About the Founder
Ryan Berg — Founder, AdvanceAPractice
16+ years in healthcare revenue cycle, credentialing, finance, and operations — applied specifically to behavioral health practices.
Background
Ryan Berg founded AdvanceAPractice after more than sixteen years working the business side of healthcare — revenue cycle management, payer credentialing and enrollment, finance, and practice operations. That work spans the full arc of how a practice makes and keeps its money: eligibility and authorization, clean-claim submission, denial management and appeals, payer contracting and escalation, provider enrollment, financial reporting, and the day-to-day operational systems that either feed the revenue cycle cleanly or quietly starve it.
The through-line in that career is a specific kind of problem: a clinical team doing good work while the administrative machinery around them leaks — a credentialing file stalled in a payer queue nobody is watching, a denial pattern nobody has aggregated, an intake process that retypes the same patient data into four systems. Ryan’s work has always lived at the point where those leaks get found and fixed.
Why Behavioral Health
AdvanceAPractice works exclusively with behavioral health: psychiatry practices, psychiatric nurse practitioners, psychologists and therapy groups, and interventional psychiatry programs including Spravato (esketamine) clinics. That focus is deliberate. Behavioral health billing and credentialing behave differently from general medicine — different CPT patterns and add-on codes, different payer behavior on psychiatric services, prior-authorization regimes around interventional treatments, and panels that are functionally closed to new psychiatric prescribers unless someone knows how to work the file. A generalist can process the paperwork; the value is in knowing what the paperwork is going to do before it does it.
The PMHNP resource hub — covering credentialing, billing and coding, and state-by-state practice requirements — reflects how much of that specialization has been built into publishable, verifiable reference material rather than kept as private know-how.
Operator, Not Just Advisor
Two things distinguish how Ryan runs engagements. The first is that he builds software. When a client’s EHR has no API, or a 70-patient interventional program is being tracked across email threads and spreadsheets, the answer is often a purpose-built tool: automated data feeds, scheduling and authorization-tracking applications, workflow automation. AdvanceAPractice develops its own practice-operations platform — the Command Suite — along with client-specific scheduling and automation tools, and that engineering capability changes what an operations engagement can actually deliver. The details are on the custom software and automation page.
The second is that Ryan works hands-on with every client. AdvanceAPractice is not a staffing agency reselling offshore credentialing hours under a brand. The person who scopes the engagement is the person in the payer portals, in the workflow reviews, and on the weekly calls. That model keeps the client list deliberately small and the accountability direct — how that works in practice is described on How We Work.
Areas of Depth
Revenue Cycle Management
Behavioral health billing end to end — eligibility, claims, denials, appeals, payer escalation, and the reporting that tells an owner what is actually happening.
Credentialing & Payer Enrollment
Commercial and Medicaid enrollment for psychiatric providers — CAQH alignment, managed follow-up, escalation on stalled files, and panel strategy for growing groups.
Custom Software & Automation
Purpose-built tools where off-the-shelf fails: data feeds out of API-less EHRs, authorization tracking, scheduling apps, and workflow automation sized for small practices.
Practice Operations & Finance
Intake-to-collections workflow design, team communication structure, financial visibility, and the operating rhythm that lets an owner stop being the bottleneck.
Based in Portland, Working Nationally
Ryan is based in Portland, Oregon, and works with behavioral health practices across the United States. Oregon payers — Moda, Regence, Providence, PacificSource, and the OHP managed-care landscape — are home turf, but the engagement model is fully remote and national. More about the firm is on the About page; client outcomes are on Client Results & Case Studies.
Talk Directly With the Person Who Does the Work
Every engagement starts with a conversation about where your practice is leaking time or revenue — and an honest read on whether we are the right fit for it.