Documenting your therapy progress notes should be straightforward. Unfortunately, it most certainly is not. Mainly because you are not only documenting for yourself and your patient. Instead, you must also comply with insurance company rules – at least if you want to be paid.
Even simple documentation mistakes can significantly reduce your ability to get paid. With Insurance companies cracking down on compliance, your only hope is to be able to identify and prevent red flags in your therapy progress notes that can get you audited.
The problem is that clinical training doesn’t usually include how to document therapy progress notes to comply with insurance company rules. You never learned payer documentation standards (i.e., how much or how little to write, audit triggers, payer clawbacks, legal violations, and avoiding ethical concerns).
The good news is that you don’t have to figure this out on your own. Mental health documentation expert and Licensed Clinical Social Worker, Beth Rontal, LICSW, is presenting a 60-minute online training that can help. Beth will help you pin down the most common errors being made when documenting your therapy progress notes. She’ll help you identify, resolve and avoid these errors to stop your documentation from triggering a payer audit.
Here are just a few of the practical documentation strategies you’ll walk away with by attending this online training:
- Justify multiple therapy sessions a week to avoid payment recoupments
- Stay away from innocent mistakes that can look like insurance fraud
- Pin down and avoid the top 10 “clawback” triggers
- Recognize diagnosis codes that commonly trigger audits
- Reduce denials by utilizing specific medical necessity language
- Avoid documentation fatigue that can get you into trouble
- Steer-clear of private pay patient documentation mishaps
- Defend against payer pushback when using code 90837
- Don’t write more or less than you need, get it just right
- Utilize the “Golden Thread” to support medical necessity
- Head off payer documentation errors when writing session notes
- And so much more
There is a lot riding on how you document your therapy progress notes. Your documentation is no longer simply used to ensure you provide the best care. Instead, insurance companies use it to prove therapy medical necessity, track measurable goals and objectives, justify treatment plans, and ultimately reimburse for your services.
Every single time you write therapy progress notes, you increase your chances of being audited. But it doesn’t have to be this way.
By attending this expert-led online training, you’ll receive the practical tactics necessary to help you reduce delayed payments, head off reimbursement recoupments, avoid audits triggers, prevent fraud allegations, and avert costly violation penalties. Don’t delay. Register for this online training today.
Beth is a nationally recognized speaker on mental health documentation for private practice clinicians and those working in agency behavioral health settings. Her Misery and Mastery SM trainings and accompanying forms have been used all over the world. She mastered her teaching skills with thousands of hours supervising and training both seasoned professionals and interns when supervising at an agency for 11 years.
Beth was instrumental in developing the clinic’s first electronic documentation system that significantly reduced documentation time and errors. After the implementation of this system, the transformation from error laden to accurate record keeping saved the clinic thousands of dollars, reduced time spent writing notes, which enabled clinicians to see more clients without spending more time working.
Beth’s Documentation Wizard® training program empowers clinicians, reduces anxiety about documentation, and furthers professional integrity. It simplifies the documentation process by systematically linking effective documentation to quality care. This helps to pass audits and protect income.
Beth writes blogs on clinical documentation, co-chairs the NASW Private Practice Shared Interest Group, and has a private practice in Brookline, MA specializing in working with people who struggle with emotional eating. Her other interests include writing, singing, performing cabarets and her current one-woman show called, “My Mother’s Daughter.”
