Who Can Use Medicare's New Hospice Telehealth Code?

CMS reissued a change request today for one reason: to delete a single business requirement.

The requirement it deleted is the smaller problem.

Transmittal 13944, Change Request 14495, dated September 2, 2026, rescinds and replaces the July version of Medicare's instruction on hospice recertification encounters done by video. Effective January 1, 2027, a hospice that conducts the face-to-face recertification encounter through telecommunications technology reports it on the claim with G0679, under revenue code 0657, on type of bill 81x or 82x. The code pays nothing. CMS wrote the word "administrative expense" into the descriptor so nobody would wonder.

The instruction is four sentences of policy and four business requirements, one of which is now a tombstone. What it does not contain is any hint of the three conditions the underlying statute puts on the encounter itself.

"Which hospice patients can legally have this encounter at all?"

What Got Deleted, and Where It Still Lives

Compare the September transmittal against the MLN article CMS wrote for the July version and the deletion resolves cleanly.

The article, MM14495, tells hospices their MAC will return a claim carrying G0679 in three cases: the type of bill is something other than 81X or 82X, the revenue codes are something other than 0657, or "you bill only revenue code 0657, and you don't list any other services on the claim." The first two survive in today's transmittal as requirements 14495.2 and 14495.3. The third is 14495.4, and 14495.4 now reads, in full, "This business requirement has been deleted."

So a hospice claim whose only line is the administrative telehealth encounter will go through instead of coming back. That is a sensible cleanup.

Here's the part worth noticing: MM14495 as served today still carries all three bullets, still names R13860CP as its transmittal, and its document history still shows one row, "July 10, 2026. Initial article released."

The rescinded instruction is the one the provider-facing article points at. Anyone who built their January edit list off the MLN article built one edit that no longer exists.