Sharing your data back to your staff is a key transparency step we encourage organizations to consider.
Medbridge recommends: Start a committee of staff members to look into how RTM can be successfully implemented at your organization. Task this committee with investigating the clinical impact and potential solutions that they will report to leadership. Shared decision-making leads to shared ownership of the service and is key to influencing how clinicians practice at your organization going forward. Ultimately, your clinicians know your patients’ needs best and are in the best position to determine which solution will provide the best care.
5. Implement a Pilot Program in Your Organization
If your organization is large, we’d recommend starting small with one or two of your clinics. Set your policies in motion, train staff, and implement your pilot. Learning from a small scale will help you be successful when you roll out the change across the rest of your organization.
To start, you’ll need to consider what type of model you want the project to adopt: provider-led or a centralized model, with a coordinator at the middle supporting providers. Identify your barriers early and determine what works before expanding the model across your organization.
Medbridge recommends: Start with one or two clinics or a smaller group of providers before rolling out a big change at your organization. Learning the lessons on a small scale can really help your project be a success.
6. Offer High-Quality Training and Support
Medbridge offers many resources to help support the development of RTM in your organization. You can learn from our experience implementing hybrid care at Corewell Health, or how to best use digital care to address women’s health or reduce falls in older adults.
Our course catalog includes traditional courses providers can take for CEUs, including billing and coding for RTM from Rick Gawenda, but we also offer a special content library, the Medbridge Digital Academy, designed to deploy this service across your organization, ensure your staff get the training they need at every level of digital competency, and help your staff build confidence and competence with digital tools. It offers short learning modules to get staff up to speed quickly along with longer, advanced training to build deeper expertise.
A Final Thought
To offer additional perspective, Garth Savidge, PT, DPT, OCS, FAB, one of our innovation experts who supports several Medbridge clients transforming care delivery, shared his insights on preparing for RTM in 2026:
“For many organizations, the most challenging part of implementing RTM isn’t understanding the codes, even though that’s not always easy,” Savidge said. “It’s working with clinicians to change how they provide care to patients. Our patients in PT aren’t doing their HEP when they get home. Let’s fix that. We have to recognize that the biggest impact we can make for our patients isn’t when they’re in front of us, but in giving them the tools to take control of their health when they go home. Clinicians need to feel that the process is tied to engagement and that it’s meaningful; otherwise, they won’t have a reason to do something different from how they practice today.”
Reframing RTM as a clinical tool rather than a reimbursement opportunity might seem like common sense when it comes to engaging clinicians, but many leaders instinctively focus on the business side first—a misstep when the goal is true care transformation. Savidge encourages leaders to concentrate on the problems RTM solves rather than the technical requirements or reimbursement details. Of course, financial sustainability remains essential for long-term success, but the upcoming 2026 changes appear poised to make that much easier.
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