How to Streamline Your Treatment Facility’s Pre-Authorization Process

by | Aug 14, 2023 | Authorizations, Behavioral Health, Claim Denials, Minimize Errors, Outsource, Staff Training

Billing Solutions Team
Billing Solutions provides medical billing services for behavioral healthcare practices.

For addiction treatment facilities or any behavioral health facility, the time it takes to run a patient’s pre-authorization can impact their decision in seeking treatment or cause them to seek treatment at another facility. Do you know how your pre-authorization process is affecting your business?

What Are Pre-Authorizations?

Pre-authorizations refers to the process in which the insurance provider pre-approves that patient to get addiction treatment at that facility depending on their benefit plan. This is so patients don’t get stuck paying the bill for addiction treatment after their insurance provider refuses to cover treatment for one reason or another.

How Are Pre-Authorizations Affecting Your Treatment Facility?

With a patient seeking substance abuse treatment, comes urgency. Most patients will be looking for their solution to addiction as soon as possible, which means the longer your pre-authorization process takes, the more likely the patient will go elsewhere. Accepting a patient into your treatment facility prior to the insurance’s authorization could result in delayed or denied payments.

Having staff that isn’t properly trained in all billing and insurance processes risks errors, which can also cause reimbursements to be delayed or denied. At Billing Solutions, we offer training for your staff by actual clinicians knowledgeable on billing coding and current regulations. Hire us to properly train your team and you can avoid delays in your pre-authorization process.

Streamlining Your Authorizations Process

You can streamline your pre-authorization process by outsourcing your billing to a third party-billing company. At Billing Solutions, you’ll have a dedicated expert handling the authorization process and notifying you of the payer’s determination as soon as possible. Using our unique, customer-facing software, Nectar, you can check submitting claims off of your to-do list. With our electronic claims processing, you can speed up your entire admissions process. Using our Nectar portal’s electronic claims process, Billing Solutions financial experts will navigate your claims, expediting adjudication and payment.

Outsourcing Your Billing

By outsourcing your billing with us, you can trust that your pre-authorizations determinations will return to you speedily, with a decrease in the timeline of reimbursement. The average for most billing companies to receive payment is over 35 days, but Billing Solutions averages only 26.8 days to obtain reimbursement. Having that weight of obtaining authorization determination taken off your shoulders allows you and your clinicians to fully focus on your core competency — caring for the patient in need. To find out more about how your behavioral health facility can improve your authorization process, give us a call today.