Tips for Behavioral Health Billing

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Tips for Behavioral Health Billing
Optimization of your billing process is an
opportunity to make behavioral health practice
more manageable. Its not a secret now that the
less time you spend on managing your medical
billing, the more time you can focus on your
clients to give them proper treatment for their
issues. Any practice will get benefitted from
streamlined medical billing processes, like fast
reimbursement, increment in cash flow. Although,
billing can be overwhelming to know what process
developments will have the main impact on your
practice. Here are few important tips and tricks
that will boost your efficiency and will make
medical billing easier Patients insurance and
coverage Medical billing basic is to start with
patient eligibility verification, its good to
validate patients insurance and coverage well
before the Date of Service time so that your
practice will be well informed. Though it can be
time-consuming to validate a patients coverage
since you can make sure that the client has
coverage for the services and better identify
what insurance is going to pay you.
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Tips for Behavioral Health Billing
Some insurance companies offer this service
online that makes it easy to verify coverage,
while others require you to call them to get
information. But verifying coverage before each
patients visit is not always practical to your
staff. At a minimum, you need to sure to know
benefits before the first session and re-validate
at the start of the year when most coverage
renews. We at Medical Billers and Coders has a
streamlined process to know patients insurance
verification process that enables our clients to
know whether they will get payment from payers or
patients. Patient Demographics
Documentation It's good practice to ask for a
patients insurance card and government-issued ID
card e.g. driving license. This will enable your
practice to capture all required details about
patients e.g. correct name (no spell mistakes),
address, and contact number, date of birth,
marital status, SSN, employer details, and more
important insurance information. In addition to
this, while collecting personal information, you
should document the type of therapy involved in
treatment. The patients diagnosis, progress,
therapy goals, and the duration of the session
need to note.
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Tips for Behavioral Health Billing
CPT Codes Updates Every behavioral practice
ensures that they are providing correct
information on claims to save efforts, money, and
a lot of hassle to avoid denials. CPT (Common
Procedural Terminology) codes are used by payers
to identify if they will pay off a claim. It is
mandatory to use the correct CPT codes for the
services you provided and keep up-to-date on
changes to the codes. Pre-Authorize as and when
required Payers normally do not require
pre-authorization for first visits or basic
behavioral health sessions. But in certain cases
(for example, sessions that are over 45 minutes
or multiple sessions for one client in one day),
various payers have their own rules. Its a good
practice to check if pre-authorization is
necessary before any non-standard session or for
that matter when you begin working with a new
client. On-time claim submission
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Tips for Behavioral Health Billing
Many payers have submission requirements such as
they require claims must be submitted within a
certain period of time like from 30 days to 365
days from the date of service. But its good to
file the claim on time to get paid faster. If you
fail to file a claim within the time frame,
claims will get denied and your practice will not
get reimbursed from the services you provided to
the patient. Having a fixed billing schedule for
your practice will ensure timely claim
filing. We at Medical Billers and Coders take
claim filing as a priority task and we submit all
claims as soon as we validate all the required
information. Creating a proper process to keep
on top of the administrative requirements
for error-free medical billing will help any
practice to achieve success. Correct and
well-organized billing has the additional help of
boost your time so you can focus on client
treatment.