Discover the world’s most extensive home exercise library.
Explore remote therapeutic monitoring and billing solutions for your clinic
Measure, benchmark, and improve patient outcomes.
Empower patients with tools to support their recovery.
Customized patient mobile experience under your own clinic brand.
The solution that organizes your patient activities, from triage to discharge.
A practical RTM guide for occupational therapy clinics, OT use cases, the six 2026 CPT codes, billing requirements, and the workflow to operationalize it.
Occupational therapy centres on what patients do between visits. Dressing routines, hand exercises, fine motor practice, and adaptive equipment use mostly happen at home. That between-visit work determines whether therapy translates into independence. Yet the OT team’s effort around it, including follow-ups, caregiver coordination, and program adjustments, has historically gone undocumented and unreimbursed.
Remote Therapeutic Monitoring changes that. RTM serves two purposes. As a clinical tool, it tracks functional progress. As a reimbursement pathway, it recognizes the between-visit work that already happens around scheduled care.
One important note before the details: only one therapy discipline can bill RTM codes for a patient at a time. OTs often work in multidisciplinary settings alongside PTs and SLPs. Stroke patients typically see all three, and pediatric cases often involve more than one discipline too. If OT is billing RTM, PT and SLP cannot bill the same codes for that patient. This shapes how multidisciplinary teams need to coordinate enrollment.
This guide covers OT-specific use cases, the six RTM CPT codes, and the billing requirements. It also walks through the workflow that makes RTM part of daily clinic operations.
OT outcomes depend on patients practicing daily living activities outside the clinic. A therapist can teach a one-handed dressing technique in a session. Whether the patient uses it at home stays invisible without monitoring. So does how well it works in their real environment.
That visibility gap is wider in OT than in many other rehab disciplines. ADLs happen in private spaces. Hand therapy exercises happen in short bursts throughout the day. Adaptive strategies only matter once a patient applies them in real situations. Asking a patient at the next appointment how things went produces a vague answer at best.
RTM gives OT clinics a structured way to monitor functional progress between sessions. Patients log practice, report challenges, and surface issues as they happen. Therapists get a continuous picture of how the plan of care is translating into real-world function.
RTM works across most OT populations, but adds the most clinical value where between-visit consistency drives functional outcomes. Common conditions include:
Functional and neurological recoveries benefit from continuous monitoring because progress unfolds across months, not weeks. Over a longer plan of care, RTM data helps therapists refine adaptive strategies. They can adjust based on real-world performance rather than session-room observation alone.
Six CPT codes structure RTM. They cover initial setup, device or platform supply, and time spent overseeing aspects of the plan of care between visits:
| RTM CPT Code | Description |
|---|---|
| 98975 | Initial RTM setup and patient training (requires 2 or more monitored days). |
| 98985 | RTM device capturing 2–15 days of MSK data in 30 days. |
| 98977 | RTM device capturing 16–30 days of MSK data in 30 days. |
| 98979 | 10–19 minutes of RTM treatment-management time per month. |
| 98980 | 20 minutes of RTM treatment-management time per month. |
| 98981 | Each extra 20 minutes of RTM management beyond 98980. |
“Management time” in this context isn’t the same as managing the treatment itself. RTM oversees specific aspects of the plan of care. That means reviewing patient data, communicating with patients or caregivers, and adjusting the home program based on the data.
Codes stack within a billing cycle. Take a patient who enrolls at the start of the month. They could generate 98975 once per episode, plus 98977 if they reach 16+ monitored days. One or more management time codes can follow, depending on oversight time. The 2026 RTM CPT code updates added 98985 and 98979. These codes give clinics flexibility for shorter monitoring periods and shorter management windows.
Implementation comes down to three operational steps. First, identify eligible patients and enroll them. Second, monitor progress and engage between visits. Third, bill with confidence once the data meets each threshold.
Different roles touch the workflow at different points. Clinicians own enrollment decisions, patient engagement, and management time. Front-desk staff often handle consent capture and onboarding logistics. Billing teams handle submission. RTM layers onto existing OT evaluation, treatment planning, and discharge processes rather than replacing them. It fits alongside the home exercise library and care pathway tools OT clinics already use.
OT adherence data goes beyond “did the patient do their exercises.” It covers practice on dressing routines, cooking activities, fine motor tasks, hand strengthening, and adaptive equipment use. These are the daily activities that define whether therapy is building independence.
Patient-reported challenges surface earlier through structured check-ins than through traditional follow-ups. A patient struggling with a one-handed cooking technique can flag the issue mid-week. A caregiver supporting a stroke patient’s morning routine can report what’s working while it’s still fresh. The OT sees this in time to adjust the program before the next visit, not after another week of frustration.
Over a longer plan of care, monitoring data becomes the basis for more responsive treatment adjustments. Therapists change adaptive strategies that aren’t working faster. They progress programs at the right time when the data calls for it. And they bring documented evidence of patient effort into discharge planning.
Communication is where OT often delivers value that doesn’t show up in billable visit time. OT communication includes quick messages about a transfer technique, caregiver check-ins about evening routines, and reminders about adaptive equipment use. These touchpoints support real progress. But they typically happen as ad-hoc calls and emails that clinics rarely capture.
Secure messaging, reminders, and structured check-ins inside an RTM platform replace those scattered interactions with documented, billable engagement. A clinician who ties that communication to the plan of care and logs the time turns it into billable work. It then contributes toward the time-based CPT codes (98979, 98980, 98981) instead of disappearing into the clinic’s operational background.
A few mistakes show up consistently in OT RTM billing:
Verifying coverage before billing each patient is faster than chasing denials after submission. This matters most in pediatric cases, where Medicare often doesn’t apply and commercial payer rules vary.
Wibbi gives OT clinics a structured platform for running RTM end-to-end. The clinical workflow comes down to three steps. First, enroll patients into RTM with home exercise programs and care pathways. Second, monitor functional progress and engage between visits while the platform captures activity automatically. Third, bill with confidence as Wibbi tracks compliance against each CPT code threshold.
This approach removes the manual tracking and documentation burden. OT clinicians can focus on care while billing readiness builds in the background. Behind these three steps sits a platform that Wibbi designed for occupational therapy clinics.
RTM lets OT clinics formalize and bill the between-visit work they’re already delivering. That work includes the follow-ups, caregiver coordination, and program adjustments that drive functional outcomes but have historically gone unrecognized.
The dual benefit is real. Earlier intervention and sustained engagement produce better functional outcomes. Alongside that, RTM adds a sustainable revenue stream that reflects the work happening around scheduled care. Clinics that treat RTM as a practical addition, not a separate service line, fold it into how they deliver care. RTM then becomes part of the clinic, not an extra system to manage on top of it.
