Medical Billing Forum

Billing => Billing => : NEWUSER April 16, 2015, 03:21:08 PM

: Billing Behavioral health home visits and travel
: NEWUSER April 16, 2015, 03:21:08 PM
Our company does a great deal of mental health services in the home (primarily ARMHS for adults and skills for minors) and Medical Assistance will pay for travel time as well.  However, if a client has a commercial insurance plan, we are supposed to bill that first as primary.  My question is, I have seen different ways of handling the travel portion of these visits.  Some companies will just bill the session and travel together to both commercial (which almost NEVER pays travel), then when denied for non-covered service, send to Medical assistance for payment.  But recently ran into a situation where one of my billers prefers to only send the session to the commercial payer and leave the travel unbilled until the claim comes back unpaid, and THEN send both session and travel to Medical Assistance.  To my mind this causes a lot of extra work and 'tracking'. 

I would love some other opinions, as I'm due to have a discussion about this and am having a difficult time finding the rationale behind both methods.  We are in Minnesota.