willowbridge captures every minute your team spends keeping Medicare patients out of the ER — chart review, phone calls, medication reconciliation, family conversations — signs the clinical attestation, and hands the structured charge to athenaOne. athenaOne bills and collects. No new biller, no new clearinghouse, no PDF-shuffle between systems.
A dozen Medicare programs, each with its own conditions, exclusions, and attestations — and the patients who qualify are already on your schedule. willowbridge treats that as a rules problem, because it is one.
Each morning willowbridge takes the day's appointment list — not your whole panel, just who is actually coming in — reads each patient's active problem list, and scores them against every program your practice operates.
The answers land on the schedule itself, as chips against each name, before the visit. If a candidate has no chart yet, one can be created straight from that row.
Every program gets one of three answers, each with its reason: qualifies, needs a clinician's attestation, or not eligible — and it names what's missing. Needs ≥2 chronic conditions (found 1). No behavioral diagnosis found.
It is deliberately conservative. Anything resting on clinical judgement — serious illness, high risk, chronic pain, homebound — comes back as needs attestation rather than a false yes. The same criteria drive the real enrollment gate, so what the screen promises and what the system will actually let you bill cannot drift apart.
Screening doesn't stop at enrollment. When a new problem reaches the chart from athenaOne — a second chronic condition, an F-code, a pain diagnosis — that patient returns to the top of the worklist flagged for an eligibility re-look, and stays there until someone acts or the flag ages out.
And it knows which programs stack and which collide. Most combine freely — chronic care alongside remote monitoring alongside behavioral health. A few never can: Advanced Primary Care Management won't share a month with CCM, PCM or TCM, and the two remote-monitoring programs are mutually exclusive. Others collide only in certain circumstances — CCM and PCM just when they target the same principal condition; CCM and TCM only where the 30-day discharge window overlaps the month. willowbridge blocks the pairings that can never bill, and where a month is merely contested it keeps the higher-paying claim instead of dropping both.
The hardest part of care management isn't the care — it's tracking it in a way that's still defendable in November when an auditor asks about a claim from March. willowbridge runs the whole loop: one encounter timer captures the time, drafts the note from the chart, and queues the claim with its audit packet pre-assembled. Your team works the panel; the billing happens around them.
One tap starts an encounter from a worklist row, the chart, or the willowbridge care app on your phone, and opening willowbridge from a patient's chart inside athenaOne lands you on that patient's chart. The mm:ss counter rides at the top of the screen the whole time the encounter is open, with the month-to-date total broken out by program (CCM, PCM, BHI, RPM, TCM) so you always know whether you're under, at, or over a billable tier. The clock pauses when you switch context, resumes when you return, and rolls up cumulative time across the whole care team for the calendar month.
Twenty condition templates — heart failure, diabetes, COPD, CKD, depression, opioid use disorder and the rest — each proposing a primary problem and four or five SMART goals. The clinician picks what fits; every goal carries a plain-language reason the patient can read and a guideline citation for the chart. For principal care management there are Care Pathways: guideline-aligned protocols for CHF, diabetes, CKD, hypertension, COPD and atrial fibrillation, tracked item by item from not-started to at-target. Decision support, cited — never a directive.
Tap "medication adherence," "symptom check," "care plan review," "SDOH" — and willowbridge drafts a clinical narrative from the chart under each section header. You write prose into structure, not into a blank page. The note links automatically to the encounter and the rendering provider, with the right CPT code already attached.
The rendering provider signs each encounter as it happens, not in a stack at month-end. There's still one monthly billing-period sign-off per program — but by the time it hits the review queue, the audit packet is already assembled, so it's a single review pass, not a reconstruction across 200 charts.
Every submitted claim ships with a contemporaneous evidence file: consent on the date of service, care plan version pinned to that date, the time log with timestamps and signers, threshold-met indicator, modality, and place of service. When your MAC asks about a claim from March in November, you have the answer in seconds, not days.
A solo internist and a twenty-provider group both leave the same money on the table, but almost nothing else about their situation is alike. willowbridge is one product; which half of this page you should read depends on which one you are.
Twelve programs, from CCM and RPM to the lines most practices never get to — Advanced Primary Care Management, Principal Illness Navigation, Behavioral Health Integration, Home Health oversight. willowbridge models the time thresholds, eligibility rules, consent requirements, and exclusion interactions for each one, and it knows which ones can't be billed together in the same month. Turn a program on, and the worklist updates the same day.
Order the cuff, pair it, and your own staff work the readings from the same worklist as everything else. willowbridge counts the device days and the minutes, and holds the claim until the code’s threshold is genuinely met.
CMS has proposed that, from 2027, only a practice’s own employed clinical staff time count toward billable RPM — which would end the rent-a-call-center model. willowbridge has always been software your staff sign into, so there is nothing for you to change either way.
