Mental Health Not-for-Profits Issues | Ohio Not-for-Profit CPA

Major Changes on the Horizon for Mental Health Not-for-Profits

Published on by Rachael Cruse in Not-for-Profit

Major Changes on the Horizon for Mental Health Not-for-Profits

At one of our recent Not-for-Profit roundtable luncheons, dedicated to mental health and wellness organizations, our discussion covered such a wide variety of topics, that we felt it would be most helpful to gather the group’s ideas and share them on our blog.

Mental Health Not-for-Profits Issues

Here are some of the top issues that impact not-for-profits that deal with mental health and wellness organizations today:

  • Behavioral Health Redesign is on the horizon with a lot of uncertainty about what final implementation will look like. The first phase of implementation occurs on July 1, 2017.
  • Training existing personnel, and identifying the correct positions to train is pivotal at this point – Should the focus be on supervisory positions making the coding decisions, or the actual billers inputting the data.
  • Our attendees recommended hiring a certified coder or revenue manager to oversee accuracy and full optimization of billing allowances. Consider having this person or an outside consultant shadow clinicians leading up to the implementation in order to train them on proper billing codes and identify areas of lost billing opportunity.
  • Clinician turnover at not-for-profits will remain a major hurdle for organizations because of greater education and experience demands of these employees under the behavioral health redesign, but continued barriers to competitive compensation.  Organizations might want to consider other forms of noncash compensation, including: PTO policies, work flexibility, employee benefit plan redesign, and not-for-profit mission buy in, as a way to motivate experienced employees to stay.
  • Cash flow management upon implementation will be a challenge, as many mental health organizations have less than 90 days of operating cash flows in reserve.  Based upon the experiences of other states undergoing this implementation, funding under the new system could take up to a year to receive from the date service was provided.

Contact Us:

If you have questions about what was discussed at this roundtable, or would like to join us for our next roundtable, please contact a member of the Barnes Dennig Not-for-Profit team here.


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