POS 10 identifies telehealth services delivered while the patient is in their own home — the code that separated home telehealth from POS 02 in 2022. For behavioral health and chronic care practices that live on virtual visits, POS 10 accuracy protects both payment level and audit defense.
Since POS 10 frequently preserves the higher non-facility rate, it's the code practices most want to confirm they're using whenever it's genuinely correct — the opposite failure mode from POS 11 (where the risk is overusing a high-paying code). For high-telehealth-volume behavioral health practices especially, a systematic default to POS 02 left over from before the 2022 split can mean thousands of dollars a year in home-based visits paid at the lower facility rate for no reason other than an outdated scheduling template.
POS 10 commonly preserves the non-facility rate under Medicare policy for eligible services — meaningfully better than the facility rate POS 02 often draws. Commercial parity varies by contract and state law. Ask-and-document the patient's location: it's a payment variable now, not a formality.
Run any high-volume telehealth CPT code through our RVU calculator at both facility and non-facility rates to see the exact dollar gap this single field controls — for practices running dozens of telehealth visits a week, a mistaken default to the lower-paying code adds up fast, and it's one of the easiest revenue leaks to fix once it's identified.
Since the entire POS 02/10 distinction rides on one fact — where the patient physically was — the encounter note should state it in plain language: "patient connected via telehealth from home." That single line settles the question if a payer ever asks for records, and its absence is exactly what turns a routine telehealth audit into a prolonged one. Front desk or intake staff confirming and logging the patient's location at the start of every virtual visit removes the guesswork from the coding side entirely, and takes less time than most other parts of telehealth intake.
A behavioral health practice runs weekly telehealth therapy sessions, and most patients connect from home — but a portion connect from their workplace during a lunch break, or from a parked car between errands. If the practice's scheduling system defaults every telehealth appointment to POS 10 without confirming location each time, the work-from-car and workplace visits are being miscoded, and depending on the payer's rate structure, that mismatch either underpays or creates documentation the practice can't support if audited. A 10-second location confirmation at the start of each session avoids the whole problem entirely and costs the practice nothing to implement.
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Reviewed by Hassan Raza Awan, Founder — 4+ years of hands-on U.S. medical billing experience. General billing information — verify against current CMS guidance and your payer contracts.
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