Proposed rule CMS-1848-P, published July 16, 2026; the comment period closed September 14, 2026, and the final rule is expected around November 1, 2026. Not final law — CMS may finalize it as written, modify it, or decline to finalize it. Information as of October 9, 2026; not legal or reimbursement advice.
Care management has a credibility problem, and it earned it. Rather than pretend otherwise, here are the three sentences we hear most often in a first call — and the honest answer to each.
The autopsy is almost always the same. Enrollment went fine. Then the minutes stopped getting recorded — not because nobody did the work, but because recording it meant remembering to start a stopwatch, then writing a note that justified the stopwatch, then someone reconciling all of it on the 30th. Three separate acts of discipline for one phone call. By month four the calls were still happening and the claims weren't.
willowbridge collapses those three into one. The timer starts when the chart opens. The note drafts itself from the topics you touched. The month reconciles continuously instead of at the end. And on the last week of the month, a sweep finds every patient sitting one contact short of a billable threshold and puts them at the top of the list — while there's still time to make the call.
It probably does, and it likely does two things well: it lets someone type a note, and it lets someone bill a code. What an EHR module generally will not do is decide which patients need a call today across a dozen overlapping programs, prove the twenty minutes were real when a payer asks about it in November, or refuse to bill a code that a program exclusion makes unbillable that month.
willowbridge is not a second chart and doesn't want to be. Reads come from athenaOne. Notes, care plans, vitals, and charges go back to athenaOne. athenaOne stays the system of record and the system that bills. willowbridge is the layer in between that decides what to do, captures the doing, and defends it afterward.
This is the real one, and it deserves a straight answer: yes, this needs a person. Usually one navigator, often part-time at the start, scaling with the panel. What it does not need is a physician doing the work.
Every design decision assumes one non-clinical or nursing staff member working a list, with the physician appearing exactly twice — at enrollment consent, and at the month-end signature. In a solo practice where the owner is also the office manager, both roles sit on one login. And the day arrives already sorted: who's overdue, who happens to be in the office today anyway, who just left the hospital and started a clock.
There's a fourth question nobody asks out loud, so we'll answer it anyway: what happens if a payer comes back? That one has its own section.
Every billable period willowbridge signs has a complete, contemporaneous audit packet attached. Not a PDF you generated after the fact — a chained, timestamped record of who did what, when, and on which version of the care plan. If your MAC opens a TPE or sends an ADR, your response is already written.
Practices don't usually lose care-management revenue by billing wrong. They lose it by billing late, billing nothing, or billing something a rule quietly disqualified nine days earlier. willowbridge spends most of its time watching for exactly that.
willowbridge watches for it three separate ways — a discharge encounter in the chart, a newly filed discharge summary, and an event notification from athenaOne — then opens the episode itself. The worklist counts down the two business days to interactive contact and the 7 or 14 days to the face-to-face, in the patient's row, in red.
Every open TCM window is joined against the actual appointment book. If the visit inside the window gets cancelled or no-showed and nothing replaces it, that patient goes to the top of the list while the window is still open — not in December, when someone finally reconciles October.
Periods frozen and waiting on a signature. Periods still open whose minutes already cleared the threshold — they'd bill today if someone closed them. Patients your last eligibility scan flagged who were never enrolled. Open quality gaps. Each carries its dollar figure, so the list gets worked in value order instead of alphabetically.
CCM and PCM in the same month. CCM inside a TCM window. Home-health oversight against APCM. RPM and RTM on one patient. willowbridge holds the charge rather than letting you bill it and repay it with interest eighteen months later — and it tells the navigator why, before the encounter starts.
Advanced Primary Care Management won't bill a month with no documented care management, flat monthly fee or not. Chronic pain won't close its month without the PEG on file. Home-health oversight won't bill unless a certification episode actually covers the month. Principal Illness Navigation checks the navigator's certification first.
Every month: what was billed, what willowbridge cost, what device pass-through cost, what's net to the practice — and the return multiple, revenue per dollar of total cost. Beside it, a lost-revenue report naming every period that closed unbilled and why. It's the report nobody wants to run and every practice should.
Every enrolled patient gets a private link from your practice. It opens in any phone's web browser, or in the willowbridge app for iPhone and Android. The first time, they confirm their date of birth and choose a four-digit PIN. After that they sign in with the PIN, and the app stays locked behind Face ID or a fingerprint. No password to forget, and nothing a 78-year-old has to install. It shows the goals you agreed on and the team behind them by name, and in the browser it can ask them questions between visits.
Patients who add the willowbridge app also get an appointment nudge the day before, and a “welcome home” note when your team opens a transitional-care episode after a hospital stay, reminding them they can request a call from the app. Care-team notifications never name a condition, a medication, or an instrument — they have to be safe on a lock screen someone else might see.
