A general business LLC of any ownership may employ a physician or psychologist, so the diagnostician can be brought in-house without forcing licensee ownership. Clean: ownership stays open.
Who may give the diagnosis in Missouri
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 Missouri treats psychology and medicine ownership
Missouri never adopted the corporate-practice doctrine. Its statute counts a service as a restricted professional service only if a general business corporation also may not render it, and with no doctrine a general corporation may render healthcare, so psychology and medicine fall outside the compulsory professional-corporation definition. The professional corporation, when used, renders only through licensed persons, but it is optional.
What bringing the diagnostician in-house does
A general business LLC of any ownership may employ a physician or psychologist, so the diagnostician can be brought in-house without forcing licensee ownership. Clean: ownership stays open.
How to structure it in Missouri
Because the diagnostician can be employed inside an ordinary entity, the simplest structure is a bona fide W-2 employee inside your ABA entity, which also removes the cross-entity referral that would otherwise raise the federal Anti-Kickback Statute. The framework and the alternatives are set out in the diagnostician question hub.
The corporate-practice, professional-entity, and anti-kickback rules summarized here are amended and reinterpreted, and verbatim text is a starting point rather than a conclusion. The official Missouri code, the applicable federal safe harbor, and qualified healthcare-regulatory and tax counsel are the authoritative sources.