Kym Tolson Teaches Therapists How to Successfully Bill Insurance | GP 59

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Is your private practice insurance-based? Should you credential your group with an NPI1 or an NPI2? What are some important mistakes to avoid when you take insurance pay?

In this podcast episode, Alison Pidgeon speaks with Kym Tolson about how therapists can successfully bill insurance.

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Meet Kym Tolson

Kym Tolson is an LCSW in an insurance-based, online, private practice and a digital nomad. Kym had a terrible experience with billers in her private practice and after they fired her, long story, she decided to teach herself everything there is to know about insurance billing in private practice.

It’s become Kym’s passion to help therapists live their dreams and have a successful insurance-based private practice. As a result, she created, a 3-part “Boss Biller System” to get your insurance based private-practice up and running.

Visit her website and connect on Facebook and Instagram.

Join her free Facebook group.

In This Podcast

Summary

  • Billing insurance for a solo practice versus a group practice
  • Troubleshoot your insurance billing
  • Billing telehealth basics and mistakes to avoid

Billing insurance for a solo practice versus a group practice

For a solo practice:

  • If you own a solo practice you can do an NPI1 which is essentially your name and an NPI number.
  • You can also have an NPI2 which is more connected to your practice or organization. With your NPI2 you can credential with insurance companies as a group practice and be a group of one, or a group of clinicians under your NPI2.

Therefore, if you see yourself moving from a solo practice into a group practice, consider working with an NPI2 immediately when you contract with the insurance companies.

You can also redo your NPI1 to an NPI2 if you ever decide to make the switch, it is not a once-off decision.

Troubleshoot your insurance billing

If you have any issues with billing insurance, navigate your insurance’s homepage to check up on their recent COVID-19 information because some insurance companies keep extending their end dates.

Many insurance companies are still covering telehealth as an accepted billable service due to the public health crisis at the moment, so keep an eye on the trend to see if and when this changes so that you can edit your insurance to adapt to this potential change.

Billing telehealth basics and mistakes to avoid

  • Be sure of your location code. This is 02 and if you are in a brick-and-mortar office the location code is 11, so if you are billing telehealth choose 02.
  • Modifier: This is when you notify the insurance companies that there is something different going on in the sessions. The two modifiers that insurance companies want the most at the moment are GT and 95.
  • Call if you can:

Just call and ask them if it’s covered because a lot of the times if you ever give your EHR to give you a cover to report it almost never includes the telehealth information so I would definitely recommend, if you have the time, call and actually get a confirmation that the telehealth is covered. (Kym Tolson)

  • For most therapy businesses, the bigger they get the more likely they are to outsource their insurance billing so make sure that you trust the company you are outsourcing to.
  • You might not need to know everything but know enough to know that it is being done correctly.
  • You need to verify benefits before consultation and make sure they have been cleared to receive treatment.
  • Make sure you document the time of the consultation and the location of the client whenever a therapy session is carried out because this is information that the insurance companies may need.

Make sure you have a measurable treatment plan goals and objectives and that the treatment plan ties into the progress note and the progress note and the treatment plan tie into the diagnosis. If you can make it all interconnected like that, the chance of an audit or having to pay money back is going to be a lot less. (Kym Tolson)

Useful Links:

Meet Alison Pidgeon

A portrait of Alison Pidgeon is shown. She discusses ways to grow your group practice on this week's episode of Practice of the Practice. Alison is a serial entrepreneur with four businesses, one of which is a 15 clinician group practice. She’s also a mom to three boys, wife, coffee drinker, and loves to travel. She started her practice in 2015 and, four years later, has two locations. With a specialization in women’s issues, the practices have made a positive impact on the community by offering different types of specialties not being offered anywhere else in the area.

Alison has been working with Practice of the Practice since 2016. She has helped over 70 therapist entrepreneurs start and grow their businesses, through mastermind groups and individual consulting.

Thanks For Listening!

