Insurance billing for mental and behavioral health
MindMed Billing bills insurance for mental and behavioral health practices across the United States: intake evaluations, psychotherapy sessions, psychiatry visits, testing units, teletherapy claims, prior authorizations, denials and aged A/R. Your clinicians keep their caseload. We read every remittance, work every denial and tell you what changed in plain numbers each week.
Get your billing plan. Send the form at the bottom of this page with your practice name, provider count and monthly insurance collections, and we come back with what we would do on your account, in writing.
MindMed Billing publishes four numbers for its billing work, and each one is defined on this page before it is claimed. Two of them are measured on claims, which is where a practice feels the result: how many claims go out without rework, and how long money sits unpaid. The other two say how much billing this team has done.
98% clean claim rate
Claims that pass edits without manual intervention the first time they are scrubbed
45 day A/R resolution on average
The average time an open claim takes to close, counted across the accounts we work
500+ healthcare practices served
Practices billed for across the life of the business
10+ years
Years billing insurance claims
Mental health medical billing is the insurance billing a US mental or behavioral health practice runs on time based session codes, session units and behavioral payer routing. It is not general medical billing with a different diagnosis attached. Three mechanisms make it its own job, and each one is where claims are lost.
A psychotherapy claim is priced by documented minutes, not by what was discussed. The three bands that decide the code are 16 to 37 minutes, 38 to 52 minutes and 53 minutes or more, so a note that records a start time and a stop time is a billing document. We check the documented minutes against the threshold for the code on every claim before it is submitted.
Psychological and neuropsychological testing is billed in time units per professional and technician, which is a different arithmetic from a session code and a different set of denial reasons.
Many commercial plans route behavioral health through a managed behavioral health organization: Optum and UBH, Carelon and Magellan each run their own portal, authorization rules and timely filing clock. A carve out claim sent to the medical payer is denied even when the coding is perfect. A mental health billing specialist checks the routing before the claim, not after the denial. Where a plan carves behavioral health in or out at organization level, that work sits on our behavioral health billing services page.
MindMed Billing runs six billing services for mental and behavioral health practices, and one account covers as many of them as your practice needs. A group running therapy and psychiatry under one tax ID does not get two account managers and two reports. Every service below has its own page with the code families, payer rules and denial patterns set out in full.
Organization level billing for programs and multi clinician groups: carve in and carve out routing, authorization driven services, HCPCS coded programs and Medicaid behavioral health plans. This is the service for a practice whose payers are a mix of commercial, managed behavioral health and state programs.
Billing for licensed therapists and counseling practices: intake evaluations, individual psychotherapy at each time band, family and couples sessions, group therapy and teletherapy. The work that earns the money here is minute checking, panel status and prompt rebilling.
Billing for psychiatrists and psychiatric nurse practitioners: medication management visits, evaluation and management levels with psychotherapy add on codes attached, and interactive complexity where it applies. The pairing of the add on code to the primary service is the detail most often coded wrong.
Billing for psychologists and testing practices, where testing is billed in units rather than sessions and the base code and each additional unit have to line up with the documented time per professional and per technician.
Billing for addiction treatment and levels of care, where authorization, level of care documentation and per diem coding decide whether the claim pays.
Working the claims that were already denied or already aged: reading the remittance reason, correcting what can be corrected, appealing inside the payer window, and clearing the open claim list a practice inherits when it changes billers.
Every account at MindMed Billing runs the same named list of billing work, from the eligibility check before the session through claim submission and posting to the appeal after a denial. Nothing on this list is an extra line on the invoice. The table underneath it shows what makes each type of mental health claim pay clean on first submission.
| Service | Code family | Time or unit rule | What makes it pay clean |
|---|---|---|---|
| Intake evaluation | 90791, 90792 | One per episode per clinician in most plans; 90792 when medical services are included | Correct clinician type on the code and no duplicate intake inside the payer window |
| Individual psychotherapy | 90832, 90834, 90837 | Three time bands, decided by documented minutes | Start and stop time in the note matching the code billed |
| Psychotherapy with a medical visit | 90833, 90836, 90838 | Add on codes, billed with the evaluation and management service | The add on attached to the right primary code, with therapy time documented separately |
| Interactive complexity | 90785 | Add on only, never billed on its own | A documented complicating factor on the same date as the primary service |
| Family and group therapy | 90846, 90847, 90853 | Per session, with the patient present or not present distinction on family codes | The right code for who was in the room, and the identified patient on the claim |
| Psychological testing | 96130 to 96139 | Billed in units per professional and per technician | Base code plus each additional unit supported by documented time |
| Teletherapy | Same psychotherapy codes | POS 10 for the home, POS 02 for another telehealth site | The modifier matching the method: 95 for audio and video, 93 for audio only |
Send us your billing questions. Use the form at the end of this page. Every claim on every account is read by a certified coder before it leaves.
