Struggling with Collecting Payments for Mental Health Services?

Jul 26

Collecting payment for mental health services can be frustrating. Many factors contribute to this struggle and collecting less common mental health treatments, such as transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS), are even more difficult to bill.

How can a practitioner overcome these obstacles when trying to collect for mental health services? Read on to explore how collaborating with experts can improve your mental health billing success rates.

Complications in Collecting for Mental Health Services

Having one problem with billing increases the difficulty of providing for mental and behavioral health patients. Having a combination of problems can devastate a practice’s ability to bill and operate efficiently.

Unpredictable treatment durations and outcomes are major contributors to inconsistent billing and collections. Mental health conditions can be chronic or episodic and treatment can extend over months or even years. This variability can lead to mistakes in the billing process due to changing patient information or misplaced documentation.

Insurance coverage can also further complicate payment collection. Insurers can limit mental health and substance abuse disorders care on a case-by-case basis, giving insurance companies the power to determine what is “medically necessary.” Additionally, bureaucratic complexity often delays reimbursements or leads to billing errors that require lengthy resolution processes.

The Unique Hurdles of TMS Patient Billing

Public awareness of TMS has slowly grown in the last decade. Approved by the FDA in 2008, TMS is a non-drug treatment that delivers magnetic pulses into the brain that stimulate nerve cells.

These magnetic pulses are delivered repeatedly into the brain to treat depression, OCD and smoking cessation. You might assume collecting for these TMS sessions would be easy — but the therapy’s many steps create a challenge. And even getting approval for the treatment of depression with TMS has hurdles.

“Thus far, insurance coverage is limited beyond the treatment of major depressive disorder,” says UCLA Health. “Even for depression, a patient must have previously found little or no improvement with medicine.”

As TMS treatments require several sessions and additional psychotherapy appointments and support, some physicians may recommend starting the long regimen before insurance coverage is approved. This decision can backfire on patients if they are denied insurance coverage after already beginning treatments.

The Right Partner to Address Mental Health Billing Challenges

Mental healthcare is essential, and so are your collections for services rendered. Having a profitable medical practice enables the investment in costly medical equipment such as TMS machines, opening up treatment options for patients.

A reputable and experienced outsourced medical billing vendor can guide practices through the above challenges with compassion and expertise. Find a medical billing solutions partner with industry know-how and integrated web-based billing services. Your business — as well as the patient experience — will benefit in the long run.