Prepared for New Jersey Cardiology Associates · 2026 Strategy Review · Confidential — not for distribution
Cardiovascular Service Line Performance & Optimization · New Jersey Cardiology Associates

One Remote Care Service Line.
Built Once, Reused Everywhere.

How NJCA converts a subspecialty-complete group — and the heart failure telemonitoring program it already built — into continuous, billable care for heart failure, coronary artery disease, atrial fibrillation, and hypertension. The same infrastructure is the connective tissue for the TEAM episodes now owned by the three hospitals NJCA staffs.

$0
24-Month Net Reimbursement
$0
24-Month Practice Margin
0
Hospitalizations Avoided
0
Unique Patients in Active Remote Care (Month 24)
You Already Believe In This · You Built It Yourselves

2026 Starts From What NJCA Has Already Proven

This is not a pitch to adopt remote care — NJCA adopted it years ago, on clinical conviction. The Heart Failure Clinic already sends patients home with equipment that transmits daily blood pressures, weights, and a symptom questionnaire, reviewed every day by nursing staff. The strategic question is what it takes to run that model at the scale of the whole panel — with enrollment, devices, 24/7 coverage, and billing capture behind it.

✓ In place

A Home-Grown HF Telemonitoring Program

Daily BP, weight, and symptom transmissions reviewed by nursing staff, with same-day escalation to in-office IV diuresis — a working remote-monitoring clinic, built in-house.

✓ In place

Subspecialty-Complete Group

21 cardiologists — including 7 electrophysiologists — plus 12 nurse practitioners and an APN-led preventive cardiology and lipid clinic, across five offices in Essex, Passaic, and Ocean counties.

✓ In place

Structural Heart, EP & Device Clinic

TAVR program, high-volume electrophysiology, and a device clinic already doing remote ICD monitoring, loop recorders, and transtelephonic pacemaker checks.

✓ In place

Enterprise Epic & MyChart

Part of the Barnabas Health Medical Group since 2014, on RWJBarnabas Health's enterprise Epic platform with MyChart as the patient front door — the exact substrate a remote care service line needs.

What's missing is not conviction — it's infrastructure. No billed remote monitoring or care-management program is marketed anywhere on NJCA's site today, and the HF clinic's transmissions are reviewed by the same nursing capacity that absorbed a retiring Bloomfield practice's panel and a new physician's patients over the past two years. The gap between what NJCA's clinicians believe in and what the current infrastructure can scale to is the opportunity on this page.

The 2026 Payment Shift

Your Hospitals Now Own 30-Day Episodes

On January 1, 2026, CMS's mandatory Transforming Episode Accountability Model (TEAM) went live — and all three hospitals where NJCA provides inpatient cardiology coverage are mandatory participants. A 2026 billing change makes the operational answer newly reimbursable.

Live Now
TEAM · 2026

Mandatory at All Three Coverage Hospitals

Cooperman Barnabas Medical Center (CCN 310076), Clara Maass Medical Center (CCN 310009), and Hackensack Meridian Mountainside Medical Center (CCN 310054) all appear on the CMS TEAM participant list under the selected New York–Newark–Jersey City CBSA. Since January 1, 2026, every CABG and covered surgical episode at these hospitals is reconciled against a CMS target price with a quality adjustment — 30-day spend and readmissions now flow to their bottom line. Confirm CCN-level status against the live CMS participant file.

The Wedge
Readmissions

The Gap TEAM Now Prices

At the three TEAM hospitals, heart failure 30-day readmissions run at or above the national rate at two of three — Clara Maass 20.4% and Mountainside 20.2%, vs. 19.7% national — and CABG readmissions at Cooperman Barnabas run above national (11.1% vs. 10.6%). Excess-days-in-acute-care for heart failure is flagged "more days than average" at both Cooperman Barnabas and Clara Maass (CMS Care Compare, Jul 2021–Jun 2024 data). Under TEAM, every point of that gap is a reconciliation-payment question for the hospitals NJCA staffs.

Tailwind
CY2026

Short-Window RPM Is Now Billable

New codes 99445 (2–15-day device supply) and 99470 (first 10 minutes of management) make the first two weeks after a discharge or procedure cleanly billable — removing the 16-day floor that previously blocked episodic remote monitoring. TCM at discharge plus a first-14-day RPM bundle is now a fully reimbursable transitional pathway.

