Mental Health & Psychiatry Billing
Time-based coding, telehealth rules and behavioral-health carve-outs — billing built for psychiatry, therapy and counseling practices.
Behavioral health billing breaks generalists. Codes are time-based, benefits are frequently carved out to a separate manager, telehealth rules change by payer and state, and authorizations follow their own logic. Elite Bill Care provides mental health and psychiatry billing that understands this specialty from the code level up.
Get a Free ConsultationSee All Billing Services
What makes behavioral health billing different
- Time-based psychotherapy codes — 90832 (30 min), 90834 (45 min) and 90837 (60 min) are chosen by documented time and face-to-face rules, not by what was scheduled. Under-documented time is the specialty's most common self-inflicted denial.
- Add-on psychotherapy with medical E/M — psychiatrists billing 90833/90836/90838 alongside an E/M must separate E/M time from psychotherapy time cleanly, or both codes suffer.
- Interactive complexity (90785) — legitimately used for complex cases (play therapy, third-party involvement, conflicting reports) and heavily audited when used by default.
- Benefit carve-outs — the plan on the card often routes behavioral health to a separate manager (a different payer ID, different auth rules). Eligibility verification must check the carve-out, not just the plan.
- Telehealth variation — place-of-service (02/10), modifiers (95, 93 for audio-only) and coverage itself differ by payer and license state, and are still evolving.
How we run it
Intake evaluation codes (90791/90792) and ongoing therapy are checked against authorization and visit-limit rules before submission; session time documentation is reviewed under our coding support; claims go out daily with the correct telehealth indicators; and denials — disproportionately authorization and carve-out errors in this specialty — are worked through denial management with the verification trail attached. Group practices, solo therapists, psychiatrists and IOP/PHP programs are all supported; see also our full billing services.
Frequently asked questions
Do you bill for LCSWs, LPCs, LMFTs and psychologists as well as psychiatrists?
Yes — billing rules, supervision requirements and payer enrollment differ by license type, and Medicare eligibility itself varies by profession (for example, LMFTs and MFTs became Medicare-eligible in 2024). We bill to each provider's actual enrollment and scope.
Can you handle telehealth-only practices?
Yes. Telehealth is verified payer by payer — POS, modifier, audio-only rules and the patient's location state — because a claim correct for one payer denies at another on exactly these fields.
Our sessions keep denying for authorization. Can you fix that?
Usually the cause is front-end: the carve-out manager was never checked, or authorized units ran out without tracking. We rebuild that workflow — see prior authorization — and work the existing denials in parallel.