Billable services in psychiatry for MSN not NP

[juschillin, MSN, RN, NP]

Hello,

Does anyone know if there are any outpatient (or inpatient) behavioral health codes that nurses with master's degrees can bill?

My situation is that I am a RN with a master's that used to be a psychiatric NP. I left NP practice for 5 years, and now I'm going through the process of obtaining it again, but it will take many months. I'm not employed as a RN, one big reason being that I have had a hard time finding employment because I'm always questioned about why I left my NP work, and they're concerned that after spending money to train me, I will leave the RN position to resume NP work. That is accurate, but it could be a year before I'm eligible to work as a NP.

I have to complete 400 clinical precept hours, and was recently given the opportunity by a large behavioral health agency to complete all of the hours, on a fast-track, at the pace of 40 hour/week, and a full-time NP job upon completion. Where I live there is a shortage of NPs. This is a great offer, but I need income to supplement cost of living expenses in the meantime. They asked me if there are any billable services I can provide during this time, to help offset expenses, and I said I didn't think so.

This is a long post to ask this question, but I needed to provide the background. I have a NPI number and was eligible to bill CMS at one time, even as a RN I believe.

I live in NC and my license is compact, RN, NC.

Any suggestions or info will be greatly appreciated!

Thanks and have a great day.

[jer_sd]

Look into incident to billing. There are specific rules and regulations through medicare but if you are seeing patients in follow up only, and acting within your scope of practice there is potential to have billable services.

This will also depend on your payer mix.

Jeremy

[Psychcns]

I worked in a behavioral health clinic recently where there was a nurse (in this case a LPN) who could bill some payors for giving injections and for nursing assessments. She saw patients recently started on new meds to assess side effects, monitored patients during med changes, monitored pts at risk for metabolic syndrome and she did a lot of med teaching. Not all insurance companies cover nursing services. Another nurse at this clinic did a group for lower functioning pts teaching things like hygiene and ADLs. I guess what is billable varies.

[juschillin, MSN, RN, NP]

Thank you Jeremy, and Psychcns for your information. Yesterday I was reading about "incident to", and SBIRT, and it seems like there are services that can be billed. I don't know if other states have the designation "Qualified Mental Health Professional" like NC does, but I'm also wondering if that designation allows billing of services that a RN without a master's could do.