The field of psychiatry and behavioral health is unlike any other. Diagnoses surrounding mental health are more delicate and difficult to understand, yet are equally important to the overall health of a patient.
Due to the complex nature of this specialty, behavioral health and psychiatry medical billing tend to be more complicated than other specialties. In order to successfully run your behavioral health practice, it is important to understand these differences and equip your billing department with the tools and resources to continue to help your patients in need.
Tools for Medical Billing for Psychiatry & Behavioral Health:
With the right software, providers can simplify medical billing for behavioral health. Taking a step away from the “one size fits all” software designed for primary care providers will strengthen your mental health practice.
1) Specialty-Specific Coding
Medical billing for psychiatry and behavioral health involves specialty-specific medical billing codes. Mental health specialists do not use codes designated for PCPs and should not be bothered by them in the billing process. Many systems slow specialists down by crowding their billing process with irrelevant information and billing codes that will never be used. Software designed with medical billing for behavioral health specialists in mind offers a list of the most used codes in the field, cutting out the codes your practice will never use.
2) Tailored Dashboard
Aside from the most used medical billing codes in your specialty, software designed with medical billing software for behavioral health in mind should offer a specialty-tailored dashboard. Tailored reports reflect the progress of your practice’s billing efforts and what your practice needs to work on to improve their overall performance.
3) Claims Enhancing Tools
The quickest way to reimbursement is a clean claim. As payers cover more and more mental health diagnoses for patients, medical billing for behavioral health is pushing for more providers to accept insurance at their practice. A quality software designed with medical billing for behavioral health in mind offers tools to keep your claims clean, verify coverage before services are provided, and enable your practice to receive quick payments from payers.
Specialty Services for Psychiatry & Behavioral Health:
As mental health practices tend to be smaller in staff, outsourcing medical billing for psychiatry and behavioral health might be the right move for your practice.
1) Coding Experts
Outsourcing medical billing for behavioral health to a trusted partner means gaining access to a staff of coding experts dedicated to keeping your claims clean. Dedicated to your billing needs, coding professionals are trained on every update in the field in terms of medical billing for behavioral health. Where your staff would have to exhaust its resources to keep up, a billing partner is always one step ahead of the curve.
2) Eliminate Administrative Responsibility
Maintaining an in-house billing structure is not only expensive, but it prompts administrative tasks and responsibilities that you do not have time for. By outsourcing medical billing for behavioral health, you eliminate the management of billing staff and are able to focus entirely on your patients.
3) Claims Management
By outsourcing behavioral health and psychiatry medical billing, providers not only gain access to coding experts who code their claims correctly the first time, but they also open a window to an entire claims and denial management process that improves timely payments. With tools like claims scrubbing and real-time claims tracking, potential denied claims are stopped in their tracks and corrected as soon as possible.
As the dynamics of medical billing for psychiatry and behavioral health continue to change with each passing year, mental health providers need to have the right software, tools, and resources at hand to be successful. To learn more about resources that can help your practice, click here.