Get your billing planMindMed Billing works inside the system your practice already runs. There is no migration, no second portal for your clinicians and no new software to buy as part of the billing service. We take named access to your practice management system and your payer portals, and your clinicians carry on writing notes where they write them now.
That list is what we work in, not a partnership, an integration or a vendor certification with any of them. Nearly every US therapy practice already runs its notes and scheduling in one of those systems, so billing starts in the one you have on day one.
Six steps take a mental health practice from a signed agreement to a working claim cycle, and each one says what we do and what your practice receives. The sequence is the same for a solo therapist and for a group, and the first claim batch goes out inside the same onboarding window either way.
A business associate agreement is signed first, then we take named access to your practice system, your clearinghouse and your payer portals, and we pull your open claim list and payer mix. Onboarding generally within 7 to 10 business days, from signature to first claim batch.
You receive a written account setup and a dated plan for the aged A/R we inherit. The full first 30 days is on our onboarding process page.
Before the session we verify the plan is active, read the behavioral health benefit, record the copay or coinsurance and check whether an authorization is required and how many units remain.
You receive a verification record on each new client and an alert when authorized units are running out.
A certified coder checks the session code against the documented minutes, the add on codes against the primary service and the diagnosis against the note, then claims go out on a daily batch. Clearinghouse rejections are worked the same day they bounce.
You receive a daily submission count and a rejection list that is already cleared.
ERA and EOB payments are posted line by line against the claim, so an underpayment against the contracted allowed amount is visible instead of being absorbed into a total.
You receive posted payments inside your own system and a short list of lines that paid below the fee schedule.
Every denial is read by reason code, corrected where a correction fixes it, and appealed inside the payer window with the documentation the payer asks for. Aged claims are worked oldest first, starting with the ones still inside the payer appeal window.
You receive a denial log with the reason, the action taken and the date, so patterns are visible rather than anecdotal.
Claim activity is reported weekly and reviewed with you monthly against the four numbers defined in the next section.
You receive a weekly report and a monthly call that covers denials by reason, A/R by age and anything in your payer mix that changed.
Four numbers tell a mental health practice whether its billing is working: clean claim rate, first pass rate, days in A/R and denial rate. Each one has a definition from HFMA, the body that publishes the standard revenue cycle indicators, and each means a different thing at a different moment in the claim life. Here they are beside our own figures.
| Metric | The standard definition | On your account |
|---|---|---|
| Clean claim rateCL-1 | HFMA MAP Key CL-1: claims that pass edits requiring no manual intervention, counted the first time a claim is scrubbed, divided by the claims accepted for billing. It is measured before submission | 98% clean claim rate |
| First pass rate | HFMA's MAP Keys contain no first pass key, so a first pass rate is always a private definition and ours is stated here: claims paid on first submission with no appeal and no resubmission | Read from your own 835 remittances and reported monthly |
| Days in A/RFM-1 | HFMA MAP Key FM-1, net days in accounts receivable: net receivables divided by average daily net revenue. It answers how long money sits, not how often claims deny | 45 day A/R resolution on average, which this page defines above as the average time an open claim takes to close |
| Denial rateAR-5 | HFMA MAP Key AR-5, remittance denial rate: claims denied divided by claims remitted, read from the 835 files. HFMA separately defines an actionable denial as one that can be corrected and resubmitted | Reported monthly by reason code, with the actionable share named |
Source: HFMA MAP Keys, Indicators of Revenue Cycle Excellence, read at the document on 12 November 2026. Definitions matter because the numbers are not interchangeable: a rate measured before submission and a rate measured after remittance are different denominators.
