What are DAP Notes & Why You Should Use Them For Mental Health Practice
DAP notes have become an increasingly popular annotation method for mental health care and behavioral health care practitioner. Therapists of every discipline use DAP notes to record and manage each patient’s case. They are especially helpful for keeping track of how a patient’s case evolves while ensuring that unexplored paths do not go unexplored in future sessions. In this way, DAP notes effectively help to track the details of each therapy session while helping to inform the direction of [...]
DSM-5 codes vs ICD-10. What’s The Difference?
Diagnostic codes can sometimes seem a little arcane, even to those therapists and physicians who are experienced with using them. Two of the more scrutinized diagnostic codes come into play when choosing to use the ICD-10 or the DSM-5 code. In truth, there are some differences and similarities between the two sets, which can make it confusing to know which one to use. In some cases, applying the wrong diagnostic code can draw questions and cause delays in the [...]
What Are Non-Covered Services In Medical Billing?
Health insurance providers, public health institutions, and other payer entities typically cover most medical services and treatments administered by physicians, clinics, and hospitals. This also includes things like most prescription drugs, wellness care, and even patient-use medical devices. Yet a lot of medical billing companies recognize that private payers and institutions like Medicare do not always cover certain treatments, items, medications, and services. Essentially a non-covered service in medical billing isn’t being covered by a government institution or private [...]
How Real-Time Eligibility Verification Can Maximize Your Revenue
A consistent and vigorous revenue stream is the veritable lifeblood of any medical practice. Maximizing a revenue stream’s potential is especially important for small medical practices, ABA therapists, and solo practitioners. Fortunately, 21st Century communication technology offers medical practices of all scales and disciplines a spectrum of innovative solutions to streamline as well as maximize revenue streams. One of the places where it pays the most dividends is the ability to receive real-time eligibility verification. There are even a [...]
What Is Overpayment In Medical Billing & How To Recover The Payments
Medical billing problems and accidental overpayments can do more than just interrupt a consistent revenue stream, it can also affect your reputation with your patients as well as the community you serve. Not to mention that failing to return the extra payments from patients or their insurance provider can also leave you exposed to significant legal problems. In many overpayment cases, the consequences of failing to repay promptly can also impact a solo practice’s credit score, making it harder [...]
What’s The Difference Between Insurance Recoupment & Refund In Medical Billing
Medical billing professionals and small practices that are handling their own medical billing services often have to deal with Insurance Recoupment and Refund issues. This can significantly affect a practice’s revenue stream, and could also carry potential legal ramifications. What Is Insurance Recoupment? Most insurance providers will request a refund if there is an issue with an overpayment. This request is called recoupment. Insurance Recoupments Can Occur For The Following Reasons The insurance provider is not aware of the [...]
What Is A SOAP Note & How To Write Them?
Subjective, Objective, Assessment, and Plan notes, which are more commonly known as “SOAP” notes are a documentation process used by a wide range of healthcare providers to write quick notes in a patient's chart. This helps to document each patient encounter in their medical record is a comprehensive workflow practice that begins with appointment scheduling, patient check-in and continues on through the examination, check-out, rescheduling, and eve the medical billing process. In this way SOAP notes serve as a [...]
How to Prevent Medical Billing Fraud
Medical billing fraud has a very real and unfortunate presence in the medical billing industry. Every year private insurance companies, public health institutions and government payer agencies suffer significant financial losses to medical billing fraud. In some cases, the fraud is accidental and simply related to poor practices or not using up to date codes. This is even more likely to occur with solo practitioners and small practices where the individual in charge of medical billing and coding is [...]
Electronic Visit Verification FAQ for ABA Therapy
The term “Electronic Visit Verification” has jumped to the forefront of many alerts sent out to ABA practitioners. The barrage comes from both industry news feeds, periodicals, colleagues and team members who are concerned about compliance, yet aren’t sure where to look for more information. In this article, we will take a closer look at the nuts and bolts details of electronic visit verification for ABA therapy, as well as try to answer some of the more frequently asked [...]
10 Tips for New Behavior Therapists & Counselors
The opportunity to open your own private mental health care practices is extremely attractive and enervating for many therapists and counselors. Though it also comes with a few challenges when having to balance the rewarding aspects of patient care with the business aspects of maintaining your own small practice. To help you put your best foot forward, we collated a variety of tips to help new behavior therapists and counselors to navigate the water of growing their own small [...]
