A physician diagnostician flips ownership hard and the standard fix is itself under attack; a psychologist is lighter but still restricted. Flip, hardest: separate licensee-owned diagnostic entity, and watch SB 951.
Who may give the diagnosis in Oregon
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 Oregon treats psychology and medicine ownership
Oregon's 1947 doctrine requires physicians to hold the majority of a medical professional corporation's voting shares, and SB 951 and HB 3410 (2025) go further than most by attacking the friendly-professional-corporation and management-company structure itself, limiting ownership overlap and stock-transfer-restriction agreements. SB 951 is scoped to medicine and nursing, so a psychologist-based structure can sit outside its worst restrictions while still facing professional-corporation ownership under ORS 58.
What bringing the diagnostician in-house does
A physician diagnostician flips ownership hard and the standard fix is itself under attack; a psychologist is lighter but still restricted. Flip, hardest: separate licensee-owned diagnostic entity, and watch SB 951.
How to structure it in Oregon
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.
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 Oregon code, the applicable federal safe harbor, and qualified healthcare-regulatory and tax counsel are the authoritative sources.