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Podcast Transcription

[ALISON PIDGEON]: Is managing your practice stressing you out? Try Therapy Notes. It makes notes, billing, scheduling, and telehealth a whole lot easier. Check it out and you will quickly see why it’s the highest rated EHR on Trustpilot with over a thousand verified customer views and an average customer rating of 4.9 out of five stars. You’ll notice the difference from the first day you sign up for a trial. They offer live phone support seven days a week so when you have questions, you can quickly reach out to someone who can help. You are never wasting your time looking for answers. If you’re coming from another EHR, they make the transition really easy. Therapy Notes will import your clients’ demographic data free of charge during your trial so you can get going right away. Use the promo code [JOE] to get two free months of trying out Therapy Notes for free, no strings attached, including their very reliable telehealth platform. Make 2021 best year yet with Therapy Notes.
Grow a Group Practice is part of the Practice of the Practice podcast network, a network of podcasts seeking to help you grow your group practice. To hear other podcasts like The Imperfect Thriving podcast, Bomb Mom podcast, Beta Male Revolution, or Empowered and Unapologetic, go-to practiceofthepractice.com/network.
Welcome to the Grow a Group Practice podcast. I’m Alison Pidgeon your host. Well, I hope you are feeling like Spring is here. I know, I am here in Pennsylvania and feeling a lot more freedom since I was able to get my COVID vaccination. So I hope you are also feeling hopeful about the season we’re moving into and that your family is healthy. Today I have an interview with Kym Tolson. She’s an LCSW, she has her own insurance-based, totally online, private practice. She is actually location independent. She calls herself a digital nomad and she’s going to talk to us about that in the interview. So Kym had a pretty bad experience with insurance billers in her private practice and so she decided to teach herself everything there is to know about insurance billing. Now that has become her passion and she has started a business helping other therapists learn how to have a successful insurance-based private practice. She has created a three-part boss biller system to get your insurance-based private practice up and running and she’s going to talk a little bit more about the resources she offers to therapists. So please enjoy this interview with Kym Tolson.
[ALISON]: Hi Kym. Welcome to the podcast.
[KYM TOLSON]: Hi, thanks so much for having me.
[ALISON]: Yes. It’s great to connect with you and I always get tons of questions about insurance. So I thought it’d be cool to devote a whole episode to talking about billing insurance and get into some of the nitty-gritty details, because that is always something that people find to be a big learning curve, as I’m sure you —
[KYM]: Absolutely.
[ALISON]: I’m sure you know.
[KYM]: Yes.
[ALISON]: Yes. So, do you want to just kind of start out, giving us a little introduction about yourself and your practice, and then, I know you have your other business as well. So maybe tell us about that too.
[KYM]: Yes. So I’m Kym Tolson, I’m an LCSW and have an all-online private practice. I’m also a digital nomad. So I travel and I still take insurance in my private practice. So it’s kind of a long story, but basically I had terrible billers and they actually ended up firing me, which is another long story but out of that, I created a course for therapists to learn how to bill insurance on their own and learn how to do it the right way and even if they hire billers to still know how to do it. I want clinicians to be empowered around that so they don’t have the same sort of horror story that I had with billers in my practice.
[ALISON]: Yes, that’s great. So you offer a variety of services to kind of help people learn how to do their own billing?
[KYM]: Yes. So I have a free course that helps you decide if you even want to take insurance or if you want to hire a biller. It helps you decide which panels to credential with for your area and your type of practice. And then I have the full on course that I created that just walks you through every single bit of insurance billing you could ever imagine. And then, I also developed a membership site, which kind of like holds your hand through the course, and then after the course to kind of keep you on track when the tough stuff comes up. I’m featured in the membership and I have a biller each month that I feature that comes in and helps with like the really difficult stuff.
[ALISON]: Yes. That’s awesome.
[KYM]: Yes, thank you.