In a national clinician survey of 416 respondents published on 26 June 2026, 40.34% of clinicians could not state their own first submission claim denial rate, self reported, counting non clinical administrative work.
MindMed Billing bills for licensed mental and behavioral health providers in private practice, in groups and in treatment organizations, anywhere in the United States. The license types we bill for are LCSW, LICSW, LPC, LMHC and LMFT clinicians, PMHNP prescribers, PsyD and PhD psychologists, and psychiatrists. What changes between them is the code set and the payer mix, not the standard of the work.
Most of this market is one clinician: 86.5% of US private practice is sole practitioner and 74.6% accept insurance, on self reported 2025 data from Heard's 2026 report of 1,950 practices. For a solo therapist the billing job is panel status, minute accurate coding and somebody chasing the claims that quietly did not pay. Billing services for mental health providers at this size are judged on whether the owner stops doing claims at night.
A group of 6 to 25 clinicians bills therapy and psychiatry side by side, which means two code sets, group and rendering NPI pairing on every claim, and credentialing status that differs by clinician and by payer. The reporting matters as much as the collections: a group owner needs denial reasons by clinician and by payer, not one total.
Programs and treatment organizations carry authorization driven services, levels of care, HCPCS coded programs and heavy Medicaid and managed behavioral health exposure. Procurement reads the page before anyone takes a call, so the compliance posture and the reporting are set out here rather than kept for a call.
Looking for mental health billing services near me? Mental health billing happens inside your practice system and your payer portals, so MindMed Billing works with practices in every state, on commercial plans, Medicare and state Medicaid programs, from one account.
Clients get three results from the billing work above: fewer denials, faster payment and money recovered that had been written off. MindMed Billing holds a 99% client satisfaction rate. Our published result for a billing takeover is a 15 to 25% revenue increase within 90 days, and our denial work has taken claim denials 12 to 15% down to under 3%.
Three of the practices we bill for, with their own roles and their own numbers:
Dr. Sarah Mitchell, Family Medicine Practice Owner
a 98% clean claim rate in 60 days.
Michael Chen, MD, Cardiology Group Director
A/R days dropped from 90 to 42; collections up 23%.
Jennifer Adams, Practice Manager, Multi-Specialty Clinic
praises the real time reporting.
More of this work is written up on our case studies page.
The MindMed Billing team is credentialed for coding work: 35+ certified billing specialists (AAPC and AHIMA; CPC, CCS, RHIA, CMRS). Coding credentials matter on behavioral claims because the arguments that win an appeal are code arguments: documented time against the code billed, an add on against its primary service, a diagnosis that supports the service.
The compliance record behind that team is zero compliance violations in 10+ years, with a 100% HIPAA compliant workforce. Access to your system is named and limited to the people working your account, a business associate agreement is signed before anyone touches a record, and no form on this site collects health information or a client identifier. The detail of what we sign and what we are responsible for is on our HIPAA and BAA page.
Behind that team is 24 specialties served, which is where the denial and appeal experience comes from, and on this site all of it is pointed at mental health medical billing. More on how the business is set up: about MindMed Billing.
Five things make MindMed Billing worth hiring as your mental health billing company, and a practice owner comparing mental health billing companies can check every one of them on this page instead of on a call. How they land in practice shows up in one figure: a 95% client retention rate.
95% client retention rate
Behavioral code competence, shown on the page. The code families, the minute bands, the add on rules and the teletherapy place of service pairs are set out above, not claimed.
Numbers with definitions attached. Every rate we publish is defined on this page against the HFMA standard, and where HFMA publishes no key for it we say so and print our own definition.
Billing inside your system. TherapyNotes, SimplePractice, Jane App and the rest of the list above. No migration, no new clinician workflow.
A published price. Three ways to pay, printed below with the claim caps attached, so the cost of billing is a decision you can make before a call.
Payer routing checked before submission. Carve out plans, managed behavioral health organizations and state Medicaid programs are checked at verification, which is where the avoidable denials are.
Mental health billing at MindMed Billing is sold three ways: a percentage of what we collect, or one of two flat monthly plans with a claim cap. The percentage plan moves with your revenue, which suits a practice with a seasonal or growing caseload. A flat plan suits steady volume and a fixed budget line.
For solo and small practices that want billing cost to track revenue.
From 3 to 6% of collections.
