Health Benefits of Quitting Smoking and Helping Your Patients Kick the Habit

Smoking leads to multiple diseases and potentially death, but it is preventable!

Anyone at any age can benefit from quitting smoking. Medicare covers tobacco cessation counseling services. Consider making this a part of your time spent with patients who use tobacco products. It’s never too late to speak with your Medicare patients about the benefits of quitting their tobacco habit.

Did you know tobacco counseling can be done via telehealth and currently can be provided audio only? Telehealth can be used to improve access to tobacco cessation services and can be billed on the same day as an E/M service.

All health care providers, especially those with direct patient contact, have a unique opportunity to help tobacco users quit. Smokers cite a doctor's advice to quit as an important motivator for attempting to stop smoking.

To help you learn more about this covered benefit, NGS created a helpful Tobacco Cessation job aid. We also offer monthly webinars where we focus on the Medicare coverage, coding, billing and documentation guidelines for tobacco use counseling for outpatient and hospitalized beneficiaries. We also include information on tobacco counseling via telehealth.

In partnership with CMS, National Government Services’ desired outcome is to increase the utilization of tobacco cessation counseling to improve health outcomes and reduce costs for Medicare beneficiaries and the Medicare Program. We hope you’ll join our Counseling to Prevent Tobacco Use webinar(s) to learn more. You can register via our Events page, or below. All webinars are listed in ET.

Can’t attend the above webinars, we have some options:

• We offer these Tobacco Counseling sessions monthly along with many other Medicare Part B topics. Visit our NGS Events Page for upcoming educational opportunities.
• The NGS POE team created a free Tobacco Cessation “On-Demand” video offering our providers the ability to watch or listen to this prerecorded live educational webinar. This forum offers providers in all time zones the ability to join us for this important education at your leisure, 24 hours a day, seven days a week. Select Counseling to Prevent Tobacco Use to take advantage of this free educational offer.
• Visit the NGS Tobacco Cessation web page for related content.
• In addition to tobacco cessation counseling, Medicare covers a wide array of preventive services. Visit the interactive CMS MLN® Educational Tool: Medicare Preventive Services and the CMS MLN® Educational Tool: Medicare Wellness Visits to learn more about the preventative services available for your Medicare patients.

Posted 7/24/2024