[ALISON]: So I was hoping we could talk about, obviously, because this podcast is more geared towards group practice, talk about maybe what some of the differences are with insurance billing in a group practice versus a solo practice and I know I tend to get a lot of somewhat common questions like, “Do I need a type two NPI number? And what about this and that?” So would you mind kind of going over some of those basic things of somebody who’s not familiar with maybe what some of the differences are with billing for a group practice?
[KYM]: Sure. So if you’re just doing solo practice, you can just have your NPI-1, which is just basically your name and an NPI number and then you can also have an NPI-2, which is more connected to your organization. So when you get the NPI-2, you can then use that to credential with the insurance companies as a group practice and you could just be a group of one, if you wanted to, or you can start to bring other clinicians in under your NPI-2. So if you ever want to expand into a group practice, I would recommend starting out with getting that NPI -2 immediately when you contract with the insurance companies.
[ALISON]: So if you didn’t do that from the outset, you can always go back later and apply for the NPI type two, and then you can go back to the insurance companies and kind of redo your contracts correct into group contracts.
[KYM]: Yes.
[ALISON]: And do you recommend that people switch over their contracts to a group contract? Is that something that typically you find to be better?
[KYM]: I think it’s individual preference. I hate to tell somebody to do it one way or the other, but there are a few insurance companies that really want you to come in as the NPI-2 to begin with. So you might run into that. So it’s easier I think to just have that right off hand and if you ever, ever, ever want to do a group practice, just start out with the NPI-2 too because it’s really time consuming. It can be a real pain to go back and have to re-credential that NPI-2. So if you have any inkling, just start with the NPI-2. It’s a lot easier.
[ALISON]: Yes. Another question I get, I’m not sure if you know the answer to this, but for people that have self pay practices and they’re giving out super bills they ask, “Do I still need an NPI-2? Like should I even bother with having a self pay practice?” And I always kind of thought it was somewhat optional, but curious, what your perspective is.
[KYM]: Yes. Again, I think it’s totally optional. I really do. I think it’s, depending on your state and have you talked to an accountant? Has the account recommended that you’d be an organization instead of an individual provider for whatever reason? So, there’s a lot of stuff that goes into that decision, I think. But you could do it either way with the superbill.
[ALISON]: Yes. And then I know we were talking before we started recording about how things have changed pretty dramatically with the pandemic and billing for telehealth and that was a whole another learning curve that even in my own practice we had to figure out because it seemed like every insurance company wanted it done a little bit differently.
[KYM]: Oh my gosh. It’s been crazy trying to keep up with all that. It really has.
[ALISON]: Yes. So any kind of advice for folks who maybe, are having trouble with billing telehealth or maybe haven’t billed telehealth? I don’t know how you haven’t built telehealth at this point, but …
[KYM]: Yes, seriously. Well I would say navigate to the insurance company’s home page, a lot of them have the COVID-19 statement and recommendations right there these days and they also have like the end date for when it’s going to end. A lot of them keep having these end dates, but they keep extending them. So right now most of the companies are still covering telehealth for the public health crisis right now. So you’re pretty good. Medicare, just sort of released something recently where they’ve expanded it through the end of 2021. So, usually what Medicare does it trickles down to the commercial insurance carrier. So we’ve all kind of got our fingers crossed, hoping it’s just going to stay this way. And then we’re also hoping once the benefits are seen, like it’s just so much easier, it cuts down on commute times, all that stuff that the insurance companies are just kind of going to get all on board about it. That’s what we’re hoping.
[ALISON]: Right. So like, you’re talking about the dates for telehealth being an accepted billable service, keeps getting extended.
[KYM]: Exactly.
[ALISON]: Yes, because I think the other interesting thing that happened was that they started covering people’s copays for doing the telehealth visits and that’s the other thing that some companies have extended and some haven’t and then people are getting confused about, “Well, are they talking about just extending telehealth in general or the copay waiver or?” Yes.
