Thinking About Switching Billers?

How A Transition Works Without A Cash-Flow Gap

The fear that keeps practices in bad billing relationships is the gap, a month or two of chaos where nothing gets collected. A properly run transition is designed specifically to prevent that:

• Overlap, not handoff. The outgoing biller typically continues working existing A/R for an agreed run-out period (check your contract, most have run-out terms) while the new team takes all new charges from a clean cutover date. Nothing gets dropped between the two teams.
• Baseline audit first. Before cutover, the incoming team documents the current state, open A/R by bucket and payer, denial backlog, credentialing status, fee schedules, EDI/ERA enrollments. This is both a to-do list and the before-picture your future reporting is measured against.
• EDI, ERA, and portal re-enrollment early. Clearinghouse and remit enrollments take lead time and are the most common cause of transition hiccups. They start the day the decision is made, not the day the old contract ends.
• Weekly reporting from week one. The fastest way to know a transition’s working is to see charges out, payments in and denials worked every week from the start. If a new biller doesn’t offer that, you’re trading one black box for another.

Done this way, practices typically see continuity in deposits through the transition, and the first ninety days usually surface recoverable money the old biller left in aged A/R.

Questions To Ask Any Prospective Biller

Whether you talk to us or anyone else, these questions separate real billing operations from claim-submission shops:

• “What percentage of your clients are behavioral health?” You want an expert, or at minimum a dedicated behavioral health team, not a generalist who will learn your specialty on your revenue.
• “Show me a sample of the reporting I’ll receive.” It should include denial rate and categories, A/R by aging bucket and payer, net collection rate, and clean-claim rate, on a schedule, without asking.
• “How do you work denials, and how fast?” Listen for a defined workflow with turnaround targets and appeal-deadline tracking, not “we rework them as they come in.”
• “Who owns credentialing status, and how does billing know about it?” Credentialing-related denials live in the gap between the credentialing spreadsheet and the billing team. A good biller closes that gap; see how we handle it in revenue cycle management.
• “What does my exit look like?” A confident biller will explain run-out terms, data ownership, and transition support plainly. Evasiveness about leaving tells you how the relationship will end.

Where We Fit

We built our mental health billing around the failure points above, with a deep behavioral health focus, denials worked as part of the billing itself and owner reports by default. As Ongoing Billing, it’s priced by practice size, from 7% of collections for a solo provider down to 4.5% for 26 or more providers, with no setup fee (see billing prices by practice size). The monthly minimum is $300 for a solo practice. Old biller left aged A/R behind? Billing Cleanup And A/R Recovery works claims older than 90 days for 20% of what we collect, and nothing on claims we don’t.

And if the review shows your current biller is doing the job, we’ll tell you that too. Some practices come to us thinking they have a biller problem when it’s really a front-end eligibility problem or a credentialing sync problem. The fix is different, and getting the diagnosis wrong wastes a year.