The diagnostician question in Colorado

Who may give the diagnosis in Colorado

The medical-necessity diagnosis is made by a licensed physician or a licensed psychologist. A BCBA may not diagnose ASD, so the diagnostician you would bring in-house is a psychologist or a physician, and both are professions the state may treat differently from behavior analysis.

How Colorado treats psychology and medicine ownership

Colorado enforces a strict doctrine with an active medical board: corporations may not practice medicine, and a medical professional corporation must be physician-owned. A psychology professional service corporation must have its practice performed by or under a licensed psychologist, with lay directors and officers barred from any authority over professional matters. Behavior-analyst and ABA-clinic licensure also phase in by 2028.

What bringing the diagnostician in-house does

A physician diagnostician flips ownership hard and the psychologist path is restricted as well. Flip: separate licensee-owned diagnostic entity plus a management company.

How to structure it in Colorado

Keep the ABA entity ABA-only and non-licensee owned, and put the diagnosis in a separate licensee-owned entity connected through a management company on fair-market-value, not volume-based, terms so the referral survives the federal Anti-Kickback Statute; or rely on an outside referral with no remuneration flowing for the referral. If the diagnostician is a physician and the payer is Medicaid, the federal physician self-referral rules add a layer that a psychologist does not trigger. The full three-entity structure is set out in the diagnostician question hub.