Medicare Compliance & Reimbursement

Keep incident to billing and assistant supervision issues separate. If you've been concentrating on how to bill incident-to services, you may have overlooked one tricky area: supervision rules for outpatient physical therapists. Medicare incident-to rules require that a physician billing incident-to must provide direct supervision when a therapist performs the services. "Direct" means the physician must be in the office suite, explains Gayle Lee, JD,director of federal payment policy and advocacy for the American Physical Therapy Association. There is no "in the room" requirement for therapists in physician offices, says Judy Thomas, senior policy manager for the American Occupational Therapy Association. "The only real distinction between incident-to and OTs [or PTs] in private practice is that for therapists billing incidentto, the physician must be in the office suite." This means a therapist billing incident-to cannot provide therapy in a person's home. "Some of our members working in physicians' offices would [...]