If you’re reading this post, then we don’t need to tell you that medical billing for addiction treatment is complicated and time-consuming. You already know that. 

Whether you’ve been doing revenue cycle management (RCM) in-house for months, years or decades, you’re intimately familiar with how stressful and frustrating medical billing can be, especially in the addiction treatment space, where denials and ever changing rules and regulations make every claim a potential battlefield. 

You provide great, medically necessary services that change your patients’ lives, but insurance companies don’t always see it that way. They pick apart your claims over minor details like CPT code modifiers, missing signatures, or data entry errors. 

You’ve been curious about outsourcing your medical billing for a while, but you’ve heard it’s expensive and you’re apprehensive about hiring the work out. 

How will you know if it’s being done correctly? 

How can you guarantee that you’ll see better results with a contractor? 

Today, we’ll look at some of the top signs it’s time to start outsourcing your RCM. 

You Lost Your Long-Standing Medical Biller 

The staff member or members who were covering your billing efforts left! 

Oh dear. 

We generally advise addiction treatment providers to outsource their billing before this happens, but it’s not always avoidable. Now you’ve got a hiring emergency and an RCM emergency on your hands. 

Your mind is probably racing:

Who will train your new billing staff? 

Who is qualified to supervise your new billing staff?

How will you know they’re even doing a decent job (before it’s too late)?

Medical billing is a specialized field, and addiction treatment medical billing is a tricky skill to master. It takes time to become proficient. There’s quite a bit of nuance to this undertaking. Your new hire won’t be able to turn out the same results as the veteran biller you lost for a long time, if ever. Expect your net days in A/R to skyrocket. 

It helps if your departing employee can assist with training up the new hire, but it’s impossible to impart all of the details that go into masterful medical billing for addiction treatment in a few hours or days.  

If this describes your situation, now is a great time to outsource your RCM to a provider like Behave Health. 

We ONLY do addiction treatment billing, and we have relationships with folks at every single major insurance company, so our medical billing specialists know the idiosyncrasies of what goes into successful claims at each company. 

You’ll see results immediately - rather than months down the road (or never). 

Your Patient Care is Taking Too Big a Hit 

Medical billing takes a lot of time. 

If you don’t have a dedicated in-house billing specialist, you’ve probably got your administrative staff covering the claims, doing follow-up calls and working with denials, patient responsibility payments and utilization reviews. (Confused? Check out our handy glossary for addiction treatment billing newbies.) 

They’re probably also doing VOBs, claim scrubbing and taking care of all the random loose ends that can present themselves during the adjudication process. 

And that’s on top of their other job - greeting patients, fielding questions, scheduling patients and managing the office. 

You know what’s not great? 

When your receptionist is too wrapped up in billing to greet your new patient. 

Also not good? 

When your clinicians are so stressed over billing that it’s cutting into their ability to provide excellent patient care.

If you’re seeing patient care take a hit, it’s time to outsource your billing and remove the extra stress that billing has introduced into your addiction treatment business. 

Staff Turnover Is Off the Charts

If you're managing your RCM in-house, it’s not just your patients who might suffer, it’s your staff, as well. 

You’re free to work your staff as hard as the law allows, but at a certain point, you risk burning your best employees out. 

If your employees are overwhelmed with the amount of medical billing work, or if they feel out of their element with the technical nature of the task, then it’s likely they’ll start looking for a new job. 

Turnover at your addiction treatment center can make an already dysfunctional medical billing operation a complete nightmare - and an expensive one, too boot. 

If You’ve Got Questions About Outsourcing Your Addiction Treatment Center’s Medical Billing, We’ve Got Answers 

At Behave Health, we put YOU in control of your revenue cycle, once and for all. 

• Our billing specialists receive constant training on the latest changes in the addiction treatment medical billing universe. 

• We work tirelessly to track down every dollar owed to you by insurance companies and patients. 

• You get real time updates on the progress of each claim right on your phone. No more wondering what’s going on. - you’ll know.

• We even help train up your clinicians to help eliminate billing errors at every level of the process. 

When you turn your billing over to us, you can rest easy knowing that you’ve chosen the best. We get addiction treatment billing because it’s the only kind of billing we handle. It’s what we do.

Ready to take a closer look at what we can do for your business? 

Get your free trial started today and see why more addiction treatment centers prefer Behave Health.