Tuesday, March 8, 2016

What Does A Treatment Center Need To Succeed Today?

By Kisten Burkley


If you have been surfing Google lately, you may come to realize that many treatment centers are closing down and simply going bankrupt. Insurance today is a confusing industry for a lot of people. In the past, insurance companies almost always paid out on your claims. Today, ICD-10 is in effect and treatment centers are finding it harder and harder to turn a profit. Today, there is no guarantee that you are going to get paid for treating a patient once they are at your facility. Many treatment centers are finding out that they cannot get paid on services that they used to offer in 2015.

Many clients that come to your facility will not have good enough insurance to turn a profit for your facility. Many insurance companies are not going to pay you $20,000 to treat someone. Instead, they will give you a much smaller amount. You will often be shocked that you had to pay $25,000 out of pocket and only receive $15,000 in return. A lot of treatment centers today are asking themselves if they can afford to stay open if this continues to happen.

For starters, you are going to need a person that understands and is certified in ICD-10. Most people today are not ICD-10 certified and have no prior education in this coding. The new codes were released on October 1 of 2015. It is important to understand that you must get your books straight. If not, you will find yourself closing your business down.

Today, marketing is king when it comes to getting good clients. Your treatment center must have a good reputation. Many people will come to your treatment center because of someone else that had gone to your facility. If you want to be successful, everyone in the industry must respect you as well. Before dumping lots of money into a fancy 5 star facility, make sure that you have enough money to market your business. It is estimated that a pay per click campaign can cost as much as $150,000 a month for a 30 bed facility. You will spend roughly $5,000 to recruit just one client with good enough insurance to come to your facility. If you want to run television ads, it will cost even more. You also need to pay field marketers that work in the streets knocking on doors for you. It is important to have an entire team working for your success.

One important step for every treatment center to take is to do your own in house audits. Don't wait for an audit from the insurance companies. Business owners need to be more on top of what their medical billers are doing. If you are the owner of the treatment center, do you have your own in house people doing audits each month? In this way, you can see whether or not everyone is doing their job properly. Hiring a medical billing consultant is also a wise idea. Let them come into your practice in order to show you what you may or may not be doing wrong.

Most medical billers today depend on their marketers to get them good clients. Marketers today have to be in the field constantly working with mental health providers and drug and alcohol counselors. It is important to go to a lot of meet and greets with detox facilities as well. You need to become a referral source for people that need treatment. It is now necessary to have your treatment center known to multiple people in the business.




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