How Is Mental Health Billing Different from Medical Billing?

Counselors, therapists, and mental health practitioners offer services that starkly differ from their healthcare counterparts. A majority of time is spent in therapy sessions as opposed to running around for lab tests and x-rays.

Mental health practitioners who run their establishments often have to process their billings to cut down on expenses. This is a challenging task with factors such as changing regulations and billing practices from insurance companies that make it harder for the therapists and counselors involved without any external help. Being rejected by billing companies is something that happens often to behavioral health practices and makes the task of running one even more strenuous.

How Is Mental Health Billing Different from Medical Billing?

What makes medical billing time consuming and complex:

Several behavioral health practices operate under circumstances that are far different from their medical counterparts. Patients who opt for the use of these services often suffer from severe and debilitating behavioral problems that require special care services such as rehabilitation, round the clock service, support programs, and more comprehensive care.

Behavioral health practices have to shell out on extra resources and manage time closely to accommodate their patients. These activities can come in the way of attending to a patient’s immediate needs.

Some billing software don’t account for behavioral health, psychotherapy, or psychology which doesn’t allow a practice to make a claim.

Insurance companies are usually the ones dictating how long a session runs for as well as how many can be fixed within a certain timeframe. This is a major limitation for behavioral healthcare providers as it proves challenging to balance treatment with an effective billing plan.

How can outsourcing billing processes help?

When a behavioral health practice or practitioner decides to outsource the billing services it can reduce overhead costs, lead to an increase in reimbursements, and decrease in claim denials and rejections. The primary benefit of this would be to find more valuable time to focus on their patients who require their undeterred attention. Most billing providers provide access to multipurpose dashboards that highlight the issues with the medical accounts.

This enables the practice to maintain patient volumes, patient information, procedure mixes, days in rehabilitation, collections, and any major denials. This makes it a lot less strenuous for the behavioral health practice to handle financial matters. If practice takes it on to themselves to establish an in-house billing software along with the required hardware the operation cost would be high. Furthermore, training the staff to be able to understand and use the software effectively would add to time wasted and to overall expenses. By choosing to outsource these services practice would be able to effectively manage the day-to-day activities, open up more time to deal with patient-related matters, and gain accuracy with regards to correct codes, terminologies, etc.

Atlantic RCM is one of the leading multi-specialty medical billing companies in USA that serves 25+ major medical billing specialties. Our experts work across your practice in billing, collections and account receivables management, to help you succeed.

Get in touch with the leading medical billing outsourcing company to learn more. Call us at (469) 501-1500 or write to us Info@atlanticrcm.com