[KYM]: Exactly. So they’re calling it cost sharing, which is confusing, but basically a lot of the insurances cover everything at a hundred percent deductible. They weigh the deductibles, they’re covering copays and some of them are still doing it, but some of them have stopped doing it. So all of a sudden especially if you’re brand new to telehealth billing and the pandemic everything’s been covered. It’s been great, it’s been real smooth and now all of a sudden it’s like, “Wait a second. Oh my gosh, you have to pay your full deductible right now.” So it’s kind of a shock for people, but yes, the cost sharing has started ending for different insurance companies ,unfortunately.
[ALISON]: Yes. That was nice for awhile. It was nice while it lasted.
[KYM]: That’s right.
[ALISON]: So, could you go over just a little bit of the basics of billing telehealth like, what is different about it from like the modifiers and the place of service and that kind of thing?
[KYM]: Yes. Basically when you bill, when you submit an insurance claim, you submit it on a form called a HCFA-1500 and there are some differences. Basically location code is the first thing you want to look at and that’s O2 for telehealth where when you’re in a brick and mortar office, the location code is 11. So if you’re billing telehealth, you’re going to want to choose O2 and then the other important thing is the modifier. So modifier is just something to notify the insurance companies that there’s something a little bit different about the session going on. So right now the two modifiers that they want the most are GT and 95. So 95 is really the preferred one, It seems like these days, but I’ve dealt with both with all the insurance companies and they’re still accepting either of those modifiers as far as I know.
[ALISON]: Yes. I think that’s the other thing that confuses people like, are those pretty much interchangeable or do some insurance companies say we want the GT versus we want the 95 and if you put the opposite, then they reject the claim. What’s your experience with that?
[KYM]: I’ve never had either one rejected. I started to switch it to 95 because I just kept hearing that that’s more of what they wanted, but I’ve never had either rejected. The insurance companies, if you call, sometimes the reps will tell you, “Hey, this is the modifier we want you to use for the service.” And then also on the homepage, under the COVID-19 stuff you’re going to see directions a lot of times for the insurance companies about what they prefer, but I think both are being paid.
[ALISON]: Okay, great.
[KYM]: Yes.
[ALISON]: Yes. Any other kind of tips or tricks around billing for telehealth?
[KYM]: Just call and ask them if it’s covered because a lot of times if you try to depend on your EHR to give you a coverage report or something like that, it almost never includes the telehealth information. So I would definitely recommend if you have the time, call and actually get a confirmation if telehealth is covered. And that goes for pre-pandemic, post-pandemic, and right now too.
[ALISON]: Right.
[KYM]: Call if you can.
[ALISON]: Right. Yes, that’s good advice.
[KYM]: Yes. Thank you.
[ALISON]: Yes. So just in terms of talking about billing for a group practice, what do you see in terms of like the structure of how it’s set up? Do you see people having the therapist do the billing? Do you see people hiring billers? Do they have an outside vendor they use? Do they have an in-house vendor? Like, is there any rhyme or reason to what you recommend?
[KYM]: I think, again, this is one of those personal preference things. I mean, I know your practice is huge. Your practice is huge, so I’m guessing you outsource that. I don’t know, but I think the bigger you get with any part of your private practice, you’re going to want to start to outsource. But it’s really important to trust the company you’re outsourcing to and make sure they’re doing a good job with it. So I think when you’re small, you’ve got a couple clinicians, it’s pretty manageable to do that group billing, but the bigger you get, you might want to look into expanding to outsourcing to a company that does it for you.
[ALISON]: Yes. It’s been interesting, because I think that’s something that I didn’t realize when I started out that as your practice grows, you’re going to need different things. Like for a while it was manageable for us to do it ourselves and have the therapist do it, and now we’ve just sort of grown into this like we really just need our own in-house biller. I’m sure you have an opinion on this too, but I started out knowing how to do the billing myself. Now I don’t obviously do it anymore, but I know enough to know if it’s being done correctly.
[KYM]: Yes.
[ALISON]: Yes. So what are your thoughts about that?
