Working with the top insurance providers in the country is an important part of running an addiction treatment business. Each company handles their billing differently.
Slowly building relationships with employees at each company over time is the “gold standard” approach for managing tricky claims and other sticky billing issues with the top 10 insurance companies for addiction treatment.
About 12% of patients with Medicaid insurance have a substance abuse problem.
If your center isn’t accepting public payer plans—like Medicaid and Medicare—then you’re missing out on a massive pool of potential patients. Still, many centers decide to pass on public payer insurance and only accept private insurance and self-pay patients—and for good reason.
Getting patients sober is a challenging job. Billing for that job is sometimes even harder. Sometimes it feels like the system is designed to be confusing. There are so many codes and one simple error can completely throw off an entire revenue cycle. Understanding how the different types of codes interact with one another is critical to billing success.
Implementing a new EHR can feel like a daunting project.
When it goes right, implementing a new EHR can save your organization time and money while improving the quality of care you deliver to patients. When it goes wrong—look out! Your revenue cycle, productivity, and patient care all take a significant hit.
In Part 1 of this series, we covered how to get an addiction treatment center licensed in California, Arizona, Kentucky, Maine, North Dakota, Montana, Wisconsin, and West Virginia. Be sure to check out that post if you are looking for how to get your center’s launch off to the right start in those states.
“Playing nice” with insurance companies is one of your most important jobs as an addiction treatment provider. Organizations that master the art of interacting with insurance providers reap major rewards in terms of happy patients, strong revenue cycles, confident clinicians, and flawless documentation. Organizations that struggle with “insurance speak” grapple with angry patients, poor cash flow, unmet patient responsibility payments, and wary clinical staff.
With the opioid crisis still grinding along, now is a great time to open an addiction treatment center. But navigating the licensing requirements of each state is tricky—they are all different and each plays by its own rules. Because there are no federal guidelines for addiction treatment center licensure, every state’s regulatory body is unique.
Getting insurance companies to fairly reimburse for services rendered is one of the biggest struggles for many addiction treatment providers today. Between an initial verification of benefits, pre-authorizations, concurrent reviews, and even retrospective reviews, it’s easy to get lost in the insurance authorization labyrinth and spend a lot of your organization's time (and money!) fighting with insurance companies.
Biopsychosocials (or “BPS” for short) are often one of the first pieces of documentation addiction treatment counselors complete with their patients. Although busy clinicians might dread writing these lengthy and time consuming tomes on each client, the BPS is more than just a mandatory insurance form.
SOAP (Subjective, Objective, Assessment, and Plan) notes have been the cornerstone of medical documentation since Lawrence Reed introduced the “Problem Oriented Medical Record” in the 1950’s. Before the dawn of SOAP notes, medical practitioners of Reed’s time had no standardized method of record-keeping. Instead, each provider would scribble notes in their own fashion, making insurance reimbursement, coordinated care, and chart review difficult and time-consuming.
Patient portals—online dashboards where patients can access their EHR, view test results, review treatment plans, track referrals, and message their providers—have been around for years.
The adoption of patient portals in the addiction treatment industry was slow, but as more and more providers realize the benefits of these powerful patient engagement tools, patient portal adoption rates at addiction treatment centers and sober living homes are soaring.
We hear it from our clients all the time: treating patients for SUD is easy, but getting patients into treatment is hard.
For many of the providers we work with, filling beds and keeping them filled seems to be taking more and more staff time, slowly cutting into their businesses’ bottom line. That’s why we created BehaveHealth Bridge—a platform to help you connect with new clients.
The US government recently reported that millions of health records are breached every year. For behavioral health organizations, each breach translates into massive fines for violations of the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) laws.
HIPAA fines, which range from $100 to $50,000 per record, can easily bankrupt an organization.
You already know your treatment center is providing excellent care, but do you have the numbers to back it up?
Anecdotal evidence is no longer enough to convince prospective clients and their families to trust your center with a life-and-death behavioral health crisis.
Thinking of opening a drug rehab center or sober living house?
Good news—your timing couldn’t be better. Now is a great time to get into this industry and start making a difference in your community!