Six Tips for Marketing Your Billing Company to Mental Health Practices

The COVID-19 crisis has caused not only mental health practices to be in demand, but the billing companies that serve them. Many of these practices prefer to outsource their billing operations to a company with expertise.

If you are a billing company seeking to expand your client base to include mental health practices, there is no better time to do so! Many mental health practices are overwhelmed and may be more open to having a billing company assist them.

To help you with marketing to this segment, we’ve compiled some tips to effectively market your billing company:

1. Identify pain points: Before marketing your company to these practices, first identify and understand the specific challenges they face. These 'pain points' are issues that make them consider outsourcing to a billing company. For instance, many mental health practices are particularly at risk for payer audits and denials. They also often struggle with patient collections and coding. Doing this market research will help you be better prepared present to mental health practices and increase your chances of landing them as clients. Potential clients will always pick billing companies they feel are aware of the nuances involved in mental health billing.

2. Engage in targeted marketing: Mental health practices are a distinct kind of independent health practice. You're unlikely to stand out if you use the same marketing materials that you use for medical practices. We recommend developing and crafting marketing and communication materials (such as brochures, emails, and pitches) that are tailored them. These materials should acknowledge the unique pain points you discovered in the data gathering process and explain how your billing company can help them. Doing this step lets prospective clients know that you don't take a one-size-fits-all approach with clients. It will boost their confidence in your ability as a billing company and can increase the chances they'll trust you with their practice's finances.

3. Expand your service offerings: Now more than ever, with the coronavirus crisis, mental health practices are super busy. They need help with more than basic billing. When you're marketing to them, consider offering services like scheduling, insurance verification, and patient engagement—office tasks mental health practices often have difficulty with. Providing these services lets prospective clients know that you are dedicated to improving their operational efficiency and success.

4. Play up your experience: Highlight your expertise in the billing industry when marketing your services to mental health practices. Make available metrics to show how you improved your clients' bottom lines. Go further and showcase testimonials from current, satisfied practices in your client base. This should be included in your marketing materials and on your website. However, with that said, don't worry if you don’t have previous experience billing for mental health practices. Although having experience in the mental health field gives you an edge, any solid experience will go a long way towards building potential clients' confidence in your company’s ability to manage their reimbursements.

5. Ask for referrals: Practices in many different specialties routinely refer patients to mental health practices. Often, trusting relationships have developed between these practices, and you can benefit from this. Ask your existing clients to refer you to the mental health professionals they typically work with. Referral marketing is often successful because word of mouth is powerful. Hearing first-hand from a satisfied practice owner can be just the push a mental health practice needs to sign up with your billing company.

6. Leverage the right technology: Potential clients want to know that you have the right tools to help them bill more efficiently. More specifically, they want to know that the tools and software you use can cater to their specialty’s specific needs. For instance, mental health practices expect that your billing software is ICD-10 compliant and your EHR is 2015-certified. If you're offering practice management services too, the software you use should have capabilities and features created with mental health practices in mind.

Kareo partners with billing companies like yours to help streamline billing workflow and processes. Our integrated platform includes EHR, billing and engagement functions, which helps billing companies manage their clients’ businesses successfully – from top to bottom.

We are also committed to the success of mental health practices and continue to evolve our platform to meet their specific needs. That means as a billing company working with Kareo, you can leverage our software and information to help market your business better to serve mental health practices. To see how Kareo supports the needs of this important specialty, visit us here.