John F Mulcahy, Sadiq Y Patel, Ateev Mehrotra, Hannah T Neprash
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引用次数: 0
Abstract
Importance: Under certain circumstances, advance practice clinicians (APCs), such as physician assistants and nurse practitioners, can bill Medicare directly or indirectly (ie, incident to the services of a physician). With indirect billing, the submitted claim states the care was provided by the physician, and the reimbursement is higher.
Objective: To quantify volume and spending on office-based encounters billed indirectly in the Medicare program.
Design, setting, and participants: This cohort study used Medicare fee-for-service and Medicare Advantage claims data to identify indirectly billed APC services. To do so, office-based Medicare Part B claims (ie, clinician services) were linked to Part D claims for prescription drug fills. Because the latter contains the prescribing clinician's unique identifier, this linkage distinguished between directly and indirectly billed services provided by APCs. In this way, the fraction of encounters and component services billed indirectly by APCs and physicians were quantified.
Main outcomes and measures: Share of fee-for-service and Medicare Advantage office encounters provided by APCs and billed indirectly. Share of a physician's billed claims actually provided by an APC and billed indirectly.
Results: In 2022, of all office encounters provided by an APC, 38.9% were billed indirectly. Conversely, for the median physician in 2022, indirect billing on behalf of APCs represented 11.1% of all billed encounters. Billing for care delivered by APCs was most common among surgical specialists (29.7% of encounters) and least common for primary care physicians (3.9%). If all indirectly billed APC-provided care was billed directly by the APC, Medicare would have saved $270 million in 2022.
Conclusions and relevance: The results of this cohort study suggest that APCs provide a substantial fraction of office-based care received by Medicare beneficiaries. Identifying indirectly billed APC-provided care is integral to understanding who serves Medicare beneficiaries.
期刊介绍:
JAMA Health Forum is an international, peer-reviewed, online, open access journal that addresses health policy and strategies affecting medicine, health, and health care. The journal publishes original research, evidence-based reports, and opinion about national and global health policy. It covers innovative approaches to health care delivery and health care economics, access, quality, safety, equity, and reform.
In addition to publishing articles, JAMA Health Forum also features commentary from health policy leaders on the JAMA Forum. It covers news briefs on major reports released by government agencies, foundations, health policy think tanks, and other policy-focused organizations.
JAMA Health Forum is a member of the JAMA Network, which is a consortium of peer-reviewed, general medical and specialty publications. The journal presents curated health policy content from across the JAMA Network, including journals such as JAMA and JAMA Internal Medicine.