Verification of Patient Benefits for Mental Health Professionals
While your busy running your mental health practice, you may overlook a crucial detail – verifying your patient’s benefits. The process of verifying a patient’s benefits might sound like a hassle and time consuming, but in the long run, it’s worth it.
Especially when dealing with benefits where the codes are tricky related to specific mental health services, it might be well worth the wait time on the phone with a claims agent.
At Anchor Point Billing Solutions, we find that the best practice is to always frequently call and verify patient benefits, which saves you time, money, and most importantly costly denials.
Here are some helpful tips to keep in mind:
Verifying New Patients at Your Practice
One piece of advice in private practice for our billing clients is that no patient should walk through your door for the first time without you having verified that patient’s benefits.
This way, it will not come as a surprise to you that the patient has not met his or her deductible, has different benefits than expected, or even worse, that the patient is no longer covered by insurance. You will know exactly what to collect and the patient also won’t be surprised.
Verifying Returning Patients at Your Practice
We have all had it happen. A new patient schedules and attends a first appointment.
To no fault of our own and not because the session was ineffective, but perhaps because the patient changes his or her mind, the next session is happily scheduled and as that date nears, the patient cancels or perhaps fails to show.
You file a claim for the patient’s first and only session with the insurance information he or she provided you, but guess what? You come to find out that the patient is no longer covered.
After you discover this, you send a patient statement suggesting that the patient is responsible for the session, but by this time, the patient has moved on and isn’t responding to your statement.
Do you send the patient to collections for such a small amount? Will the collection company even follow up on such a minor fee? Even if the collection company collects for you, they have taken a large percentage leaving you collecting the meager remainder.
Another instance is the patient who shows up for the first session and suggests that his or her responsibility is far less than your verification has revealed.
If you have done your job verifying benefits, at least you know what you should collect and at that point you can at least make the choice of whether you want to move ahead with the session if they are not going to pay their copay at that time.
Partner with a Mental Health Billing Specialist
At Anchor Point Billing Solutions, we have learned over the 20 years of experience with mental health billing, the right questions to ask. If you are eager to know about those questions you should be asking if you decide to verify patient benefits, head over to our website at and sign up for our newsletter.
We would be happy to provide you with our forms that ensure you know the right questions to ask. Of course, we are always happy to take the load off of you so you can focus on what you do best.
Hold times for claims agents with insurance companies are long, so let us listen to their bad hold music and we will get your patient’s benefits verified so you can go about what you do best, which is providing excellent therapy services.
Give us a call at 816.753.7071 or fill out our contact form to learn more about how we can help grow your practice.