I’ve been working with mental health billing for almost 20 years and YES, clinical staff, clinician assigned to client/patient should be responsible for inputting a valid diagnosis. As someone already pointed out, it can take 2 or 3 initial assessment to be able to get a diagnosis, however it's no excuse for not having a preliminary one either or not wanting to do the work and use a generic Dx.
There are two questions:
1. Why do they want it automated ?
2. Do you need to submit billing as soon as it is entered? What’s the hurry to have a Dx. entered?
You are allowed to bill with a preliminary diagnosis for the first few visits and later have a more comprehensive and "final" diagnosis and change it to bill accordingly.
I would say It's up to your workplace to "babysit, spoil" clinical staff and add a generic diagnosis or even automat it, but eventually it must be updated and clinicians are the ones responsible for doing it. Billing staff should refrain from editing anything related to clinical, even it is preventing you from billing.
You are not saying what type of insurance you are billing, but no matter which one, if Medicare, Medicaid, HMO’s & PPO’s or even if it’s a state/county/city grant you must follow guidelines for each contract you have and not do things that may penalize you when an audit comes along.
In the end of the day billing should do only what is billing related and no matter how much clinical staff whine about it, it’s not a biller job to input diagnosis. The opposite is also true, it's not a clinician job to submit billing when your billers go on vacation.