A dual-system position most groups don't have: NJCA's coverage footprint spans RWJBarnabas and Hackensack Meridian facilities. One ambulatory remote-care infrastructure can support episode performance on both sides — which makes NJCA more valuable to both systems, not less.
Heart Failure
Coronary Artery Disease
Atrial Fibrillation
Hypertension
The Operating Model

One Cardiology Service Line, Two Coordinated Layers

Not a point solution bolted onto one condition — a named, governed service line with its own owner, P&L, and scorecard, following the Medicare patient from hospital discharge through longitudinal management, on the enterprise Epic backbone NJCA already uses.

Acute & Transitional Layer — At Every Discharge
  • TCM Structured 30-day post-discharge management (99495/99496) — the billable bridge from Cooperman Barnabas, Clara Maass, and Mountainside back to NJCA's offices for HF, post-CABG, and post-procedure patients.
  • RPM First-14-day monitoring bundle on the new 99445/99470 codes — daily weights, BP, and symptoms through the exact window TEAM reconciliation prices.
  • Handoff Patients graduating from the transitional window roll directly into the longitudinal layer — same device, same care team, no re-enrollment.
Longitudinal Layer — Between Every Visit
  • RPM Device-based physiologic monitoring (weight, BP, pulse ox) — the continuous early-warning and titration layer across the HF, CAD, AFib, and hypertension panels.
  • PCM Principal Care Management (99426/99427) — the care-management wrapper for the condition NJCA actually owns: resistant hypertension, coronary disease, heart failure, or cardiovascular disease as a single domain.
  • Handoff One shared care plan in Epic, one care team, one device — the longitudinal layer inherits the transitional patient rather than re-enrolling them.
Why PCM, not CCM: a specialist's care management is focused on one principal condition — resistant hypertension, coronary disease, heart failure — or on cardiovascular disease as a single domain, which is precisely what Principal Care Management is written for. Chronic Care Management assumes management of all of a patient's conditions, and it is increasingly billed by the patient's primary care practice, or absorbed into a prospective payment there. PCM is the code that fits the specialist's actual scope and does not collide with the PCP's.
The one coordination rule: each patient gets one longitudinal care-management wrapper — PCM on the principal cardiac condition — and RPM stacks with it. One shared care plan lives in Epic; CoachCare's engine (enrollment, devices, 24/7 alert triage, health coaching, billing capture, analytics) is built once and reused by both layers.

The CY2026 Billing Stack

ServiceCodes~CY2026 MagnitudeCardiovascular Use
Transitional Care Management99495 · 99496~$200 / ~$280Every HF, CABG, and procedure discharge
RPM setup & device supply99453 · 99454 · 99445 (new)~$20 setup · ~$52/mo99445 unlocks 2–15-day post-discharge windows
RPM treatment management99457 · 99458 · 99470 (new)~$52 + ~$41 add'lMonthly review, titration, escalation
Principal Care Management99426 · 99427~$60 + ~$50 add'lThe principal cardiac condition — HF, CAD, resistant HTN — ≥3 months

Illustrative national non-facility magnitudes. The Value Analysis below uses MAC-locality rates auto-resolved for NJCA's West Orange headquarters (Novitas carrier 12402, New Jersey locality 01). Verify against the current CY Physician Fee Schedule.

Connective Tissue

Build the Engine Once. Every Lever Reuses It.

The same seven capabilities — enrollment, device logistics, 24/7 alert-and-triage, nurse navigation, billing capture, Epic integration, analytics — sit behind every value lever NJCA and its hospitals face in 2026.

Standalone Recurring P&L
The floor of the case is a margin-positive program in its own right: an illustrative, modeled $3.71M in 24-month net reimbursement and $1.59M in practice margin at a 42.7% margin — recurring, subscription-like professional-fee revenue on the panel NJCA already manages. Illustrative, modeled — verify against practice data. Every other lever is upside on top.
TEAM Episodes at Your Three Hospitals
TCM at discharge + a first-14-day RPM bundle on CABG and covered surgical discharges at Cooperman Barnabas, Clara Maass, and Mountainside. Moves 30-day readmissions and episode spend — the exact terms of TEAM reconciliation — and makes NJCA the cardiology group that helps two competing systems win the same mandatory model.
The HF Program, At Scale
Today's nurse-run telemonitoring clinic becomes the flagship pathway: the same daily weights, BP, and symptom review NJCA already trusts — now with telephonic enrollment, cellular devices, 24/7 monitoring coverage, and systematic billing capture toward a modeled ~1,170-patient monitored census.
Procedural Throughput
RPM-enabled recovery surveillance supports earlier, safer post-TAVR discharge and follow-up for the structural heart program, adds a physiologic layer to the EP device clinic's remote ICD monitoring, and builds the BP-monitoring backbone that any future renal denervation offering would require.
The Quality Halo
Continuous post-discharge care defends the readmission measures publicly reported for the hospitals NJCA staffs — and the referral reputation of the group itself. Performance on HF and CABG readmissions is now both a public quality story and, under TEAM, a financial one.
Direct · Bi-Directional · Native

True Epic Integration, In the Chart You Already Use

NJCA runs on RWJBarnabas Health's enterprise Epic platform — the single biggest accelerant for this service line. CoachCare integrates directly and bi-directionally with Epic: clinicians enroll and monitor remote-care patients inside built-in Epic workflows, without learning a new system. The whole program lives in the Epic environment, and CoachCare's implementation team works directly with the health system's Epic team on the integration build.