Billed on what we collect for you.
Includes:
For an established practice with steady monthly volume that wants a fixed line in the budget.
$1,299/month (up to 500 claims).
Everything in the percentage plan, plus a fixed monthly cost regardless of a strong collections month, and payer level denial reporting.
For groups and programs running therapy and psychiatry on one account.
$2,499/month (up to 1,500 claims).
Everything in the 500 claim plan, plus multi clinician reporting by rendering provider, and authorization tracking across programs.
| Feature | Percent of collections | Up to 500 claims | Up to 1,500 claims |
|---|---|---|---|
| Billing model | From 3 to 6% of collections | $1,299/month | $2,499/month |
| Claim volume | No cap | Up to 500 claims | Up to 1,500 claims |
| Eligibility and authorization work | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Denials and appeals | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Aged A/R at takeover | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Reporting | Weekly | Weekly, by payer | Weekly, by payer and by clinician |
| Monthly review call | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Works in your system | Yes | Yes | Yes |
The plan detail, what sits inside each one and how the claim cap is counted is on our mental health billing services cost page.
Get your billing plan. The published prices carry their claim caps, so you can decide before a call.
Get your billing planOne in house biller costs more than a percentage of collections until a practice is collecting far more than a typical therapy practice collects. Current federal wage data puts the mean annual wage for a billing and posting clerk at $51,070 and for a medical records specialist at $56,790, before a single benefit is added.
| The post | Mean annual wage | Wage plus benefits at the BLS share |
|---|---|---|
| Billing and posting clerk | $51,070 | $74,555 |
| Medical records specialist | $56,790 | $82,905 |
Sources: BLS Occupational Employment and Wage Statistics, Table 1, national, May 2025 and BLS Employer Costs for Employee Compensation, June 2026, both read 12 November 2026. BLS calculates the annual wage as the mean hourly wage times 2,080 hours. The benefit column applies the published 68.5% wage share of total compensation for full time private industry workers. No software, training, cover or management time is added, so this is the most generous possible reading of the in house option.
The breakeven that follows is computed against the rate ladder this market publishes, 4.5% to 8% of collections (Crown Counseling's vendor comparison, published 2 November 2026, and TheraThink's own FAQ, read 11 November 2026). That ladder is what other billing companies charge, not the MindMed Billing price card above. On those wage inputs and that ladder, one in house biller beats a percentage of collections only above roughly $638,000 to $1,262,000 of annual collections on wage alone, and roughly $932,000 to $1,842,000 once benefits are counted at the share BLS publishes. For scale, the loaded cost of one billing clerk, $74,555 a year, is 0.99 times the entire annual revenue of the median solo therapy practice at $75,000, and 0.44 times the median group practice at $169,121 (Heard, The Financial State of Private Practice 2026, 1,950 practices, 2025 self reported data).
| Topic | One in house biller | MindMed Billing |
|---|---|---|
| What you pay | A salary plus benefits, fixed whatever you collect | A percentage of collections, or a flat plan with a claim cap |
| Cover during leave or a vacancy | The claims wait | The account is worked by a team |
| Denials and appeals | Competes with posting and front desk work for the same hours | A denial log with reason, action and date |
| Prior authorizations | Tracked by hand, usually in a spreadsheet | Requested, unit tracked and flagged before units run out |
| Code set changes | Your staff member keeps up alone | Certified coders across the whole book of accounts |
| Reporting | Whatever your system prints | Weekly reporting against four defined metrics |
Most practices outsource mental health billing to stop paying a fixed salary for a workload that moves with the caseload. What changes for the person in the role is the work they stop doing: chasing clearinghouse rejections, sitting on payer hold lines and rekeying remittances. What they keep is the front desk, the schedule and the client relationship.
