Recurring Revenue Rules for Healthcare

Tricia Steele
5 min readMar 19, 2024

When my husband woke up with his new pacemaker, there was a box on his bed. I sat next to him has he groggily awoke from the short acting medicine. He saw it and shrugged. The surgeon came in for a few minutes; the procedure was smooth. He joked that my husband could live forever with the way this hardware was improving. He changed clothes; we left. We would follow up with our own cardiologist in a few months.

Here’s what we definitely did not know: when we opened that box and plugged in the black metal cube, we were subscribing to quarterly reads which would be billed at full price.

Fast forward two years: we paid just shy of $2000 for “remote reading” by physicians we didn’t know who (I assume) produced reports we haven’t seen. One time we got a call during a power outage about monitoring; we had forgotten the box was there. Because we had previously setup autopay with this healthcare provider, we were not getting bills that showed any balance, and I didn’t investigate further.

That is, until the card that had been put on file expired and we got a bill for the more than $500 accruing once auto-pay stopped going through. What the heck is this for, I wondered. That’s when I gathered all the bills together that had been neatly filed away and started calling.

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Tricia Steele

Lover of words, woods, math, and anything done with conviction. Twice-exited tech founder turned Hopkins-trained science writer. Mom & Lolly to many.