How Claims Automation Helped a Mental Health Practice Increase Revenue

Many ambulatory healthcare providers – especially small mental health and therapy practices – often struggle with insurance. The whole process of accepting insurance and working with multiple payers can be complicated and intimidating. Over half of recently surveyed clinicians said their practice is overwhelmed by constantly changing medical billing rules.¹

Like other providers, Nicole Breck, who owns a mental health practice in New York City, feared time-consuming billing tasks. Ensuring correct coding and reporting, navigating complicated billing processes, and handling claims corrections and claims management are areas that could take her away from her patients.

Instead of dealing with all that hassle, many small providers opt not to take insurance at all. Collectively, the lack of automation for claims processing costs the healthcare industry more than $11 billion each year.²

Unfortunately, in a recession or economic downturn, ignoring insurance can be catastrophic. That’s why Breck turned to Inovalon.

But how can a small healthcare provider overcome the barriers to accepting insurance?

Breck enhanced her practice’s revenue while freeing up time to focus on her patients with Inovalon’s Claims Management Starter™.

With an average of 32-38 patients scheduled each week, she cannot afford to spend a lot of time on billing. She chose Inovalon because it helps her save time and frustration. Instead of logging in and out of multiple payer portals, she can access all of her payers in one place.

With Inovalon, Breck has successfully recession-proofed her practice. In good and bad economic times, she continues to have a full schedule and can help more patients who need her but may not have the cash available for therapy.

Since she began using Inovalon, Breck has seen significant positive impacts on her day-to-day activities for her practice. With its simple, user-friendly interface, the application makes it easy to automate her billing processes.

In fact, the application is so easy and takes so little time, that Breck now bills all her payers twice a month instead of monthly. “After seeing how successful I was with the application, my Inovalon representative recommended that I bill my payers twice each month. Since it’s all basically automated already, I tried it,” she said, “And I’ve seen a big increase in my monthly revenue.”