Billing companies that work mental 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:
Mental health billing looks easy from the outside. Most of the day is three or four time-based psychotherapy codes, so how wrong can it go? Quite wrong. The 90834 versus 90837 choice depends on minutes and documentation, and payers audit the 53-minute note that was billed as a full hour. Add-on codes like 90833 on a psychiatrist's evaluation visit get dropped when the primary E/M is missing a modifier. Telehealth adds a second layer: place of service 10 or 02, modifier 95 or not, depending on the plan and the month.
Then there is the carve-out problem. Commercial plans and most Medicaid managed care plans hand behavioral health to a separate vendor with a portal, authorization rules and credentialing queue of its own. A therapist who is in network with the medical plan can still be unpaid for six months because nobody started the behavioral side. Groups with associate-level clinicians hit supervision and billing-under-the-supervisor rules that differ plan by plan. Intensive outpatient and partial hospitalization need authorizations that expire mid-treatment. TMS and esketamine are their own world of prior auth and medical necessity letters. Self-pay practices run into the opposite issue: superbills that get rejected by the client's plan because the diagnosis code or the license type was wrong.
In-house staff usually fail in the same places. Eligibility gets checked once at intake and never again. Denials for no authorization get written off instead of appealed. Credentialing sits in a drawer until the new hire is already seeing patients. A good specialty biller tracks each clinician's panel status by payer, watches add-on and time-code denials as a pattern, and calls on aging claims before they reach timely filing. Outsourcing makes sense when you have three or more clinicians and nobody who owns the denial queue, or when you are adding telehealth in new states. Tell the billing companies your license mix, your payers, and if you take insurance at all, then compare how each one handles credentialing and appeals.
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