Mental Health Billing: 10 Common Questions and Answers

But essentially it’s a four hour per week contract and the rates will have to be determined separately. But one thing to specify here, the psychiatrist is not billing. They review all cases with the behavioral care manager and review medications with a behavioral care manager, and then also make advice to the primary care provider who continues to prescribe the medications. And then the psychiatrist is also available to the primary care providers for ad hoc consultation for an hour or two throughout the week. And then secondly, there is an impact on the patient in regards to enrolling in this program. Medicare or CMS requires that we obtain advanced consent from the patient, because this is a billed service for non-face-to-face time, which is a key difference from what patients are used in an outpatient setting.

So currently what we see in a lot of primary care practices is that the primary care provider is delivering behavioral health interventions to the patient directly. Collaborative care adds two care team members to supplement the existing PCP-patient relationship, and those two care team members are the behavioral care manager and the consulting psychiatrist. He co-founded a mental health insurance billing service for therapists called TheraThink in 2014 to specifically solve their insurance billing problems.

It’s time to protect your bottom line.

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. And to be able to report that work of the physicians and the QHPs, and our non-physicians as well, in many cases. So if it’s something that you haven’t looked at lately, I would strongly encourage you to get reacquainted with that area of CPT, because there’s a lot of changes going on and there may be options there you had not considered. Someone had a question about the vaping, whether or seven could be used for vaping.

Medicare is requiring provider to move to all electronic claims. The following are a few questions and answers commonly asked regarding mental health billing. These codes can also differentiate whether the test was administered by a healthcare or mental health professional or a technician. Additionally, the testing services now have a stand-alone code for the primary service, as well as add-on codes for each additional service and extra time. Most mental health professionals use code for an intake interview and for family therapy. The list we’ve included below isn’t a complete one, but rather a list of some of the most commonly used CPT codes in mental health and psychology services, meant to be used as a quick reference sheet.

Other Coding Information

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 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.

Our comprehensive revenue cycle management solution saves you time and overhead, and reduces the stress involved in collecting payments. The correct use of an ICD-10-CM code listed below does not assure coverage of a service. The service must be reasonable and necessary in the specific case and must meet the criteria specified in the related determination. The record must indicate that the Psychotherapy in Crisis guidelines under the “Description” and “Comments” sections in the related LCD were followed.

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Eligibility doesn’t say what providers are “in-network” and “out of network”. Thus, if you’re using an eligibility solution provider, you still need to determine that yourself using the information presented to you. Insurance organizations refer to this code for billing purposes. However, if you think that the claim is correct as it is, you can write a letter or fill out a specific payer form.

If you’d prefer to offload all of this nightmare, you can hire a billing service as well (and we only work with mental health providers). To ensure the financial health of your mental health practice, fast, efficient, and effective mental health billing services are essential. Psychiatric Billing’s exclusive focus on mental health-related billing ensures that its billing professionals have expert knowledge of the latest insurance rules, government regulations, and coding requirements.

Claim Scrubbing

I’m definitely mixing up the names and what is true at Northwestern, but that’s an example that might happen with a patient. It’s one of, if not the only specialty that is often carved out of insurance Mental health billing plans. And then finally, recognize and embrace the unique components of behavioral health integration. This is different than the health care that we’re used to seeing in outpatient settings.

We adapted assessment tools to build the form that we have our clinicians enter clinical information into. So it’s all within the EHR and it’s all doable, but it’s going to require a really strong partnership with an EHR architect to build solutions that work specifically for collaborative care. Integration of the electronic health record billed to support both clinical and administrative functions was essential to adding value. And this opportunity to integrate offers a really unique opportunity to simultaneously capture program and clinical outcomes data.

When payers speak with you, they’ll give every conversation a reference ID and indicate the representative with whom you’ve spoken. You should do the same – just ask your contact for the reference ID and their name. This way, if you have to contact the payer again (and you almost certainly will), you’ll have a traceable record of all billing steps you’ve taken to date. This process improves accuracy and streamlines future billing.

Corrected Claim:

Oftentimes, we’ll get a lot of the questions, just like what you’ve posed here, and what we typically will refer people to is what’s called our CPT network and our knowledge base. And it’s a group of coding experts that I actually managed here at the AMA to handle specific coding queries, because as we all know, sometimes the nuances come in the documentation and the details. So, when we looked at implementing collaborative care, of course we had to focus on the clinical component and ensuring clinical efficacy and best practices. However, for the purposes of today, we’re going to focus on how we set and achieved our operational and financial goals, and specifically the obstacles that we faced as we look to implement this. Now, we won’t have time to get through all of them in deep detail in the time we have available, but I’ll give you an overview and would strongly recommend that you consider taking a look at the latest CPT professional code book.

This isn’t one of those industries where you dive right into it and learn as you go. If you went this route it would take you a few years to get a grasp on all of the jargon. Not to mention the fact that mental health billing is a specific niche within the space. Well, as I alluded to earlier, the claims that come from hospital visits differ from those in the behavioral health world. Although the billing rules within the mental health space seem archaic, the practice sends shivers down the spine across the entire medical world…regardless of specialty. If/when the crisis psychotherapy session lasts longer than 60 minutes, the add-on code, 90840, can be billed for each additional 30 minutes of psychotherapy for crisis.

• Psychiatrists, psychologists and therapists can improve their collection rate by hiring trained staff who understand billing for mental health services and the ins and outs of the insurance industry.
• And then the psychiatrist is also available to the primary care providers for ad hoc consultation for an hour or two throughout the week.
• We also enforce a tiered review process in which at least three individuals — two or more being licensed clinical experts — review, edit, and approve each piece of content before it is published.
• The insurance company might not care about you and your practice, but they will care about annoying a newly insured member who will be on the hook for your clinical fees if they don’t grant the authorization.
• We are dedicated to providing you with valuable resources that educate and empower you to live better.

Perhaps you submitted online, check your portal to see if claims are accounted for in your account. For complex services like a 70 minute emergency call and then a two hour emergency session at their home, you might have absolutely no idea how to bill that situation. We recommend reading and using Barbara Griswald’s book Navigating the Insurance Maze as a primer on how to submit paper claims correctly. Submit appointment dates with the requisite CPT codes and diagnosis codes.

You will need the claim ID or claim number for each date of service to refile your claims. Save any dates of service that never made their way to the insurance company. If you don’t know which CPT codes to use, what diagnosis to use, the number of units to use, consider seeking professional expertise. If you don’t know which CPT codes to use for billing, refer to our popular and easy to read guide here.

Or hire a billing service, submit your weekly appointments in 10 minutes, and focus on your private practice. Again, if you’re tired reading about the ins and outs of insurance billing, you might save time, money, and headache delegating this part of your private practice. Use the allotted information to get a quote for “outpatient mental health office visit services”. The past and present status of that client’s insurance policy through a particular insurance company’s coverage. If you’ve filed a claim and had it denied because the client is no longer covered by his or her old plan, you’ll need to contact the client and get their new information.

Perhaps because of this, sadly, many practices collect less than 85% of the money they are owed from insurance companies. Since you and your staff work within your PM/EHR daily, the most ideal process to submit mental health claims to all of your client’s payers is through it. CPT codes communicate services and tasks performed by mental health professionals during sessions. We help the mental health providers that work with us in our billing service do all of this for every appointment. CPT is provided “as is” without warranty of any kind, either expressed or implied, including but not limited to, the implied warranties of merchantability and fitness for a particular purpose.