Starting a house call business

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Hey everybody, I have always had an interest in starting my own business one day and just recently thought about the idea of starting up a house call business in a rural area. I currently am not a NP, but am thinking about doing it, especially if there would be opportunity to be an entrepreneur.

My main question at this point is: would it be possible for me to do house calls and directly bill medicare as a NP without working under some house call company? I see a lot of groups hiring NPs to do house call but I would rather try to go on my own if I could. I know in my state, I would need to have a physician 'sign off' on everything I do but I just want to know if I could go out and see medicare patients in their homes and bill for it?

Anyone please comment if you know the answer to these questions or if you have any additional insight for me.

Thanks for reading!

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Specializes in ACNP-BC, Adult Critical Care, Cardiology.

It's been done and your idea is certainly not absurd. The one thing you must possess in an endeavor like this is knowledge of healthcare business laws and practice in your state and an acumen for entrepreneurship. Medicare billing for NP's is the same across the board in all the states in that the ability to bill directly is allowed even though state law regarding collaboration with physicians vary. In some cases, NP's have gotten around that barrier by employing a physician collaborator. I suggest you do an internet search with the tag "NP Business Owner" and you'll find a wealth of informational websites about it. There are experts on this field already and without naming names, I've listened to one of them during a conference and this person is truly remarkable in their knowledge of starting a NP-run business.

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Thanks for the advice and info, Juan. I looked up np business owner and that gave me a lot of insight. That will be a huge resource if i do eventually get to open something up so thanks for sharing it. As far as the medical business, I am not the most knowledgeable but would be willing to do reaearch and read books in order to learn how things work. Anyways, I have read a lot of posts from others about doing house calls and decided that may not be the thing I want to do.

One more question, I have been wanting to shadow NPs in various settings, but have had no luck in finding any except one in an UrgentCare. So my question is, what would be the best way for me to find an NP to shadow that does house calls? The hospital I work at employs a lot of APRNs, but they do not allow RNs to shadow the advanced practice nurses :no:

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Specializes in Cardiac, Home Health, Primary Care.

Google Dr. Scharmaine on New Orleans I believe. She is independent in her house calls practice and even has a class for NPs to attend if they're interested in starting their own business with it.

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Specializes in Cardiac, Home Health, Primary Care.

In. Not on lol.

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I just looked her up, that looks awesome. I would love to do something like that one day, but don't know if the conservative state I live in would ever make it to where NPs have the freedom to do all of that without a MD. I guess I need to dig deeper into my state's legislation and figure out..

thanks for sharing!

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