Carrie Lester looks forward to the phone call every Thursday from her doctors’ medical assistant, who asks how she’s doing and if she needs prescription refills. The assistant counsels her on dealing with anxiety and her other health issues.

Lester credits the chats for keeping her out of the hospital and reducing the need for clinic visits to manage chronic conditions including depression, fibromyalgia, and hypertension.

“Just knowing someone is going to check on me is comforting,” said Lester, 73, who lives with her dogs, Sophie and Dolly, in Independence, Kansas.

At least two-thirds of Medicare enrollees have two or more chronic health conditions, federal data shows. That makes them eligible for a federal program that, since 2015, has rewarded doctors for doing more to manage their health outside office visits.

But while early research found the service, called Chronic Care Management, reduced emergency room and in-patient hospital visits and lowered total health spending, uptake has been sluggish.

Federal data from 2019 shows just 4% of potentially eligible enrollees participated in the program, a figure that appears to have held steady through 2023, according to a Mathematica analysis. About 12,000 physicians billed Medicare under the CCM mantle in 2021, according to the latest Medicare data analyzed by KFF Health News. (The Medicare data includes doctors who have annually billed CCM at least a dozen times.)

By comparison, federal data shows about 1 million providers participate in Medicare.

Even as the strategy has largely failed to live up to its potential, thousands of physicians have boosted their annual pay by participating, and auxiliary for-profit businesses have sprung up to help doctors take advantage of the program. The federal data showed about 4,500 physicians received at least $100,000 each in CCM pay in 2021.

Through the CCM program, Medicare pays to develop a patient care plan, coordinate treatment with specialists, and regularly check in with beneficiaries. Medicare pays doctors a monthly average of $62 per patient, for 20 minutes of work with each, according to companies in the business.

Without the program, providers often have little incentive to spend time coordinating care because they can’t bill Medicare for such services.

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