Mental Health Billing Services for Therapists
Time-banded psychotherapy codes, telehealth rules, carve-outs, and per-license credentialing make behavioral health billing more work than any clinician should do between sessions. We handle it end to end, and help your practice grow online too.
Understanding Mental Health Challenges
Marketing mental health services sensitively and ethically
Creating a safe, inviting online environment
Managing HIPAA compliance in marketing
Insurance vs. private pay patient acquisition
Services for Mental Health Practices
Compassionate Website Design
Safe, welcoming websites that reduce anxiety and build connection for new patients.
HIPAA-Compliant Marketing
Fully compliant digital marketing strategies respecting patient privacy.
Insurance Plan SEO
Rank for searches including specific insurance plans you accept.
Telehealth Marketing
Campaigns promoting your telehealth services to expand geographic reach.
Medical Billing for Mental Health
Our mental health billing services are built for how behavioral health actually gets paid. Psychotherapy codes are time-banded, add-on therapy with E/M has precise rules, telehealth place-of-service coding changes reimbursement, and payers credential (and pay) each license level differently. Add session limits, authorization tracking, and behavioral health carve-outs, and it's a workload most solo therapists and group practices can't absorb between sessions. We take the whole thing off your plate: eligibility and carve-out checks before the first appointment, clean time-documented claims after every session, and denial follow-up that actually happens.
Time-accurate psychotherapy coding (90832/90834/90837) and the 90833 add-on when therapy accompanies medication management
Telehealth billing with correct place-of-service (02/10) and modifier combinations per payer
License-level credentialing and supervision billing rules for LCSWs, LPCs, psychologists, and prescribers
Behavioral health carve-out detection at eligibility, so claims go to the right payer the first time
Authorization and session-limit tracking per patient, so visit 13 of a 12-visit auth never happens
Key CPT Codes in Mental Health Billing
The codes that drive most of the revenue in this specialty, and what has to be right on each one.
| Code | Service | Billing Note |
|---|---|---|
| 90791 | Psychiatric diagnostic evaluation | Intake without medical services. Most payers allow one per provider per episode; some require it before therapy codes will pay. |
| 90792 | Psychiatric diagnostic evaluation with medical services | Prescriber intake. Higher reimbursement than 90791; requires medical elements documented. |
| 90832 | Psychotherapy, 30 minutes | 16 to 37 minutes of documented therapy time. |
| 90834 | Psychotherapy, 45 minutes | 38 to 52 minutes. The workhorse code for most outpatient therapy. |
| 90837 | Psychotherapy, 60 minutes | 53+ minutes. Pays more and gets payer scrutiny; session start/stop times in the note make it defensible. |
| 90833 | Psychotherapy add-on with E/M, 30 minutes | Billed alongside medication management visits. Frequently missed revenue for prescribers who also do therapy. |
| 90846 / 90847 | Family psychotherapy (without / with patient present) | 50 minutes. Payer coverage varies; diagnosis must belong to the identified patient. |
| 90853 | Group psychotherapy | Billed per member per session. Documentation must be individualized, not one shared group note. |
Top Mental Health Denials We Prevent
Session limit or authorization exhausted
How we prevent it: We track every patient's remaining authorized visits and flag renewals before the limit is hit, so sessions are never delivered unpaid.
90837 flagged for routine use
How we prevent it: Start and stop times documented on every session make the 60-minute code defensible. We audit time documentation instead of down-coding your work.
Telehealth place-of-service or modifier mismatch
How we prevent it: Each payer's telehealth recipe (POS 02 vs 10, modifier 95 or GT) is maintained per plan and applied automatically at claim scrubbing.
Clinician not credentialed with the payer
How we prevent it: We manage credentialing per license level and never schedule a payer's patients to a non-credentialed clinician's calendar without a supervision plan that the payer accepts.
Claim sent to medical plan when behavioral health is carved out
How we prevent it: Eligibility checks identify carve-outs to managed behavioral health organizations up front, so claims route to the right payer the first time.
Mental Health Billing FAQs
The 60-minute code pays meaningfully more than 90834, so several commercial payers flag providers who bill it routinely and request session start/stop times. It's fully defensible when documentation shows 53+ minutes of psychotherapy. The answer is airtight time documentation, not down-coding every session.
Place of service matters: POS 10 (patient at home) versus POS 02 (other telehealth) can change the rate, and payers differ on required modifiers (95, GT). Behavioral telehealth enjoys the broadest permanent coverage of any specialty, but each payer's coding recipe must be followed exactly.
It depends on the payer and state. Medicare doesn't recognize some associate licenses; Medicaid and commercial plans vary on supervised billing and incident-to arrangements. Getting this wrong risks recoupment across every claim the clinician touched, so we map the rules per payer before the first session is billed.
Like most outsourced billing, mental health billing is priced as a percentage of collections, typically 4% to 8%. Behavioral health sits toward the higher end of the range because session fees are smaller than procedural specialties, but the math still favors outsourcing: a solo therapist loses more to a single month of unworked denials and missed carve-out rules than the service costs.
Both. Solo and small practices are most of our behavioral health work, because a clinician seeing 25 to 30 patients a week has no realistic way to also run eligibility, claims, denials, and credentialing. Group practices get the same workflows plus per-clinician credentialing management and clean split reporting.
Yes. Medicaid MCOs and behavioral health carve-outs each carry their own claim rules and timely-filing windows, Medicare has license-level restrictions, and EAP sessions bill to the EAP administrator rather than the health plan. We run all three streams and keep them separated correctly.
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