Resources
The part of the work that happens after the session.
Guides for outpatient mental health practices on getting paid for the care they deliver — what a billing company should cost, why claims are denied and how to prevent it, whether changing billers means changing your EHR, what to do when a claim comes back denied, how timely filing deadlines actually work, how to recover the A/R that has already aged, what a normal denial rate and days in A/R look like, and what a time-based psychotherapy note has to document.
Every figure here traces to a primary source and is labeled with the population it actually covers. Most numbers in this category are not, which is its own kind of problem when you are trying to know what normal looks like.
What billing costs
What is contingency (percentage-of-collections) billing for a mental health practice, and what does it cost?
What “a percentage of collections” actually costs an outpatient mental health practice — the 4% to 10% market range, what the percentage is charged on, what should be included in it, and what a rate under 4% usually means.
Denial prevention
How do outpatient mental health practices prevent claim denials?
Prevention beats cleanup. How outpatient mental health practices stop denials upstream — eligibility, authorization, and medical-necessity documentation checked before the claim goes out, not appealed after.
Switching billers
Do you have to change your EHR to change how you bill?
Changing billers doesn’t mean changing where your clinicians work. What a billing company actually needs out of your EHR, the one enrollment that genuinely has to move, and where the cost of doing it by hand shows up.
Denials & appeals
What do you do when a mental health claim is denied?
Three different things get called a denial, and only one of them is appealable. How to tell them apart from the remittance, who the appeal right actually belongs to, the federal and Medicare clocks, and which denied claims are worth the hour.
Denials & appeals
Can you still get paid for a mental health claim past the timely filing deadline?
A timely-filing denial is not always the end of the claim — but with Medicare it usually is. What the deadlines actually are, which exceptions genuinely exist for which payer, and how to prove you filed on time.
Aged A/R
How do you recover old or aged accounts receivable at a mental health practice?
Writing a balance off on age alone is a decision made without information; assuming old claims all pay is the opposite mistake. How to triage an aging report — no-response vs. denied vs. underpaid — and what happens to the old pile when you change billers.
Benchmarks
What’s a normal denial rate, days in AR, and clean-claim rate for a mental health practice?
No credible benchmark is specific to outpatient mental health — what the defensible cross-population numbers actually show, each labeled with who it covers, and how to read your own against them.
Coding & documentation
What does a 90837 note have to document, and when should it be a 90834?
The note has to establish how long the session was and that it was necessary — and when federal auditors sorted failing psychotherapy claims by type, undocumented time was the largest single category. What the record has to carry, what else auditors found, and why a scheduling block is not a measurement.