Epic RWJBarnabas enterprise instance One chart & in-basket Orders & flags Flowsheets / vitals MyChart Billing workqueues CoachCare Remote care platform Cellular devices 24/7 monitoring Health coaches Enrollment team Billing engine FROM EPIC Enrollment flags & trigger orders Patient health history BACK INTO EPIC Discrete vitals — in the flowsheet, not PDFs Care summary & compliance documentation Real-time enrollment status Claims — auto-generated, every patient, every month Clinicians never leave Epic — the program lives in the chart they already use

< 5 days

from enrollment flag to a patient receiving billable RPM and care-management services.

The only one

CoachCare is the only care-management platform integrated with Epic that provides automated claims creation via its billing engine.

"Key to achieving a program that is efficient, effective and sustainable, is creating a seamless, intuitive user experience for the patient and provider, and that's what our integration with Epic accomplishes."

CoachCare Value Analysis · Modeled for New Jersey Cardiology Associates

The Value Analysis

A 24-month forecast for NJCA's practice: an estimated ~4,450-patient Medicare panel, 33 referring providers (21 physicians + 12 NPs) plus a dedicated on-site enrollment specialist, MAC-locality rates for West Orange (Novitas 12402, NJ locality 01), and direct Epic integration. The service line is RPM + PCM — physiologic monitoring plus Principal Care Management on the principal cardiac condition. TEAM episode value at the hospitals and avoided-readmission savings are not in these numbers; they are upside on top. All figures are illustrative, modeled — verify against practice data.

Active Program Enrollments Under Remote Care

Monthly active enrollments by program — not unique patients; a patient carrying both RPM and PCM is counted in each. Physician referrals (5/provider/mo, 70% acceptance) + 1 on-site enrollment specialist (80/mo) + telephonic outreach, net of discharges. RPM reaches its enrollment ceiling (~1,168) in month 11; PCM runs to ~1,033 of a 1,135 ceiling by month 24. Illustrative, modeled — verify against practice data.

Monthly Economics — Revenue, Fees, Margin

Net reimbursement (after denials, coinsurance bad debt) vs. CoachCare fees. Month 1 is modeled slightly negative as one-time setup and Epic integration fees land; margin turns positive in month two and there is no negative-margin quarter. Illustrative, modeled — verify against practice data.

24-Month Net Reimbursement Mix

$3.71M total across the RPM + PCM cardiology stack. Illustrative, modeled — verify against practice data.

The Financial Summary

24-month, by programNet reimb.CoachCare feesPractice margin
RPM$2,419,428$1,359,708$1,059,720
PCM$1,290,265$689,302$600,963
Implementation & ancillary$75,676−$75,676
Total, 24 months$3,709,693$2,124,686$1,585,007
By periodNet reimb.CoachCare feesPractice margin
Year 1$1,203,649$698,078$505,571
Year 2$2,506,044$1,426,608$1,079,436
24 months$3,709,693$2,124,686$1,585,007
Includes an on-site enrollment specialist staffed at CoachCare's expense — embedded value, never subtracted from practice margin.

24-month practice margin: 42.7% of net reimbursement (Year 1 42.0%, Year 2 43.1%). Figures are illustrative, modeled — verify against practice data. Full model available as a companion workbook.

Scenario Explorer — Build Your Own Forecast

Adjust the assumptions and watch the 24-month forecast recompute live. Calibrated to the CoachCare Value Analysis engine — at the modeled defaults it reproduces the workbook — but the companion workbook remains the source of truth. Census is active program enrollments, not unique patients. Illustrative, modeled — verify against practice data.
24-mo net reimbursement
$3.71M
24-mo practice margin
$1.59M
Active enrollments at month 24
2,202
Hospitalizations avoided
~146
60,560

Billed Claims / Units

Recurring, subscription-like professional-fee volume over 24 months. Illustrative, modeled — verify against practice data.

230,561

Physiologic Readings

A continuous clinical picture of the HF, CAD, AFib, and HTN panels between visits. Illustrative, modeled — verify against practice data.

