Billing For Nurse Practitioners In 2022 – During The PHE And With New Split Shared Guidelines

Hopefully, you're staying healthy and vaccinated in this crazy world that we're living in. We certainly are seeing more and more practices looking to add to their staff, and not necessarily being able to accommodate new providers or maybe even find new physicians, and so nurse practitioners have certainly along with physician assistants, nurse practitioners have certainly become an option for many practices. And in saying that as well, there are many nurses that are going into a higher, if you will, education situation and going into a higher level job.

So, as we sort of get a handle on exactly what type of training that they have, as you can see, there are certainly some programs that they go through. They are trained, particularly in an area in some instances and others just in general areas, the certification that they receive sometimes is specialty specific, all things for you to look at. We look at after graduation that a nurse is going to look at this national certification with lots of different certifying entities, but we also have something new called a consensus model where we're trying to get some states to -- try to get more homogeneous to exactly what it is that state to state nurse practitioners have to work with.

When we look at a registered nurse, we know that a registered nurse or an RN, and their license sure is a prerequisite to an advanced practice nurse. And in most cases, many will hold both their RN and their APRN credential simultaneously. Now, there are some states that allow them to hold a combined licensure, but everything is state to state, almost everything is state to state when it comes to their licensure and some of their certifications. We know that state set additional minor requirements that may need to be completed before their licensure. In other words, they may need to be fingerprinted or have a background check.

Some also require that the prospective APRNs complete a supervised collaborative practice requirement where they actually have to work in a particular scenario. For example, in doing the research for this, Connecticut recently passed legislation, allowing independent -- for an independent practice for nurses who had completed three years of a collaborative practice, and then after those three years, they could go ahead and have a practice without that collaborative requirements. We also know that state to state prescriptive authority is an issue and I mentioned this because you need to know in spite of what may be happening in your practice, you need to be sure that you know what are your nurse practitioners allowed to prescribe four.