[KYM]: Well, that was my, I mean, that’s what led me to this whole thing. When I first went into my private practice, the advice was just use these billers that we use, they’re the best ones in town, use them and don’t worry about it, just see your clients. So I found out eventually through like some investigation that they weren’t telling me the right copays, the right deductible amounts to collect and I asked them for a bank balance report and it was like $12,000 that they hadn’t collected like over the years So I was like, “Ah.” So I decided like right then and there, like, even if I hire other billers, I’m always going to know exactly what’s going on. I’m going to be like running monthly reports, just to see if there are any outstanding balances. I’m really going to understand like the process of insurance billing because I really knew nothing about it before I decided to like dig in and teach myself all this stuff. So yes. So know what’s going on even if you have billers. Be very educated and empowered around that information, I think.
[ALISON]: Yes. I think that’s so important because unfortunately I don’t know what it is about that industry, but I hear such bad, I mean, like your story is not out of the ordinary. I hear bad stories from people about they have these billing companies who like aren’t doing what they’re supposed to be doing and they’re owed like tens and thousands of dollars and then they like don’t even know, or maybe it’s even too late to do anything about it. Like you can only bill for such a window of time and then after that and you just can’t bill anymore. So yes, it just unfortunately is an industry that’s not always doing the right thing. So I think the more you know, even if you shouldn’t be the one doing it, you should be seeing clients or running your practice, but you definitely need to keep tabs on what’s going on for sure and having at least some understanding of what it should be looking like.
[KYM]: Absolutely. Yes. And I say just make sure that they’re billing like in your EHR, so you can like go in there and look anytime you want to, so you can see what your clients’ balances are that they owe like before a session, if you want to because that was part of the problem with me. I didn’t even have access to the claim filing to be able to check on it.
[ALISON]: Right. So just making sure like that whole process is really transparent.
[KYM]: Absolutely
[ALISON]: Yes. I’m curious what, obviously from working with lots of different practice owners, if you see kind of the common mistakes that get made over and over again with billing. Is there anything that jumps out at you?
[KYM]: The number one problem I see is people do not verify benefits. So they just say, “Oh, okay. I take United Behavioral Health,” and then they see the client and then they maybe see them twice before they get around to filing the claim. And then before the claim gets denied, they’ve seen the client like five times and there’s like a thousand dollar balance there. And the client’s like, “I’m not paying this.” And you find out, “Oh, they didn’t have mental health coverage or all the policy termed and they failed to tell me that.” So, that’s like the number one problem that I see. So that’s always my advice; is please verify benefits beforehand and make sure the person has coverage and everything is good to go with the policy.
[ALISON]: Yes. I think the other thing too, that we learned the hard way was checking and typically insurance plans start over at the beginning of the year. So literally on New Year’s day, my admin is checking everybody’s benefits just to see like have deductibles rolled over, have copays changed. Because you’re just going along seeing the client, not thinking, “Oh wait, it’s a new year and they have a deductible and I need to be collecting like the whole reimbursement amount.” And then like you said, like two, three sessions go by before you figure it out and now the client owes you like a few hundred dollars and obviously they’re not happy because they didn’t realize it either, right?
[KYM]: Yes.
[ALISON]: Yes. So that is definitely something that I recommend to people. Whenever the most common time is that insurance plans were all over, you definitely need to be re-checking benefits again.
[KYM]: Absolutely.
[ALISON]: Yes.
[KYM]: And the other thing I see clinicians doing is they get a denial and they just push it to the side and like, I’ll deal with that later and then they never follow up with it when a lot of times a denial could be as simple as you’d like reverse the policy ID number. It’s usually a really simple fix. So I encourage people to do that too. Like just set some time aside if you’ve got any denials, like a couple hours and just go through them and get them corrected because I think the insurance companies like count on that.
[ALISON]: Oh, I’m sure they do to have as part of their money saving plan, but, yes, I think that’s been my experience too. That usually it’s like a simple fix and you just resubmit the claim, which you can do electronically and then it’s done.
[KYM]: Easy.
[ALISON]: Yes, you should be getting paid for what you’re doing, right?
[KYM]: Absolutely.
[ALISON]: Yes.
[KYM]: Absolutely.
[ALISON]: Any other mistakes that you see people making a lot?
