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Our https://www.bookstime.com/ staff is on call Monday – Friday, 8am-6pm to ensure your claims are submitted and checked up on with immediacy. He co-founded a mental health insurance billing service for therapists called TheraThink in 2014 to specifically solve their insurance billing problems. Common Procedural Technology (CPT) codes are also necessary for billing for therapists and other mental health providers.
Call to verify eligibility and benefits and make sure those codes will be approved with that client’s coverage. Add-on codes are extremely important to use in order to most accurately describe the services being rendered and to ensure your services are maximized per session. In the new codes, greater distinctions are made between whether the assessment is being given by a mental health professional, such as a psychologist or neurologist, or a technician. Some companies also limit how many providers can accept their insurance. Before a therapist can bill an insurance company, they must complete a credentialing application with that company.
Mental health insurance billing involves understanding coverage, accurate documentation, and precise coding. Mental health billing stands as a pivotal mechanism to guarantee individuals’ access to vital mental health services and treatments. This process entails intricate procedures, coding precision, and meticulous documentation, all aimed at facilitating reimbursements from insurance providers. In the mental health field, patients and insurers are billed primarily for therapy, medical management and psychological testing services. Insurers have rules about how long a session they’ll pay for, how many they’ll pay for per day or week, and often a maximum number of treatments that they will pay for.
Essentially, they apply to be allowed to accept the insurance. If you have a high deductible plan, your therapist might allow you to set up a payment plan to pay down your balance after your insurance begins covering sessions. For example, if your deductible has you paying $100 per session and your deductible is $1,000, your therapist could agree for you to pay $50 per week until the deductible is paid off. Obtain eligibility and benefits and make sure you know how to submit claims and where. If you want to spend as little time as possible, use a billing service.
Fighting denials and rejections is the hardest part of billing. This is yet one more reason why mental health providers choose billing services like TheraThink to help. This is a headache you don’t deserve nor are your trained to handle.
A telltale sign that who you’re evaluating isn’t a leading mental health clearinghouse is if they don’t have experience integrating with the EHR your organization’s using. However, you’re in a unique scenario within the mental health space where you have to deal with MCOs, mental health EHRs and state-level government ordinances. Thus, if you don’t have a clearinghouse that has specific processes in place to help you with each of those mental health billing-related aspects, you should seek a new one. The last step in the mental health billing process is to rework your denials and submit them for an appeal.
It does help to have an expert explain the jargon in plain English and with our EOB accounting and billing service at TheraThink, we make it easy to understand what’s going on with your claims. So we are at the end of our time, just about, and so I want to thank you both for joining us this evening, spending part of your evening with us and our participants. And so our upcoming mental health billing webinar is scheduled for Thursday, October 22nd. And our physician experts will be talking about strategies for virtual health or excuse me, virtual behavioral health integration. We can put that in the chat box, and we can also make sure that that’s included our follow-up email as well. So once again, I would like to thank everybody for spending part of their evening with us.
We have a guide called “How to Check Mental Health Eligibility and Benefits” at this link which contains a script and thorough questions to ask so you gather all necessary information.
Typically, you will send the claim, wait for it to get paid, only to find out that the claim has been rejected. And if all of that sounds like too much trouble, offload the work to us. You won’t have to know one CPT code from another to get your billing paid in full.
That means it should be able to alert you of errors you make during the claim submission process and correct the same automatically. These payers are in the minority but you don’t want to take any chances. This type of form replaced UB-92 forms in 2007 and it’s also sometimes referred to as CMS 1450. It involves checking for and correcting spelling and formatting errors. ANSI 837P is the accepted electronic format for practices that have to submit under the CMS1500 form. ANSI 837I is the accepted electronic format for facilities that have to use UB-04 claim submission forms.
Your clearinghouse should be able to help with the denial recovery process by explaining what happened, pointing out errors, and generating appeals letters or resubmitting corrections to payers. The unique payers that still cling on to paper stand no chance against the most ideal alternative for claims processing. So, although you’re technically submitting your claims electronically in this sense, it’s STILL a very manual process. If ALL of your patients had Health First Colorado as their payer, this wouldn’t be that bad of a manual process…but that’s not the case. If you asked the USPS, they would tell you that first-class mail is one of the most secure ways to send anything sensitive.