Can a nurse practitioner or physician assistant do any part of a new patient office visit or consultation and still bill under the physicians billing number?
The Evaluation and Management guidelines established by CMS would allow a physician’s ancillary staff (which may include NPPs) to document a limited portion of the patient’s history (specifically, a patient’s review of systems and/or past, family, social history**). No other parts of an initial visit or consultation (i.e. the other key components-exam, medical decision-making or the chief complaint of the patient’s history) could be done by these practitioners and the service still be billed under the physician’s billing number. CMS guidelines stipulate that consults, whether office or inpatient, cannot be split/shared. Furthermore, split/sharing other office visits (such as new patient visits) cannot be done because the “incident to” criteria must be satisfied. For the “incident to” criteria to be fulfilled, the physician would have had to seen the patient before which is not the case in a new patient visit, and thus precludes this type of visit from being split/shared between the phy
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