Three goals, five medications, one team — kept up to date after every visit.
willowbridge puts the plan on your patient's phone; willowbridge care puts the worklist, the chart and the timer in your team's pocket. Both are free, and both work from the same record.
Screens captured in a demo practice with synthetic patients. Apple, the Apple logo, iPhone and App Store are trademarks of Apple Inc. Google Play and the Google Play logo are trademarks of Google LLC. Android is a trademark of Google LLC.
Every program bills on its own: APCM or CCM each month, RPM every 30-day cycle, BHI on top of either. Drop your numbers in. The model starts from 2026 Medicare national rates, and every rate is yours to change.
Adjust the numbers to your practice. The breakdown updates as you type.
APCM and CCM can't both bill for the same patient, so together they top out at 100% of enrolled patients. CCM is counted as the remainder.
One worklist, two RN navigators, ~1,500 Medicare patients — followed for a full month, all the way through a clean audit. Names and dollar amounts are illustrative; the workflow, billing rules, and evidence requirements are exactly what every willowbridge tenant uses.
Most care-management vendors charge a five-figure implementation fee, a per-provider license, and a per-patient PMPM whether or not you ever bill. willowbridge charges none of that. There's one fee, and it applies only to billable care you actually capture.
The one fee: $6 per patient, per program, per billable month. One flat charge per program bundle, whichever of its codes bill, and only in a month that closes with a billable service — no qualifying care, no charge. RPM, RTM and CGM count per 30-day monitoring cycle. The rate is fixed for your initial term, and either side can walk away in the first 120 days after go-live.
Remote monitoring devices are sold at the manufacturer's published list price with no markup — a one-time device and shipping charge, plus a flat monthly connectivity fee for each active device — and invoiced separately from the platform fee. A device is your practice's property once it is invoiced.
willowbridge is purpose-built for athenahealth practices. Sign in once with your athenaOne login, connect willowbridge from the athenahealth Marketplace, and your care-management team works the panel from one worklist. Notes land in the chart on the date of service. Charges hand off to athenaOne's billing pipeline as structured charge entries — no separate clearinghouse, no PDF shuffle, no new biller to train. Your existing athenaOne workflows for revenue, payments, and reconciliation stay exactly where they are.
willowbridge connects directly to athenaOne. Authentication is athenahealth's SMART on FHIR OAuth. Clinical reads are FHIR R4 (US Core) — problems, medications, encounters, coverage, labs, immunizations, care team. Clinical writes ride athenaOne's own document, vitals, and charge APIs, because that is what athenaOne actually exposes for writing, and it is the only way a note lands as a real chart document rather than an attachment nobody can find. Device readings flow in through whichever cellular hub or phone-bridged health store the patient already uses — nothing new for them to set up.
If a vendor tells you they write your chart over FHIR, ask which create scopes their EHR granted them. Most read/search-only FHIR servers grant none.
willowbridge is generally available on the athenahealth Marketplace. Production rollout is per-practice as the matching SMART scopes are enabled on your athenaOne tenant.
A signed BAA is in place before any patient data touches the system. The encryption, tenant isolation, and audit log below are built to hold up under an actual payer audit — not just to look right in a security questionnaire.
Patient data is AES-256-GCM encrypted on disk, with keys managed by AWS KMS.
Every read and write lands in an append-only log, hash-chained so tampering shows.
Records are walled off at the database itself, not just in the application code.
Runs in a U.S. AWS region, and no offshore processor ever touches patient data.
athenaOne bills. willowbridge produces the structured charge (CPT, units, dx pointers, rendering provider, place of service) at sign-off and hands it to athenaOne's charge API. From there it goes through your existing athenaOne billing setup — same payer connections, same posting, same reconciliation. No new clearinghouse, no new biller to train, no PDF shuffle between systems. Reimbursement lands in your account, where it already does.
Every encounter is stamped with the performing staff member, their role, the activity type (phone call, chart review, secure message, medication reconciliation, patient education), the patient, and start/end timestamps. The chronological log is append-only and hash-chained. At month-end, the rendering provider reviews the billing period and signs an attestation that includes the CMS-required general-supervision affirmation; the signature is cryptographically bound to the period (Ed25519, per-provider key) so a payer can independently verify it later. The cumulative minutes lock to that signature — nothing edits the period after approval.
One click on the billing period builds a single paginated PDF: cover sheet, eligibility, patient consent, the care plan pinned to the date of service, the chronological time log, the signed clinical note, and the provider attestation. That's the document you fax or upload to your MAC for an ADR or TPE — no unzipping, no assembling loose files. It's drawn from the snapshot frozen the moment the period was signed, so it can't drift from what athenaOne billed on your behalf. The same records also come as a verifiable archive — every file fingerprinted into a signed manifest, with an open-source verifier (packages/audit-verify) — for the rare payer or auditor who wants to confirm the chain themselves. The audit packet (the work) and athenaOne's claim + 835 (the bill) cross-reference cleanly by patient + date of service + CPT.
