During a Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) “Office Hours” call on April 14, 2020, I had the opportunity to ask CMS if a physical therapist or occupational therapist employed by a physician practice can provide a telehealth visit and have that telehealth visit billed incident-to the physician (under the physicians NPI in Box 24J on the 1500-claim form)? The answer from the CMS representative was I hope you found this article and the answer to the question helpful. Thank you for being a Gold Member!

On March 30, 2020, the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) issued an interim final rule titled “Medicare and Medicaid Programs; Policy and Regulatory Revisions in Response to the COVID-19 Public Health Emergency“. In this interim final rule, CMS did add CPT codes that are typically billed by physical therapists (PTs), occupational therapists (OTs) and speech-language pathologists (SLPs) as covered telehealth services; however, they did not add PTs, OTs and SLPs as telehealth providers. This led many to ask why would CMS add these CPT codes to the list of covered therapy services if they did not add PTs,