Wiki Patient Education

[njvbs]

Our clinic nurses visit inpatient CHF patient's for patient education to review medication, discuss diet and to expand on their new diagnosis. Can we bill a 99211?

 

[thomas7331]

No, 'incident to' billing is not allowed in a facility place of service - all services of ancillary staff services are part of facility overhead costs and would be inclusive to the inpatient charges billed by the hospital itself. Are your clinic nurses hospital employees? If not, I'd actually be surprised that the facility would allow nurses that weren't their own employees to practice on their premises without going through some kind of formal process since the facility could be liable if anything went wrong. If this is an ongoing thing, I'd suggest that you could try working with the facility to make a formal billing arrangement/contract where you could invoice the hospital for these services and then the hospital could bill the insurance and report the costs. On the other hand, if your clinic is part of the hospital, then the hospital accounting system should allocate this cost back to your clinic's department to cover your expenses.