Forum - Questions & Answers
New v. Established- Nurse practitioner
A hospital owns an urgent care and primary care practices. If an employed nurse practitioner sees a new patient at the urgent care for an acute problem and bills under their own NPI and then refers the patient to an employed primary care physician within the same group, is the first visit to the PCP considered a new patient visit even if the NP and PCP are the same "specialty" such as family medicine?
Nurse practitioners have their own specialty and taxonomy codes and are not the same as physicians even in the same "specialty"; in other words, a family medicine NP has specialty 50 and taxonomy 363LF0000X but a family medicine doctor is specialty 08 and taxonomy 207Q00000X.