Insurance Billing

Insurance Billing can be a good way to keep your massage business going or to help it grow.  If you don’t have enough clients and are constantly struggling it might be a good way to stabilize your business and make ends meet or even make being a massage therapist very profitable.  The thing is that there are many things that you need to know in order to bill your massage services to an insurance company and there is a learning curve to it all.  Once you get the concepts down and have worked with some insurance companies, you will be able to tell what cases to take and which cases not to take because they will be more risky and take more time and effort to get paid.  That will make doing insurance billing for your massage business much easier.

Here is a basic outline of the things that you will need to know:

• How to find out what insurance companies are paying.  The best thing really is to ask a massage therapist in your area that is successful in billing insurance.  Ask them to be a mentor for you and teach you the ropes which will include this information.  Otherwise, you will just need to call each insurance company one by one or wait for a client to ask if you bill and then call the insurance company for details.  In most states you can bill for motor vehicle accidents and for work related injuries.  Many other PPO’s and HMO’s are also now ‘willing’ offering to pay for massage services.
• Learn the vocabulary so you know what they are talking about.
• Learn what questions to ask each client so that you can determine if you want to take that client.
• Set up forms for intake, HIPAA, SOAP charting, progress reports, tracking billing/copays/payments
• Learn how to fill out the CMS 1500 billing form
• Get referrals from MD’s, Chiropractors and other medical professionals
• Build a referral network
• Send progress reports to each doctor during treatment and when treatment is complete.
• Share your billing knowledge and experience with other massage therapists (and yes you can charge to teach/share this info)
• Work with the insurance commissioner in your state to get them to pass a law that would make PPO’s and HMO’s pay for massage services
• Become research literate and understand what research is saying and learn how to use it to promote yourself and the massage profession
• Support research which will help show the medical profession more about what massage can do
• Work to get access professionally/nationally to research data bases.