Our quick 8-step physical therapy billing course

A billing system is an organized way of sending and receiving a sum of money after providing a patient or customer with a service or product. In the physical therapy industry, patients are billed an invoice after receiving services from those working at a physical therapist’s practice.

The billing process can be complicated and lengthy, so it’s important to have some sort of system in place to keep you on track. Most practices will use third-party systems to help streamline their billing processes, like the one at AgileEMR. But, to help you better understand the billing process we’ve come up with a quick, eight-step course so that you can get a good idea of how the process generally works.

What are the steps of physical therapy billing?

1. Calculate (billable) time — It’s first important to know how much time you spend treating each patient. This is, at its core, what billable time is. Therapists can bill for evaluations prior to coming up with a full treatment plan and for the services thereafter. However, the services that you’re not supposed to bill for are the following: breaks during a session, supervising services or documentation.
2. Decide how you’re going to bill for your services — The next step in our physical therapy billing course is to determine how you’re going to bill your patients. This depends on if you provide group services or if you service your patients individually. It’s important to differentiate between the two in your billing.
3. Know how you’re going to bill for co-treatment — Next, you’ve got to know how you’re going to bill patients who accept treatment from more than one therapist at your practice at one time. Depending on whether your practice bills on Medicare Part A or B, billable amounts may vary.
4. Become credentialed — You could potentially increase your clinic’s patient outreach by becoming credentialed with an insurance provider. Credentials from an insurance provider make you an in-network care provider. Not only can it boost your outreach, but for companies like Medicare, it’s required.
5. Anticipate copays — It’s likely that the insurance provider your patient has partnered with will require them to copay for services. It’s a good idea to read through relevant insurance contracts for policies on copays.
6. Know when to bill for reevaluations — Reevaluation billings are only necessary for certain situations. Some examples of these situations include significant changes in a patient’s functionality or health, changes or additions to clinical diagnoses, and changes that need to be made to a patient’s treatment plan.
7. Prepare ABNs — In some cases, Advance Beneficiary Notices of Noncoverage (ABNs) are necessary for patients to sign. These forms ensure that a patient acknowledges responsibility for payments. These forms are specifically for patients with Medicare.
8. Know when to use modifiers — You should get to know each of the modifiers and when to apply them to payment billing. These generally include Modifier 59, the KX Modifier and the GA Modifier.

Why is EMR software important for billing? How does it fit into this physical therapy billing course?

Physical therapists and physical therapy admin deal with a lot on a day-to-day basis. They have a variety of responsibilities from patient care, to time management, billing and insurance. It can be difficult to get all work tasks completed without the help of an organized system. Electronic medical record (EMR) systems are great ways to streamline work tasks and billing so that your office can make the most out of a workweek. Many EMR systems have built-in features to make billing simplified. The purpose of the physical therapy billing course above is to teach the billing process, but an EMR system can help make the process easier.

AgileEMR can help simplify your physical therapy billing process through our 8-step course

AgileEMR is a simplified health care practice management software solution designed for physical therapists and created by physical therapists. We officially launched our software in 2013 to address and fix several of the issues that our therapists frequently ran into with run-of-the-mill EMR systems: None of them were built with physical therapy in mind. We consulted with physical therapists and clinicians as we developed our unique software. This way, we knew without a shadow of a doubt that our physical therapy software program can meet the needs of those who work in the health care field. Since the time of our launch, AgileEMR has been used in more than 1 million patient cases by all kinds of providers. These providers belong to the outpatient physical therapy and hospital rehabilitation fields. We know that EMR systems are driving the future of outpatient physical therapy. To view our extensive list of physical therapy and rehabilitation partners, click here.

We hope you found our physical therapy billing course helpful. If you’re a physical therapy clinic owner who is looking for more information on EMR systems or the features of our EMR program, consider taking a moment to view our site. We’re confident that AgileEMR can meet your clinic’s needs and can help keep your physical therapy practice running as smoothly as possible.

Contact our team today for more information or to schedule a demo to see how AgileEMR can help your practice.