5 Tips for a Robust Behavioral Health RCM System
Over 50 million Americans reported experiencing mental illness between 2019 and 2020. Despite this, societal attitudes toward mental health are shifting, encouraging more individuals to seek help. Behavioral health encompasses a broad range of treatment programs beyond traditional psychiatric visits. From addiction to eating disorders, these services require a dedicated team, including billing and coding specialists.
To maintain a robust revenue cycle management (RCM) system, everyone in a behavioral health facility must work together. A streamlined and efficient process allows providers and caretakers to focus less on troublesome billing problems, and more so on patients. This alone can help you ensure the sustainability of your practice.
Today, we’ll delve into the crucial role of revenue cycle management in behavioral healthcare, as well as a few ways you can optimize your practice’s financial performance.
Behavioral health services often deal with multiple sessions over an extended period, unlike other healthcare specialties whose services may be a “one and done” situation. So it’s good for your billing team to be familiar with the different behavioral health codes, as the guidelines for them can be more complex.
This proves a whole new challenge for medical coding and billing professionals. Making sure to keep service information together and accurate for one patient over time can get confusing.
Here are a few suggestions when it comes to identifying, collecting, and managing your revenue in this space.
1. Staff Training and Education
Invest in training for your employees. This includes everyone from clinicians, to billing specialists, and administrative staff. By doing this, your team as a whole can stay up to date with constantly changing and evolving regulations, as well as any coding changes.
2. Technology Integration
The more streamlined your processes are, the better. That’s why my second tip is to lean into technology integration. For example, utilizing third-party RCM systems can help take some of that tedious work off your plate! Electronic Health Records (EHR) and practice management systems are two great examples of helpful software.
3. Create & Enforce Behavioral Health Payment Policies
Things can not only become confusing for your billing staff, but for patients too!
Help everyone involved by creating set behavioral health payment policies. Having a list of these policies available through pre-registration and check-in is not only a good business practice, but helpful for patients as well.
4. Verification of Benefits
During the intake of a new patient, be sure to pay attention to any insurance eligibility or benefits they have.
Staying aware of these details can help you identify the following:
* Coverage limitations.
* Co-pays.
* Deductibles.
This helps facilitate transparent communication with your patients from the start. Establishing their financial responsibilities, including what they are responsible for out-of-pocket, will likely reduce the amount of missed payments.
5. Knowledge of Behavioral Health-specific Codes
In the same breath as employee education, you should make sure your staff is familiar with behavioral health-specific codes. Appropriate utilization of these codes, such as Current Procedural Terminology and the Healthcare Common Procedure Coding System, will help you collect your revenue faster.
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