Incident-to billing is a service performed by a non-physician provider under the supervision of a physician. More and more practices employ Nurse Practitioners to handle additional volume.
When a non-physician provider performs a service, it gets confusing if the service is incident-to billing or not, whether to bill under the physician or non-physician?
Know these basic rules for performing incident-to billing under a Physician:
- Can be used only in a non-institutional facility (typical office setting).
- The physician has to provide the patient’s initial visit.
- Typically used in follow-up care.
- NP has to be employed by the group.
- Active participation of the provider in follow-up and treatment – specifically when the patient’s condition changes.
- Both physician and non-physician providers must belong to the same facility.
- Record who performed the service and that the physician or a group physician was in office at the time of the service.
The key benefit of incident-to billing is, that billing under Physician is reimbursed at 100% of the contracted rate while billing under NPPs gets reimbursed at 80-85%.
Learn the billing rules detailed by AAFP’s article that also lists the additional considerations here: https://www.aafp.org/fpm/2015/0300/p15.html