Physicians and certain other healthcare providers qualify for reimbursement* from Medicare and other payers when assessing cognitive status on patients who meet medical necessity (suspicion or evidence of memory loss).
* Please consult with your billing representative or agency for specific reimbursement requirements and coding procedures according to your geography, your specialty, and the nature of your organization.
An excellent approach to documenting medical necessity is to use the Healthy Brain Checklist, which is freely available to all of our clients. This short checklist form can be self-completed by patients in less than 2 minutes and reliably distinguishes between “qualified concerns” and “benign concerns.” Qualified concerns relate to symptoms that suggest memory impairment due to a medical condition; these should be further evaluated with the MCI Screen. Benign concerns relate to symptoms associated with normal aging and, depending on medical history and clinical judgment, may not need further evaluation.
The Healthy Brain checklist was developed from an analysis of well-validated instruments in the medical literature. The white paper describes its development and utility.