Behavioral Medical Billing VS Conventional Medical Billing

Behavioral medical billing is one thing that mental health practitioners simply wish to do away with. It is a special kind of frustration that is conjured when you try to file insurance claims for mental and behavioral health benefits.

Due to the types of services offered, or the pre-authorization needed, the challenges that mental health practitioners face are unlike any their contemporaries have to deal with.

What Makes Mental Health Billing so Complicated?

Lack of a standardized process as compared to other practices would be a simple answer to this question. In a Behavioral health practice, there are a number of variants when it comes to types of services offered. Major time in behavioral healthcare is spent on therapy sessions. Insurance companies take note of how long the duration of these treatments can go for, as well as how many of these sessions can take place in a day. Both counselors and psychiatrists simply have a very different way of dispensing their services.

These make it very difficult for them to balance their treatments with an adequate billing system. Another area that clearly distinguishes mental health billing from other conventional billing plans is the fact that the problems with behavioral medical billing are only amplified by office budgets.

Counselors will often try to process their own bills, to cut down on operation costs for their private practices. The lack of dedicated staff to update billing codes for behavioral health, changing regulations, and billing practices for each of the respective insurance companies, will result in rejection rates skyrocketing.

If you want to process your claims quicker, then the following can help:

File within the time allotted by the insurance company
Use only the billing format required by your client’s insurance company
Use the appropriate code for the delivered treatment
Limit the bill’s total to the fee allowed by your client’s insurance policy
Use the appropriate policy number for the bill claim
Submit the claim to the right address
Receive pre-approval for treatment as needed by the insurance plan

On average, only 85 percent of claims for behavioral healthcare is approved. Improving these approval rates is the biggest challenge facing behavioral healthcare providers today.

Make it a habit to double-check your client’s insurance plan before each and every visit. Sudden policy changes and lapses in coverage are common in the world of health insurance. Try to stay ahead of the game for your own benefit.

Be up-to-date on each of your client’s insurance company filing methods. Paper and fax have become a thing of the past, and are now being replaced by email, and online filing services. Stay in touch with the insurance companies, as you don’t know when they will change their billing method.

DENmaar’s Behavioral Health Medical Billing Services.

As you can guess from the article, medical billing for mental health is not a walk in the park. A lot of effort, blood, and sweat goes into the entire process. It can be time-consuming and really frustrating for mental health practitioners who just want to tend to their client’s needs.

Here at DENmaar, we partner with concerned practitioners to offer pre-authorization, third party billing, claims follow-up, and to assist with appeals for any denied insurance claims. With DENmaar, you get the assistance of our behavioral medical billing consultants to make your billing process easier than ever.