Billing companies that work counseling claims every day. Describe your practice once and compare their proposals.
A few questions about the practice, then billing companies that fit send proposals. You are not committing to anything.
Hand off all of it or just the parts that are breaking. Say which in the form so the proposals match.
Charges entered, claims checked against payer edits, and sent daily so clean claims go out the first time.
Every denial worked, appealed, or corrected, with the root cause tracked so the same denial stops repeating.
Old balances called on and worked by payer and by age until they are paid, adjusted, or written off on purpose.
Certified coders assign CPT, ICD-10, and modifiers from your notes, or audit the codes your providers pick.
New providers enrolled with payers, CAQH kept current, and revalidations handled before they lapse.
Statements, online payment, payment plans, and the phone calls that come with them, handled in your name.
Eligibility checks, prior authorizations, and old AR cleanup go through the same request. If you only need one piece, say so.
There is no right answer for every practice. The usual tradeoffs:
Counseling looks simple on a claim. A few time-based psychotherapy codes, one diagnosis, one rendering clinician. Then the denials start, and almost none are about the code. A 60-minute session billed as 90837 gets pulled for review because the note never records start and stop times. A telehealth visit goes out with the wrong place of service and the wrong modifier, and the payer pays it at the wrong rate or refuses it. A family session gets billed under the identified patient's plan with the patient absent for half of it.
The bigger traps are structural. Many payers carve behavioral health out to a separate managed behavioral health company, so your medical-plan eligibility check says nothing about session limits, authorizations, or which network you are in. Associate-level clinicians, interns, and pre-licensed staff often cannot be paneled directly, so their sessions bill under a supervisor, and those rules differ plan by plan. Then there is the intake code, the interactive complexity add-ons, the screening instruments, and the crisis codes, a set no front-desk employee holds in their head. Credentialing is the other slow leak. A clinician who starts in March and is not loaded by the plan until June has three months of sessions that go unpaid or get held.
Outsourcing makes sense for counseling once you have more than a couple of clinicians, a mix of insured and self-pay clients, and nobody who owns follow-up on unpaid claims. It makes less sense for a solo therapist with a handful of insured clients a week. Good counseling billers watch session-time documentation, authorization units running out mid-treatment, and out-of-network superbills that clients cannot get reimbursed. In your request, say how many clinicians you have, which are licensed and which are associates, whether you see clients by telehealth, and which payers you already work with.
Three steps. Most practices hear from the first billing company within a business day.
Specialty, providers, claim volume, your software, and what you want handled.
Your request goes to billing companies that work your specialty and take on practices your size.
Compare fees, scope, reporting, and contract terms side by side. Pick one, or none.
What practice managers usually ask before they fill out the form.
Describe the practice once and compare proposals from billing companies that fit. No obligation.
Request proposals