Telehealth or in person for your mental health plan review?

For most people with an established GP Mental Health Treatment Plan (MHTP), a telehealth review with the same GP is Medicare-eligible and, for many, the better default — it removes a trip for a conversation that rarely needs a physical exam. But the eligibility rule for this specific review tightened in November 2025, video clears a bar that phone does not, and a face-to-face visit is still the right call whenever the relationship, the risk profile, or the connectivity isn’t there.

The telehealth rule for this review tightened on 1 November 2025

A GP Mental Health Treatment Plan is the clinical and billing gateway into Better Access, the Australian Government initiative that uses the Australian Medicare Benefits Schedule (MBS) to subsidise psychological care. None of that matters if the plan and its follow-up never get booked — that operational side, separate from the question here, is covered in mental health treatment plans in Australian GP: slots and follow-up. This piece is about a narrower, later step: once the plan exists, should its periodic GP review happen on a screen or in the room?

Until 1 November 2025, that review had its own dedicated MBS item — 2712 face-to-face, plus phone and video equivalents. From that date, the Department of Health and Aged Care folded item 2712 and five related review and ongoing-consultation items into the ordinary, time-tiered GP attendance items a clinic already uses for any consultation, sized by the time the review actually takes rather than a fixed mental-health-specific fee. That change is confirmed both by MBS Online’s own factsheet and by primary health network guidance issued the same month.

The change that matters for telehealth specifically is not the item number — it’s the exemption. Mental health telehealth items previously sat outside the established clinical relationship rule that governs most other MBS telehealth. From November 2025, that carve-out is gone: a Medicare benefit for a telehealth MHTP review is only payable when the person has seen a GP or Prescribed Medical Practitioner at their MyMedicare-registered clinic, or their usual medical practitioner (defined as whoever has provided, or will provide, the bulk of their care across a rolling 12-month window), in person or otherwise. In plain terms: a video review is now billable for someone the clinic already knows, and not for a stranger booking a one-off call for a plan review.

Video clears the bar for the plan itself — phone does not

Not every telehealth modality clears that bar equally. The MBS item for preparing a plan by telehealth (92116) is specifically a video attendance — not a phone one. RACGP’s own position statement on rural mental health is blunt about the consequence: “GP initiated mental health treatment plans must be provided face to face or via video conference, they cannot be provided via telephone.”

That single sentence does more to shape the real-world choice than any general preference for or against telehealth. It means the comparison isn’t really “screen versus room” — it’s three options with two different bars: face-to-face and video both clear the plan-specific requirement, phone does not. RACGP is not quiet about disliking this: the same statement calls on the Federal Government to protect and expand phone-based mental health items specifically because video is “often not possible or practical” where internet connectivity is intermittent — which is precisely where the travel savings from telehealth would matter most.

Rural and remote access cuts both ways

The access case for telehealth is strongest exactly where road trips are longest. RACGP’s rural mental health position statement puts a number on why that access gap is urgent, not academic:

A video review that saves a half-day round trip is a genuine win against those numbers. But the same MyMedicare/usual-practitioner test that now gates telehealth billing is hardest to satisfy in exactly the towns where it would help most: rural and remote clinics run on locums and fly-in GPs more than metropolitan ones, so “someone at this clinic has seen this person in the last year” is a harder claim to make, not an easier one. Layer on the connectivity gap RACGP describes and a real subset of rural and remote people are shut out of the video item on infrastructure grounds alone, with phone unavailable to them as a fallback for the plan review itself. Some general exemptions to the established clinical relationship rule do exist regardless of this — for people experiencing homelessness, for those in a declared natural disaster area, and for care delivered through an Aboriginal Medical Service or Community Controlled Health Service — but none of those exemptions currently extend to MHTP review on the strength of remoteness alone.

Continuity of care is a clinical call, not a Medicare box

Meeting the MBS test is necessary, not sufficient. This is a narrower and different question from telehealth vs in-person GP care in general, which covers the same established-relationship rule for any ordinary consultation. A mental health review adds a second layer on top of the billing rule: whether the format itself serves the clinical task. A GP deciding how to run a review is weighing things Medicare eligibility says nothing about — whether mood and risk look stable enough that a screen captures what matters, whether a medication change needs closer observation than a call allows, whether the person has said anything, in the record or at the door, that reads as a flag worth seeing in person. None of that is a rule an appointment system can enforce; it’s a judgement the GP makes each time, informed by what they already know about that person — which is itself the argument for keeping telehealth reviews with a GP who has the history, not a rotating roster.

Side by side: what a screen review and a room review actually give you

For a clinic thinking through telehealth and in-person mental health access as part of a broader operational picture, the related context for Australian general practice sits at Arbol’s Australia page.

Verdict