To meet the demands for physicians, many health systems and hospitals are rapidly expanding their portfolio to include more APPs, making them one of the fastest-growing healthcare workforce.

Advanced Practice Providers (APPs), such as physician assistants, nurse practitioners, clinical nurse specialists, and clinical social workers, can generate considerable Return on Investment (ROI) for your practice. Over the past six years, more than 60 percent of healthcare organizations in the U.S. have increased employing APPs. This is primarily because of the increasing shortage of physicians and deteriorating care distribution in underserved communities.

To meet the demands for physicians, many health systems and hospitals are rapidly expanding their portfolio to include more APPs, making them one of the fastest-growing healthcare workforce.

Studies reflect that APPs have the potential to enhance the provision of patient care, particularly by improving access, quality, and service of care. However, the majority of the physicians fail to comprehend how to maximize the potential of these APPs and hence, are unable to employ them for the long-term. They fail to define what all entails the primary responsibilities of APPs and end up allocating mundane tasks to them – rooming patients, answering phone calls, and submitting refill requests. However, you should not be paying such hefty amounts for such routine tasks.

Here are three tips on maximizing the potential of your APPs and reaping the most out of them:

Deploy APPs on Seeing Patients

APPs are well-equipped to provider a variety of E/M services. The concern, however, remains whether the payers will require practices to bill directly under the APP’s provider number, or they will allow practices to bill the APP’s services under the physician’s supervision. In the case of direct billing, the practice only receives a portion of the physician’s fee schedule amount for the service rendered. However, when billing under a physician’s supervision, the practice gets the full fee schedule amount.

Nevertheless, regardless of the billing specifics, the practices reap significant financial benefits by deploying APPs to see patients. For instance, APPs can be assigned to see post-op patients since these services are bundled into the payment for the procedure. This then allows the physician to instead focus on specialty services that generate separate revenue.

Similarly, APPs can be deployed to see all new patients and bill directly for them. Or they can also be billed under the physician’s supervision, in case the documentation mandates the physicians to develop the actual treatment plan. This again frees the physicians for other essential procedures such as higher-level E/M services, hospital visits, and so forth.

Do Your Homework Before Hiring APPs

Before making the strategic decision to hire APPs, you must do rigorous homework. It would help if you were well-aware of the licensure requirements in your state that pertain to hiring APPs. It would help if you also were aware of the services that are included under the scope of the APP’s practice and whether or not your payers will allow direct billing for each of these services. Sometimes the payers require a physician to be immediately available for a particular service, typically in the same room as the APP. For other services, the physician might only need to be available on the phone. Hence, the relevant documentation should support the supervision requirements.

Involve Your Coders

Involving your coders while hiring APPs can potentially enhance your billing opportunities and cut down on billing limitations. Coders can typically assist you in anticipating how much revenue you can generate by hiring an APP.

In the face of a growing physician shortage and the increasing demand for healthcare services, American medical practices continue to depend upon APPs to treat their patients. Deploying this strategy, they are not only able to curb on the administrative costs but also boost their practice’s revenue and productivity by securing more time to focus on the most acute cases.