While FM+ is similar to Comprehensive Care Management (CCM), patients of all ages are now included and there is a broader list of qualifying disease diagnoses. This means it will be important to review your patient panel and ensure it is up to date before your first FM+ claims.
There are two steps to preparing and maintaining your panel:

1. Ensuring all patients on your panel are properly enrolled.
2. Ensuring all qualifying diagnoses are correctly noted in your EMR. 

It will also be important to understand which data in your EMR or other records your vendor will use to compile your FM+ claims. 

Ensure your data is of sufficient quality to claim FM+ effectively. This can be achieved by running queries and a review of your data. Some common examples of poor-quality data include missing patient information and data, inconsistently stored information, insufficient data to provide relevant information and absence of a reliable naming convention for certain elements including diagnosis, lab and test results.

FM+ billing states ​“Home Clinic Enrolment must be denoted in the EMR and communicated to Manitoba Health in a format compatible with Manitoba Health’s information system and delivered securely through: (a) web-based enrolment portal (Home Clinic Portal), or (b) via data extracts compatible with Manitoba Health’s information system and delivered securely, through a secure electronic interface from the EMR on a monthly basis.” This work is consistent with the existing CCM requirements that you have already been providing for several years.

Step 1: Checking Your Panel Listing

All enrolled patients on your panel are counted for the purposes of calculating FM+ panel payments and indirect clinic time, so it is important to ensure they are properly enrolled through Home Clinic. 

Shared Health has resources on how to generate reports of your enrolled patients. Use their guide Generating a List of Enrolled Patients to help check which patients are enrolled, and more importantly, which patients are not. Your EMR may offer a link to this that could also be helpful. However, only clinics enrolled under Home Clinic qualify for FM+ panel payments. 

Shared Health also has other tips sheets available here, and EMR learning modules here. 

If you find patients missing from your enrolled panel list, you should consider enrolling them. You can follow this instruction sheet from Shared Health on enrolling a patient. 

It is important that all physicians approach enrollment accurately and respectfully. If a patient is currently enrolled under another most responsible physician, you should ensure the patient wants you to become their primary care physician. Once you assume this role, you will be noted as such in eChart and all relevant reports and results related to your patient will come to you for follow up. Physicians and their staff should not take this action lightly.

Need Help? To contact Home Clinic:

As a first step, contact your assigned Home Clinic Liaison. The staff in your clinic who manage enrolment activities can provide the contact information. If you’re unsure, contact our central intake to be redirected:

Phone: (204) 926‑6010
Toll free: 1−866−926−6010
Email: homeclinic@​sharedhealthmb.​ca

Step 2: Ensuring Diagnoses are Up-to-Date

FM+ includes an expanded list of disease diagnoses that qualify for panel payments compared to CCM tariffs. This means it is important that panels are reviewed and all existing and new diagnoses are properly noted in the EMR. 

→Access the complete list of eligible diagnoses and ICD codes here. 

You should ensure you understand where to correctly note active diagnoses for each patient in your EMR. A key change under FM+ compared to CCM is that disease diagnoses must be noted in the chart, but do not need to be submitted as part of the billing. In most EMR products, there is a​“problem list” or​“cumulative patient summary” that can be used where ICD codes can be added.

Physicians often review their panel on a regular basis. Sometimes diagnoses are noted elsewhere in the patient record, and queries can be set up to catch these. Some physicians also build queries to pull relevant prescribed medications or classes of medications to help catch qualifying FM+ diagnoses as well, such as searching for specific medications or for Anatomical Therapeutic Classification (ATC) codes (see this ATC/DDD index as an example).

Consider using the strategies above to capture all patients with qualifying FM+ diagnoses and ensure there EMR record is up to date to help with more efficient billing.