Mental health claims were denied more often than medical and surgical claims in all four of the claim service types a mental health practice bills, on Virginia carrier data for calendar year 2024. The Virginia Bureau of Insurance collects denial rates from carriers by benefit category, and mental health was denied more often in four of its five service types.
| Claim service type | Medical and surgical | Mental health | Substance use disorder |
|---|---|---|---|
| Office visits | 6.7% | 8.1% | 30.6% |
| All other outpatient | 7.1% | 9.4% | 21.2% |
| Inpatient | 13.3% | 17.9% | 21.5% |
| Emergency care | 9.9% | 13.5% | 20.1% |
Source: Virginia State Corporation Commission Bureau of Insurance, report RD721, 1 November 2025, covering calendar year 2024, read at the document on 12 November 2026. Weighting those four service types by the report's own published claim counts, Virginia carriers denied 9.02% of mental health claims against 7.40% of medical and surgical claims in 2024, and 24.37% of substance use disorder claims. Those three weighted rates are our own arithmetic over the report's counts, not figures the report prints. The one category where mental health was denied less often is outpatient pharmacy, which a mental health practice does not bill.
At the Virginia office visit rates, per 1,000 office visit claims a practice sees 81 mental health denials against 67 medical and surgical, a gap of 14 claims. At the $95 to $125 average session reimbursement Heard reports, that gap alone is $1,330 to $1,750 held up pending rework, on 1,000 claims, before anyone has worked a single appeal.
Twelve questions practice owners ask MindMed Billing before they move their billing, answered here in full. Anything specific to your payer mix or your practice system is answered on your account rather than in general, so send the form at the bottom of the page with the detail.
Psychiatric billing is one part of mental health billing. Psychiatry claims run on evaluation and management codes with psychotherapy add on codes attached to them, plus medication management visits. Therapy claims run on standalone psychotherapy codes with minute thresholds. MindMed Billing works both on one account and keeps the two code sets separate on the claim.
Mental health claims carry ICD-10 codes from the F chapter, most often the depressive, anxiety, trauma and stressor, attention deficit and substance use families. The diagnosis has to support the service billed and match the documentation in the note, which is where payers look first on a behavioral health audit.
Teletherapy uses the same psychotherapy codes as an in office session. What changes is the place of service and the modifier: POS 10 for the patient at home, POS 02 for another telehealth site, with modifier 95 or 93 depending on whether the session was audio and video or audio only.
Yes. MindMed Billing requests the authorization, records the units approved and the expiry date, and flags the clinician before the last approved session is used. Where a payer requires an authorization for a level of care or a service type, the request goes in before the session is scheduled rather than after a denial.
Yes. Coding review and billing run as one job on every claim. Our certified coders check the session code against the documented time, the add on codes against the primary service and the diagnosis against the note before the claim leaves, because a coding error found after remittance costs an appeal.
Credentialing itself stays with your practice or your credentialing specialist, and MindMed Billing works with the panels you already hold. We verify that each rendering clinician is active with the payer before claims go out, keep the group and rendering NPI pairing right on the claim, and tell you when a payer enrollment record is the reason a claim is denying.
Yes, aged A/R comes with the account at transition. We pull the open claim list from your system, sort it by payer and by age against each payer timely filing limit, and work the claims that can still be appealed first, so the oldest recoverable money moves before the window closes on it.
A business associate agreement is signed before anyone at MindMed Billing touches your system. Access is named, limited to the people working your account and removed when they stop. No form on this site asks for health information or any client identifier, and nothing about a client belongs in an email to us. What we sign and what we are responsible for is set out on our HIPAA and BAA page.
Onboarding generally within 7 to 10 business days, counted from the signed agreement to the first claim batch we submit. The gating item is payer portal and system access, not our side of the work.
Longer sessions are paid when the documented start and stop time supports the code billed. We check the minute total against the threshold for the code before submission, so a 55 minute session is not billed down to a 45 minute code and a 45 minute session is not billed up.
MindMed Billing works with practices anywhere in the United States, because mental health billing is done inside your practice system and your payer portals rather than in your office. Commercial plans, Medicare and state Medicaid programs are all billed from the same account.
Yes, and it is one account, one report and one point of contact. Psychiatry claims run on evaluation and management codes with psychotherapy add on codes, therapy claims run on standalone time based codes, and both code sets are worked by the same team against the same payer mix for your practice.
Tell MindMed Billing what your practice is trying to fix and you get a written billing plan for your account, not a brochure. Send your practice name, provider count, monthly insurance collections band, work email and what you need. A business associate agreement is signed before any access: HIPAA and BAA.
Get your billing plan. Send the form, or write to us from the contact page.
Written by the MindMed Billing team. How this page is researched and checked: editorial policy. The coding and payer information on this page is general information, not legal or tax advice.
