Manassas, VA, Jan. 08, 2020 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Notal Vision, Inc., a privately held ophthalmic diagnostic services company focused on advancing eye care with precision medicine by extending disease management from the clinic to the home, announced today that the American Medical Association’s (AMA) Current Procedural Terminology (CPT) Editorial Panel has established three new Category III codes (0604T, 0605T, 0606T) to report patient-initiated remote retinal optical coherence tomography (OCT) scans, which is performed using Notal Vision’s home-based OCT pipeline technology.
“This milestone marks the first step towards establishing physician and patient reimbursement for our home OCT pipeline technology,” said Kester Nahen, PhD, CEO of Notal Vision. “We applaud the AMA’s CPT Editorial panel for establishing codes for billing remote diagnostic services and patient home monitoring services. We believe that a home-based OCT will be the future of monitoring patients with wet AMD, one that allows doctors to individualize their patients’ treatment.”
The new CPT codes allow for billing for the initial device provision, set-up and patient education on use of the home OCT, as well as a means for the company’s Notal Vision Diagnostic Clinic to provide technical support, data analyses and reports to physicians and patients who can benefit from this technology. Prescribing physicians or other qualified health care professionals will be able to bill for reviewing, interpreting, and reporting data analyses every 30 days. The full list of the new CPT codes and their descriptors have been published on the AMA CPT Website: https://www.ama-assn.org/practice-management/cpt/category-iii-codes.
“Our next efforts will focus on proving the clinical relevance and providing valuation of our services to Medicare, Medicaid, and payors.” explains Dr. Nahen.
Notal Vision’s home-based OCT pipeline technology received FDA Breakthrough Device designation at the end of 2018. The Breakthrough Devices Program was developed to help patients gain timely access to innovative technologies that provide for more effective treatment or diagnosis of irreversibly debilitating diseases, for which no approved or cleared treatment exists or that offer significant advantages over existing or cleared alternatives. The company’s home OCT has the potential to truly individualize and advance retinal disease management.
About Notal Vision
Notal Vision is a diagnostic services company that operates the Notal Vision Diagnostic Clinic, a medical provider with a proven platform for engaging patients and AI-enabled analyses of high-volume personalized health data that extends disease management from the clinic to the home to improve vision outcomes, reduce treatment burden, and improve health economics. www.notalvision.com
The ForeseeHome AMD Monitoring Program is an FDA-cleared diagnostic that monitors visual changes in patients at risk of vision loss from undiagnosed wet AMD. The clinical utility for ForeseeHome was established in the Home Monitoring of The Eye (HOME) Study, part of the National Eye Institute-sponsored AREDS2 study, in which 94% of patients using ForeseeHome twice weekly who progressed to wet AMD, maintained 20/40 or better vision compared to only 62% of patients whose diagnosis was at a routine eye exam or a visit triggered by symptoms. Based upon the robust level-1 evidence and compelling clinical outcomes demonstrating the ability to detect choroidal neovascularization (CNV) earlier, the ForeseeHome AMD Monitoring Program gained Medicare coverage in 2016, and is covered by most private insurance. To learn more, visit www.foreseehome.com.
Notal Vision’s Home OCT will enable exudative AMD patients to perform technician-free OCT testing at home with rapid, self-guided fixation – critical components, especially for elderly patients frequently with pre-existing vision loss. The Notal OCT Analyzer (NOATM), a proprietary machine learning algorithm, developed in-house, performs automated analysis of the Home OCT scans and generates a report to the physician when a physician specified change in disease activity is detected. The Notal Vision Diagnostic Clinic sends reports to the treating physician which characterize quantitative changes in fluid. In addition, physicians will be provided 24/7 access to all B-scan images from each home OCT test with the location of the fluid annotated on each B-scan. Following physician receipt of an alert report, patients may be brought to the office for evaluation and treatment at the doctor’s discretion. NOA can also analyze the output of other commercial OCT devices, and published study data indicate that the performance of NOA in detecting disease activity was similar to that of retina physicians when each was compared to a panel of experts. Notal Vision’s Home OCT has the potential to truly individualize and advance retinal disease management.