Practice Management Alert

Question: Can an obstetrics practice bill for initial physician interviews, or so-called meet and greet appointments? Are there any criteria for billing such appointments? What should I be doing?

North Carolina Subscriber  
Answer: There is no CPT code for physician interviews, or meet-and-greet appointments that are often requested by potential patients trying to select an obstetrician for their prenatal care and delivery. You cannot charge an E/M code for such visits because no history, examination or medical decision-making is involved when a patient simply wants to meet and interview the doctor to see if she wants that provider to handle her care. As a result, no insurance company will pay for a meet-and-greet visit.
 
You can charge the potential patient for such a visit, but you need to examine the patient-relations effect on your practice of such a charge. To levy such a charge, your practice would have to establish a policy that carves out such visits from those covered by insurance. The policy would state that the physician conducts meet and greet visits in which the potential patients meet with the doctor for a specified amount of time, such as 10 minutes. The policy would also state that because such a visit is not covered by insurance, the patient must pay a set fee before seeing the doctor. She would have to sign a form acknowledging the policy and pay the fee to be able to interview the doctor. Before considering such a policy, the practice needs to evaluate how many patients are going to agree to pay the fee, and whether they will choose that doctor after paying for an interview. Chances are that no patients will want to pay, and the practice will lose potential patients.
 
Ob/gyn practices trying to build their patient base and promote good patient relations conduct meet-and-greet visits for free and consider it a cost of doing business. A problem can arise, however, when the practice is small and many patients want to conduct these physician interviews. Practices that fail to manage the scheduling of these interviews can spend valuable office-visit time in meetings with patients for which they receive no payment. For example, if you have four meet-and-greet patients a month taking up 15 minutes each when a 15-minute medical exam can bring you $45 in reimbursement, youve lost $180 a month in potential revenue, or $2,160 a year.
 
To best manage the meet-and-greet appointments, set aside a time when the doctor does not normally see patients, such as after office-visit hours or office-visit down time when the doctor normally catches up on paperwork. Dont take up valuable patient appointment time for meet-and-greets. Instead, use the doctors time for such interviews and try to limit [...]