by Trent Thompson | August 13, 2021

Why You Should Bill Home Instruction
Home Exercise Programs have their place in professional care. Not every patient requires exercises for recovery, alternatively some may benefit from nutrition advice, or safety procedures, but that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t benefit from your expert advice. After all, you’re paid for the time and work you put into accumulating your knowledge, not the 3 minutes it takes for you to create a custom program/plan.
Instructions on billing
The main CPT Code we are focusing on here is 97535: Self-care/Home Management Training. If your patient has a work related injury or reintegration, consider reading about 97537 CPT Code: Community/Work Reintegration.
The 97535 CPT code represents self-care/home management training. This includes ADL (active daily living) training, compensatory training, going over safety procedures/instructions, meal preparation, and use of assistive technology devices or adaptive equipment. You can also use this code for teaching wound care techniques, strategies for edema control, safe sleeping positions, use of a home tens unit, traction, or paraffin device, activity modification, setting up a safe home environment, basic household cleaning/chores, and for education on the signs of infection. You can also include transfer/transition training in this code if the patient is having trouble getting up out of a chair, but not if you are using sit to stand for strengthening.
There are six basic ADL’s:
- Bathing
- Continence
- Eating
- Dressing
- Toileting
- Transferring
Some of these exercises may include functional IR and ER (dressing, toileting), fine motor skills (manipulating utensils), pelvic floor muscle exercises (for continence), sit to stand, and improving posture/deep cervical flexor endurance to ensure safe and effective swallowing. As long as you are working on any of these activities with your patient’s exercise program, you can bill this code.
It’s worth noting that you should not be reporting treatments that are focused on any of these ADLs if the patient has no problem with performing them or if you already included them in the count for your other codes.
Something you might be wondering is how many times you can bill this code. With the first billing event, it is every-time you provide patients with information on how they should modify their normal daily activities. For the second billing event, it is anytime you update, revise, or add additional information that wasn’t previously communicated. And of course, don’t forget to document these events.
With Patient Exercises we help you create your custom programs faster, easier, and more professionally. All while storing them in the cloud for your convenience.
How Patient Exercises Can Help
Patient Exercises is an all inclusive home exercise program (HEP) builder that can be easily broken down into four modules that work in unison to help providers deliver better care.
Program Builder: Our easy to use program builder that enables you to pick and choose exercises beneficial to your patients recovery.
Patient Management: Manage all of your patients program notes, track progress, and keep EMR’s.
Exercise Video Library: Gain access to our inclusive digital library of hundreds of exercises.
Automated Communications: Never miss a beat. Our system automatically notifies your patients of changes to their program made by you.
Get Started
If you want to test some of the features available with Patient Exercises, you can sign up here. If you need help implementing changes like these in your practice or want to chat more about how Patient Exercises can benefit you, get in touch.
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