Annual wellness visits, completed by nurses.

For established patients, yes. The AWV is on the Medicare telehealth list and audio-only delivery is permitted under the telehealth flexibilities, which the Consolidated Appropriations Act of 2026 extended through 31 December 2027. That is what makes a telephone AWV programme possible at all, and it is also why it is worth checking the current CMS telehealth list rather than assuming the position is permanent.

New patients are a different matter and generally still need to be seen in person.

This is the compliance nuance that matters most in our model, so we will be exact about it. Medicare covers the AWV when it is furnished by a physician, a qualified non-physician practitioner, or by a medical professional or team working under the direct supervision of a physician.

The billing and supervision obligations sit with your practice, not with us. TULQ's registered nurses perform the visit and produce the documentation; your practice supervises and bills. Any vendor that tells you an outsourced nurse can simply bill a Medicare AWV on your behalf is describing something other than the benefit.

The full chain, rule by rule, is written out on our plain English guide to how the visit gets paid.

As 2026 national averages, the initial AWV (G0438) pays roughly $174 and each subsequent annual visit (G0439) roughly $138. Both are covered at 100 percent with no patient cost sharing and no deductible, which is why they are one of the few Medicare touchpoints a patient never gets a bill for.

FQHCs and RHCs bill the bundled per-diem G0468 under their prospective payment system, with the standard G-codes reported on the claim for tracking.

An AWV is not a physical and does not include a head-to-toe examination. It is a structured prevention and risk assessment: a health risk assessment, a review of medical and family history, a current provider and medication list, height, weight and blood pressure, cognitive impairment detection, depression screening, functional ability and safety review, a written screening schedule for the next five to ten years, and personalised health advice with referrals.

Because most of that is history and structured questioning rather than examination, it is well suited to a nurse working by telephone. That is the whole reason this service exists.

Where you can grant delegated access, our nurses document directly in your record under a signed business associate agreement, so the note is already where your biller looks. Where you cannot, we return a completed, structured note on an agreed schedule for your team to file. Either way you receive a finished note with every required element evidenced, not a transcript for someone else to convert.

The clinical work is identical. The billing is not: RHCs and FQHCs report the bundled per-diem rather than the fee schedule amount, so the revenue arithmetic is different and usually turns on visit volume and completion rate rather than on the per-visit rate. We will model it against your own numbers before quoting.

Because it competes for the same appointment slot as sick visits, and sick visits always win. The visit takes a clinician the better part of half an hour to do properly, generates no urgent complaint to anchor it, and is easy to defer to a quarter that never arrives.

Moving it to a nurse working by telephone takes it out of that competition entirely. The room is not the constraint any more, and neither is the clinician's calendar.

Priced per completed visit, not per attempt and not per enrolled patient, so we are paid when you have something to bill. Our AWV revenue gap calculator will show you the arithmetic against your own panel and completion rate in about thirty seconds. Bring the result to the call and we will run it against your actual locality.