~146

Hospitalizations Avoided

≈ $2.20M in avoided acute cost at an illustrative $15K per admission — and direct episode relief at the three TEAM hospitals. Illustrative, modeled — verify against practice data.

14.0

FTE-Years Absorbed

~29,048 care-team hours of monitoring, outreach, and documentation handled by CoachCare's clinical team — capacity NJCA doesn't have to hire. Illustrative, modeled — verify against practice data.

Build → Partner

Keep the Clinical Model You Built. Add the Engine It Deserves.

The NJCA Heart Failure Clinic is proof the group's clinicians already believe in remote monitoring: daily blood pressures, weights, and symptom questionnaires, reviewed every day by nursing staff, with same-day escalation to in-office IV diuresis. That clinical model doesn't change. What changes is everything around it — the parts that don't scale on nursing goodwill.

Scaling a monitoring program means telephonic enrollment outreach, cellular device logistics and replacement, 24/7 alert coverage including nights and weekends, audit-ready time documentation, and a claim generated for every eligible patient, every month. CoachCare operates all of it in NJCA's name — while NJCA's nurses and physicians keep doing exactly what they built the clinic to do: clinical judgment on exceptions and escalations.

Scale path: the HF clinic proves the converted workflow → the transitional pathway goes live on discharges from the three TEAM hospitals → all five offices enroll across the HF, CAD, AFib, and HTN panels. Same protocols, same Epic build, zero re-implementation.

The 90-Day Flagship: The HF Clinic, Converted

Anchor cohorts: the HF clinic's current telemonitoring panel, plus HF and post-procedure discharges from the three coverage hospitals
MilestoneTarget
Epic integration + protocol sign-offDay 30
First billable enrollmentsDay 30–45
HF clinic panel converted to cellular devicesDay 60
48-hour TCM outreach rate on covered discharges≥ 90%
Active program enrollments by Day 90*~300
Go / scale decision with full unit economicsDay 90

*The modeled months 1–3 practice-wide census (~60 → ~160 → ~297 active enrollments), concentrated in the flagship pathway during the first phase. Illustrative — the pilot's actual funnel is set in protocol design.

Implementation

Chartered in 30 Days.
Piloting by Day 90.

CoachCare operates as the service line's engine — enrollment outreach, device logistics, 24/7 monitoring, and billing-ready documentation — while NJCA's physicians govern protocols and every clinical decision. Full-service delivery means launch requires no new practice headcount, and the on-site enrollment specialist is CoachCare-funded. Because NJCA operates within the Barnabas Health Medical Group on the system's enterprise Epic platform, the integration workstream is scoped with the system's Epic team from the start.

Schedule the Working Session
0–30 Days

Charter the Service Line

Named owner, P&L, scorecard; Epic integration scoping with the system Epic team; billing configuration for Novitas 12402-01; protocol sign-off for the HF, CAD, AFib, and HTN pathways.

31–90 Days

Flagship: Convert the HF Clinic

The existing telemonitoring panel moves onto cellular devices with 24/7 coverage and billing capture; TCM outreach begins on HF and post-procedure discharges from the three coverage hospitals.

91–180 Days

Scale Across All Five Offices

West Orange, Belleville, Bloomfield, Clifton, and Toms River all enrolling; post-TAVR monitoring pathway live with the structural heart program; monthly scorecard to service-line governance.

181–365 Days

Run Toward the Ceilings

RPM census at its ~1,168-enrollment ceiling; the PCM wrapper extended across the principal-condition panel; the EP device clinic's remote-monitoring cohort layered in; episode-support reporting shared with hospital partners.

About CoachCare

The Experience to Get It Right

The service line described on this page runs on infrastructure already proven at national scale.

500,000+

Patient Management Expertise

Over 400 managed conditions for 500,000+ patients.

10,000+

Clinician Success

Providers committed to remote care excellence.

1,000+

In-Market Success

Successful program implementations.

5M+

Operational Excellence

Care plan coding and billing generating over 5 million claims.

100M+

Unprecedented Scale

Over 100 million vitals recorded and 4 million+ care actions enabled.