It runs in a fixed order. The agreements and the BAA are signed first — no patient information enters willowbridge before the BAA is in place. Your practice then authorizes the connection from the athenahealth Marketplace, your staff accounts are set up with multi-factor authentication, and your billing providers are added. In the first week your team consents patients and builds their care plans, and the first billable month closes at the end of your first full calendar month on willowbridge. There's no clearinghouse onboarding, no SFTP credentials and no 837 mapping: charges hand off to athenaOne's own billing.
Yes, within the rules willowbridge enforces when the month closes. APCM and CCM never bill on the same patient. CCM and PCM don't bill under the same practitioner in the same month, and two practitioners can't both bill them for the same condition; APCM and PCM don't bill under the same practitioner either. Minutes logged inside a TCM episode's 30-day window belong to TCM, not to CCM or PCM. APCM and TCM don't bill in the same month under the same practitioner. RPM and RTM are exclusive. RPM pairs with CCM or APCM as long as no minute is counted twice. General BHI stacks on APCM through the APCM behavioral-health add-on, G0570. When home-health care-plan oversight and a care-management month collide, the one with the higher Medicare allowable bills. The worklist tells your team which program any given encounter is contributing to before the encounter starts.
Yes. CMS retired G0511 for FQHC and RHC care coordination: from January 1, 2025 FQHCs and RHCs bill the individual care-management codes, and the transition that let them keep billing G0511 ended September 30, 2025. FQHCs and RHCs now bill the standard care-management codes directly (99490 / 99491 / 99487 CCM, 99424–99427 PCM, 99484 BHI, 99457/99458 RPM). willowbridge runs the same workflow your non-FQHC peers use; each code is paid at the national non-facility PFS rate, separately from your PPS / AIR encounter rate, the way the bundled code was.
$6 per patient, per program, per billable month — and nothing else. There's no setup or implementation fee, no per-provider license, no per-patient base fee, and no monthly minimum. The charge applies only when a patient qualifies for a billable service and the month closes; if a patient doesn't qualify that month, there's no charge. It's one flat fee per program however many of its codes bill, so nothing on our side rewards up-coding, and we don't take a cut of your reimbursement or charge for the audit packet. The rate is fixed for your initial term, and either side can walk away in the first 120 days after go-live. Remote monitoring devices are the one separate line: sold at the manufacturer's published list price with no markup — a one-time device and shipping charge plus a flat monthly connectivity fee per active device — and invoiced apart from the platform fee. Reach out for a walkthrough sized to your panel.
One staff member working a list — typically an RN or medical assistant acting as the care navigator, part-time at the start and scaling with the panel. The physician appears twice per patient per month: once at enrollment to obtain and document consent, and once at month-end to review the billing period and sign the attestation. Everything in between — outreach calls, chart review, medication reconciliation, care-plan updates, device monitoring, patient messages — is designed for non-physician staff working from a prioritized worklist rather than from a report someone has to interpret. In a solo practice where the owner is also the office manager, both roles sit on a single login.
You keep it, and most of it never left your building in the first place. Signed notes, care plans, vitals, and charges are written into athenaOne as they happen — so your system of record stays complete whether or not willowbridge is still in the picture. On top of that, the product exports a patient's full record as a USCDI v3 FHIR bundle, as C-CDA documents, or as PDFs, and a complete tenant export — clinical records, the chronological time log, and every signed audit packet — is produced at offboarding. Nothing about the design requires you to keep paying us to read your own charts.
It depends on how you run RPM today. In the CY 2027 Medicare Physician Fee Schedule proposed rule (CMS-1848-P), CMS proposed that clinical staff time count toward a billable RPM or RTM service only when the staff member is employed by the billing practitioner or the practice, under general supervision — so time furnished by a contracted third-party monitoring company's staff would no longer be billable. If you use a full-service vendor that supplies the monitoring staff, that model is what the proposal targets. If your own employed staff do the monitoring, nothing changes for you: willowbridge is software your staff sign into, not a service that supplies staff, so there is no call center working your panel under your NPI. The proposal would not stop you buying devices or software from a vendor, and it does not reach CCM, PCM, BHI, or APCM. Worth stressing: this is proposed, not final. The comment period closed September 14, 2026, and the final rule is expected around November 1, 2026; CMS may finalize the provision as written, modify it, or decline to finalize it — so treat it as something to plan around, not a deadline. Information as of October 9, 2026; not legal or reimbursement advice.
A live walkthrough with a willowbridge clinical lead. We'll show you the worklist, the audit packet, and the billing flow on a demo tenant — no data of yours, no setup on your end. Bring your questions about programs, workflow, or fit.
A willowbridge clinical lead will reach out to schedule your 20-minute walkthrough. No setup needed on your end.