Billing companies that work behavioral health claims every day. Describe your practice once and compare their proposals.
A few questions about the practice, then billing companies that fit send proposals. You are not committing to anything.
Hand off all of it or just the parts that are breaking. Say which in the form so the proposals match.
Charges entered, claims checked against payer edits, and sent daily so clean claims go out the first time.
Every denial worked, appealed, or corrected, with the root cause tracked so the same denial stops repeating.
Old balances called on and worked by payer and by age until they are paid, adjusted, or written off on purpose.
Certified coders assign CPT, ICD-10, and modifiers from your notes, or audit the codes your providers pick.
New providers enrolled with payers, CAQH kept current, and revalidations handled before they lapse.
Statements, online payment, payment plans, and the phone calls that come with them, handled in your name.
Eligibility checks, prior authorizations, and old AR cleanup go through the same request. If you only need one piece, say so.
There is no right answer for every practice. The usual tradeoffs:
Behavioral health billing looks simple from the outside. A handful of psychotherapy codes, time-based, no supplies, no implants. Then the denials start. A 90837 gets knocked down to a 90834 because the note says 50 minutes and the payer wants more. An intake goes out as a 90791 on a patient the same group saw six weeks ago. Interactive complexity, add-on code 90785, gets stacked on every visit because somebody once said it pays, and the audit letter arrives a year later.
The other half of the problem is who delivers the care. Most practices run a mix of psychiatrists, psychiatric nurse practitioners, psychologists, LCSWs, LPCs, and supervised associates, and each payer has its own rules about who can bill under whom. Incident-to is narrower than most clinic owners believe. A therapist whose credentialing application is still sitting in a queue is seeing patients anyway, and those claims age out while the practice assumes they will pay eventually. Medication management adds an E/M code plus a psychotherapy add-on, and the note has to support both, which is why coding-only fixes rarely work. Telehealth modifiers and place of service codes can change a payer's answer on the same visit. Intensive outpatient and partial hospitalization programs bring authorization cycles and daily claims. Many plans also send mental health to a separate carve-out vendor with its own portal, its own rules, and its own denial codes.
Outsourcing makes sense when the clinical work is good and the money is not showing up. It also makes sense when your front desk is doing eligibility checks between phone calls, or when the one person who understands the carve-out portals is the one who just gave notice. A good behavioral biller will ask about session lengths, license mix, and payer split before quoting anything, and can tell you what happens when an authorization expires mid-treatment. Put your provider types, your top payers, and telehealth and IOP if you do them, in the form. That is what billing companies will bid against.
Three steps. Most practices hear from the first billing company within a business day.
Specialty, providers, claim volume, your software, and what you want handled.
Your request goes to billing companies that work your specialty and take on practices your size.
Compare fees, scope, reporting, and contract terms side by side. Pick one, or none.
What practice managers usually ask before they fill out the form.
Describe the practice once and compare proposals from billing companies that fit. No obligation.
Request proposals