Save Money:  How Outsourcing Your Psychology Billing Can Save You Money

Outsourcing your mental health and psychology billing can save you money whether you are a professional that has been doing it yourself or whether you have hired staff to do it.

Outsourcing your billing vs. Do-It-Yourself psychology billing

Many mental health professionals start out their practices doing their own mental health or psychology billing.  It is not a bad practice for someone in private practice to learn how to do their own psychology billing in order to have a better understanding of the whole business.  But is it really cost effective to continue doing the billing yourself after you have some clients and understand the billing process?

One thing a professional needs to figure out is how much is the professional's time is worth?  If you average $100 per client session, your time should be worth well over $75 per hour. But experience medical billing specialists are willing to do it for far less than that, and they can probably do it far more efficiently than you can due to their experience and specialization. 

Consider these activities that result in lost billable hours:

If you can hire someone to do your pscyhology billing for a fraction of that, it makes far more business sense for you to spend time learning inexpensive ways to market and build your practice with paying clients, rather than to personally take care of the administrative hassles involved in billing insurance companies. 

Once you find an effective biller who uses the best technology, you can get paid faster with much less time spent on billing.  You can spend time building your practice and in the long run will make far more money than doing the psychology billing yourself. To build a successful practice, you are far better off developing an efficient system for working with a good biller than to continue doing the psychology billing yourself.

Outsourcing your psychology billing vs. hiring your own staff:

Hiring your own staff is expensive and time consuming.  You are likely to need extra office space to accomodate your billing staff.  Hiring staff will require you to spend time and money on payroll and payroll taxes, as well as requiring you to comply with additional laws regarding employees/employers.  To find and keep an experienced biller you will need to pay the biller far above minimum wage, and then staff retention may still be an issue. To keep a biller once they are trained, you will probably also need to provide health insurance and other benefits.  You may be able to find a biller and pay them $10 per hour, but your costs will be far higher than that.

When you use an effective, efficient psychology billing service, you get the benefit of the billers specialization and experience.  Your psychology billing service learns things from other clients, not just from you and is independent enough to require little training on your part.  You can hire a psychology billing service as a "business associate" paying per claim, per service, or as a percent of what is collected.  You can control your costs. Optimally, a billing service may be able to provide you with one person who works directly with your practice and other staff that can back that person up and provide coverage when your mail biller is on vacation.  A good billing service can save you a great deal of money on your psychology billing in terms of lost time and lost revenue.

Comparing Costs and Options for Psychology Billing:

See our worksheet on costs, prices, and options for psychology billing.