This chart shows the turnover rates last year of two types of non physician practitioners (NPPs) – physician assistants (PAs) and nurse practitioners (NPs). All data comes from the 2011 Physician Retention Survey, a joint effort of the American Medical Group Association (AMGA) and Cejka Search, a health care recruitment company.

You may be missing out on extra Medicare reimbursements for new preventive services simply because your physicians still don’t realize – two months into 2012 – that their non-physician practitioners (NPPs) can assume the majority of the workflow.

You and your peers lose tens of millions of dollars in incident-to service denials due to improper physician supervision. The crux of NPP billing regardless of whether it’s incident-to or not lay with proper supervision. Review each types of supervision and each scenario detailing where a doctor must be physically for an NPP to render specific services.

This chart, from the 2010 American Academy of Physician Assistants Census, represents the annual median compensation for physician assistants (PAs) broken down by seven specialty types. NOTE: Survey data was collected between October 2010 and April 2011 and represents nearly 20,000 clinically practicing PAs, or almost a quarter of the total PA workforce. 

Can dietitians and nutritionists bill services “incident-to” if they operate out of a physician practice? If so, can the nutritionist bill under the physician that is onsite that day and is different than the patient’s primary care provider for the new obesity counseling service? Also, what services can the dietitians bill “incident-to” and what supporting documentation is needed?

Your physician assistants (PAs) may now certify and recertify patients for Skilled Nursing Facility (SNF) services, CMS announced in a transmittal earlier this month.

Rather than wait on the physician to get back to the office to sign off on the SNF transfer, PAs can go ahead and certify on their own, facilitating a much smoother process for the practice and the patient, says Michael Powe, vice president of reimbursement and professional advocacy for the American Academy of Physician Assistants (AAPA).

This chart presents five wound care codes and their corresponding denials as a percentage of overall service count for both physician assistants (PAs) and nurse practitioners (NPs). Data was taken from 2009 and 2010. NOTE: Wound vac codes were excluded from this graph.

Medicare has stopped paying our administration-only injection claims citing that a qualifying procedure code/service is needed. What is the proper way to bill just the administration code for patients who bring in their own medication (e.g., B-12 shots, testosterone injections)? We have only billed 96372 (therapeutic, prophylactic, or diagnostic injection).

Your non-physician practitioners (NPPs) will play leading roles in providing three newly covered services in 2012: screening and counseling for obesity, alcohol misuse and depression. These conditions are currently addressed as part of an office visit and you don’t get any separate reimbursement for them, experts say.

You can optimize your practice’s time by knowing when to it’s ok bill non-physician practitioner (NPP) services under your physician’s national provider number (NPI) outside of billing incident-to. While your NPPs can’t bill under the doctor’s NPI for major services such as E/M visits without meeting all of the incident-to requirements or billing under their own number, there are threekey scenarios in which you can that will optimize physician and staff time, experts say.