A pediatrician diagnostician flips ownership; a psychologist is the lighter, unsettled path. Nuanced: the diagnostician you choose decides the answer, so choose the psychologist.
Who may give the diagnosis in Wisconsin
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 Wisconsin treats psychology and medicine ownership
Wisconsin bars a business corporation from employing physicians, who cannot use an LLC and must practice through a physician-owned service corporation whose owners are all in the same field. That closes the physician path. The doctrine is medicine, dentistry, and law focused, and its reach to a psychologist employed by an ordinary LLC is unsettled, which leaves the psychologist path open.
What bringing the diagnostician in-house does
A pediatrician diagnostician flips ownership; a psychologist is the lighter, unsettled path. Nuanced: the diagnostician you choose decides the answer, so choose the psychologist.
How to structure it in Wisconsin
Use a psychologist as the diagnostician and you can employ them in an ordinary entity; use a physician and you are pushed to a separate licensee-owned diagnostic entity connected through a management company. Choose the psychologist. The framework and both structures 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 Wisconsin code, the applicable federal safe harbor, and qualified healthcare-regulatory and tax counsel are the authoritative sources.