These charts look at Medicare denial rates for eight minor in-office procedures in 2009 and 2010, comparing denials for primary care practices and specialists. NOTE: “Primary care” is a combination of data from general practice, family practice, internal medicine and OB/GYN. NOTE: “Specialists” combines data from most other Medicare-recognized specialties, excluding those with low annual utilization such as plastic surgery.

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.

These charts show 10 codes billed by non-physician practitioners (NPPs) that have relatively low denial rates, but were responsible for a major chunk of lost reimbursement in 2010. The top chart shows the average dollar amount lost per single denial in 2009 and 2010, while the bottom chart shows the average denial rate. NOTE: For the purpose of this analysis, NPPs include certified nurse midwives, certified registered nurse anesthetists (CRNAs), chiropractors, clinical nurse specialists, nurse practitioners, physician assistants and physical therapists. CMS does not distinguish between physician-billed services and those billed incident-to by NPPs, so this data excludes incident-to services.