Behavioral and mental health billing can be confusing, especially since insurance companies can treat these types of services a bit differently than other types of healthcare. Fortunately, there are several steps admins of these facilities can take to keep data organized and make sure they are paid correctly. Many behavioral and mental health organizations have fully transitioned to the convenience of electronic health records in recent years, and the challenges of the past year have made electronic aspects of healthcare more important than ever.
At the TenEleven Group, we offer a comprehensive electronic health records management system that includes several built-in features that can help you take the efficiency and accuracy of your billing to the next level. Here are six helpful tips for building the ultimate behavioral and mental health billing toolbelt!
Utilize Revenue Cycle Management or Insurance Billing Services
Keeping track of where your revenue is coming from and what it is being used for can be challenging, but utilizing a revenue cycle management service can make organizing this data much more convenient.
Integrated revenue cycle management systems allow substance abuse recovery organizations, mental health organizations, and behavioral health organizations to keep track of multiple types of data on one convenient platform. This element of our software covers eligibility, charges, claims, and payments in one place, as well as a helpful first step for handling denied claims. You will also have access to a variety of regular reports that can be used to analyze various elements of your organization’s finances, as well as several types of configurations that keep your preferred settings consistent from billing cycle to billing cycle.
Set Up Financial Dashboards
Having an at-a-glance view of how each of your patients and your organization as a whole stand financially at any given time makes it easy to quickly pinpoint accounts that most urgently need to be addressed, as well as any potential errors that need to be taken care of. Knowing what your organization’s financial situation looks like at any point in time can help you understand what elements of your organization are going well and which ones may benefit from being adjusted to better meet your goals. Dashboards simply make decision-making simpler, so you can more quickly enact positive change.
Standardize Billing Across Multiple Facilities
If your behavioral health or substance abuse recovery organization is large enough to span multiple practitioners or facilities, implementing standardized billing procedures that are the same at each location is a must when it comes to staying organized. Although it is generally easy enough for small practices to design their own billing procedures, those that are part of a larger organization cannot do this without creating inconsistencies from facility to facility. Designing a single billing procedure that incorporates the needs of each location helps your substance abuse recovery organization improve communication between facilities and keep your data organized and free of errors.
Make Sure Your Patient Information Is Current
Your patient’s former insurance company will not approve a claim if he or she has switched to a new provider, and it can be easy for him or her to forget to inform your substance abuse recovery organization of this change. To avoid unnecessary rejected claims, be sure to confirm that the insurance information you have on file for each patient is current regularly. This can be as easy as adding a question asking if the patient’s insurance information has changed to your routine forms, and it can save a significant amount of time by preventing errors from being made in the first place.
Track Your Insurance Claims Throughout the Process
Successfully filing an insurance claim is not as simple as submitting it and forgetting about it. Instead, it is important for substance abuse recovery organizations to pay close attention to every step of the billing process to make sure everything is going according to plan. Patients can change insurance companies without letting you know or no longer have insurance at all, and claims may be denied because they do not align with the patient’s current plan because an error was made when submitting the claim, or for some other reason.
Rather than assuming everything is fine and not finding out that a claim was denied until weeks or months later, keeping track of each step of the process allows you to catch potential problems early on and immediately relay them to your patients, which makes it easier to determine what went wrong and find a solution within a reasonable amount of time.
Understand the Requirements of Each Insurance Company Your Organization Works With
There is no one size fits all approach to health insurance, especially when it comes to substance abuse recovery and other behavioral or mental health services. Insurance companies can vary significantly as far as the types of services they cover, and familiarizing yourself with the ins and outs of each of the insurance companies your substance abuse recovery organization works with is a must when it comes to making sure each patient’s behavioral and mental health services will be covered.
Having a thorough understanding of how the insurance providers your patients have are most likely to handle specific situations can help you avoid creating billing complications by choosing treatment options that will not be adequately covered.
At TenEleven Group, we prioritize helping substance abuse recovery organizations and other behavioral or mental health organizations effectively manage electronic health records, especially when it comes to working with insurance companies. Paper files are quickly falling out of favor with many cutting-edge organizations, and our EHR software makes it easy for these organizations to stay organized by maintaining accurate digital records and submitting the correct information to insurance companies. Contact us today to learn more about how our software can benefit your behavioral or mental health organization or to get a free demo!