Transparency

Assumptions & Sources

Every number on this page traces to the CoachCare Value Analysis workbook or cited public data. The key assumptions:

Population sizing & enrollment mechanics
  • ~4,450 Medicare patients estimated for NJCA (range 4,000–4,500), derived from practice-level Medicare allowed-charges data using a cardiology-calibrated per-beneficiary divisor. This implies ~213 Medicare patients per physician — low versus benchmarks, but consistent with a hospital-employed billing split under the Barnabas Health Medical Group. This is a modeling estimate, not a chart count — validate with chart counts in discovery; the forecast is ceiling-sensitive to it.
  • Full panel of 4,450 in scope from Year 1. Cardiology eligibility: 75% for RPM (3,338 patients) and 85% for PCM (3,783 patients). Acceptance: 35% for RPM and 30% for PCM — yielding enrollment ceilings of ~1,168 (RPM, reached month 11) and ~1,135 (PCM, not reached within 24 months; month-24 enrollment ~1,033).
  • The service line models RPM + PCM only. Principal Care Management (99426/99427) is the care-management code for a specialist: a cardiologist's care management is focused on one principal condition — resistant hypertension, coronary disease, heart failure — or on cardiovascular disease as a single domain, which is precisely what PCM is written for. Chronic Care Management assumes management of all of a patient's conditions, and it is increasingly billed by the patient's primary care practice, or absorbed into a prospective payment there. PCM is the code that fits NJCA's actual scope and does not collide with the PCP's.
  • Enrollment pathways: physician referral (5 referrals/provider/month across 33 referring providers — 21 physicians + 12 NPs — at 70% acceptance), one on-site enrollment specialist at 80 enrollments/month staffed at CoachCare's expense, and telephonic outreach. 1.5% monthly attrition.
  • "Active program enrollments" (2,202 at month 24) is the sum of per-program enrollments, not unique patients — a patient carrying both RPM and PCM is counted in each. The headline patient figure, 1,478 unique patients at month 24, is deduped for that cross-program overlap (~70% dual-enrollment assumed; unique patients ≈ RPM enrollments + 0.3 × PCM enrollments).
  • The strategic opportunity is larger than the modeled revenue: TEAM episode economics at the three coverage hospitals and ~$2.20M in modeled avoided-hospitalization cost are excluded from the P&L above.
Rates & revenue mechanics
  • CY2026 Physician Fee Schedule rates auto-resolved by MAC carrier/locality for zip 07052 (Novitas carrier 12402, New Jersey locality 01); 2.5% denial rate; 20% coinsurance with 25% coinsurance bad debt.
  • Month 1 is modeled at −$3,475 as one-time implementation and Epic integration setup fees land against a small starting census (~60 active enrollments); margin turns positive in month two (+$7,830), the setup cost is recovered inside the first quarter, and there is no negative-margin quarter.
  • Code-level capture assumptions (e.g., share of managed months billing 99457 and add-on 99458 units) are itemized in the companion Value Analysis workbook.
  • Hospitalizations avoided are modeled from RPM patient-months (≈146 over 24 months), valued at an illustrative $15,000 per admission.
  • The Scenario Explorer above runs the same enrollment engine as the workbook; at the modeled slider defaults it reproduces the workbook's 24-month net reimbursement, fees, margin, and month-24 enrollment to within 0.05%.
Practice & policy facts (verified July 2026)
  • TEAM: Cooperman Barnabas Medical Center (CCN 310076), Clara Maass Medical Center (CCN 310009), and Hackensack Meridian Mountainside Medical Center (CCN 310054) — the three hospitals where NJCA provides inpatient cardiology coverage — appear on the CMS TEAM participant list under the selected New York–Newark–Jersey City CBSA; model window January 1, 2026 – December 31, 2030. Hospital-name matches were made against the published participant list (as republished June 2025) with CCNs sourced from CMS datasets — confirm CCN-level status against the live CMS participant file at time of decision.
  • Readmission and excess-days figures: CMS Care Compare, July 2021 – June 2024 measurement window (heart failure 30-day readmissions — Clara Maass 20.4%, Mountainside 20.2%, national 19.7%; CABG — Cooperman Barnabas 11.1%, national 10.6%).
  • CY2026 RPM codes 99445 and 99470 (2–15-day device supply; first 10 minutes of management): CY2026 Physician Fee Schedule.
  • Practice profile: 21 cardiologists named on NJCA's public roster (site copy says "20 board certified cardiologists" — the roster count is used here), 7 electrophysiologists per federal registry taxonomies, 12 nurse practitioners per the practice site; five offices (West Orange, Belleville, Bloomfield, Clifton, Toms River). HF clinic telemonitoring description: NJCA's public services pages, retrieved July 2026.
  • NJCA has been part of the Barnabas Health (now RWJBarnabas Health) Medical Group since 2014 and runs on the system's enterprise Epic platform with MyChart. Program and integration decisions are expected to involve the health system as well as the practice.
  • The absence of billed remote monitoring and care-management programs is based on NJCA's public materials (retrieved July 2026); the HF clinic's current billing status should be confirmed in discovery.