[KYM]: I think those are the two biggest ones. If you avoid that stuff you’re good to go. I’m trying to think if there’s any other things. Just being careful with your documentation. You want to make sure it’s specifically, if it’s a telehealth session, you want to make sure you’re documenting that exact times that you see the client. The EHRs don’t usually do that. They timestamp it like a 50 minute timestamp and it’s not reflecting the true minutes. It makes sure that, say it’s a telehealth session, make sure you document exactly where the client is located at the time of the telehealth session. Those are all things that the insurance companies want in your progress notes.
[ALISON]: Okay. Yes. That’s, that’s really good advice. So what about, with documentation, I know I’ve gotten the question before of sometimes it’s hard to know what do the insurance companies want exactly. So where do you find that information? Like, is there a page on the website that says, “This is what we expect to have in your notes?”
[KYM]: Not always.
[ALISON]: Not always?
[KYM]: They don’t make it that easy. I do have, in my course I’ve collected a lot of different audit sheets from different states, different Medicaid state providers, like the actual audit sheets that they go through to check stuff off. So I would recommend if you get your hands on one of those that will guide you pretty well like what they’re looking for. Basically you just want to make sure you have really measurable treatment plan goals and objectives and that the treatment plan ties into the progress note and the progress note and the treatment plan tie into the diagnosis. If you can like make it all connected like that, the chance of an audits going to, or having to pay money back is going to be a lot less. So if you just pay attention to that stuff, you do want to check your contract to see like if there’s any limits around how often you need to do the treatment plan review. So like Medicaid providers, you know in some states they want 90 day treatment plan reviews. Most of the commercial insurance companies want like a year, like an annual review of a treatment plan. So just keeping up to date with that stuff too.
[ALISON]: Okay. Yes, that’s good advice.
[KYM]: Yes. Thanks.
[ALISON]: So in terms of billing insurance for a group practice what do you think are, I know we talked about kind of setting up like the initial, like group contract and all of that kind of stuff. Do you think there’s anything in particular people should keep in mind with billing for a group as opposed to individual? Or is it kind of similar?
[KYM]: I mean, it’s pretty similar. The only real difference is when you file a claim, you’re going to have it under the organization and then you’re going to do another section for the rendering provider basically. So whoever the clinician is, that’s under your tax ID number, your group tax ID number, you’re going to make them the rendering provider when you’re doing the billing. So that’s kind of the only difference really in group practice billing versus individual billing.
[ALISON]: And I know some people to ask about, can they have an unlicensed person bill under a fully licensed person or like an intern or something like that. I know a lot of that can vary depending on insurance company and state. So what’s your advice about how to figure that out if that’s something that’s allowed or not?
[KYM]: I think call the insurance company and ask them, “How do I do this?” Talk to provider relations and ask them about that. I know Cigna just di, they released something that, in Cigna you know it was pretty much national. So they did just release something that you could have supervisees underneath you and you can bill for them. And they’ve got some criteria around that. Medicaid in some states allow you to do that. So it just depends on your state and the insurance company, but it is possible to do that. So I would just recommend contacting insurance to company find out what their requirements are for that.
[ALISON]: Yes. I think what, again, talking about mistakes that people make, I think sometimes people just see like, “Oh, well the practice owner’s the streets doing it so it must be fine. So I’m going to do it too.” And they don’t bother to do their own homework to see if it really is okay.
[KYM]: I know. Right.
[ALISON]: Yes. Like they could be totally doing it fraudulently and you have no idea.
[KYM]: Yes. Make sure you check. Check for yourself because that is insurance fraud. I mean, it’s not allowed, but people do it. People totally just bill under their own name and let supervisees see clients and it just go on.
[ALISON]: Yes. I know when I had called, there was one insurance company who allowed like a provisionally licensed person to bill under a fully licensed person. And I was on the phone with provider relations and I was like, “Show me in the contract where it says, this is okay.” Because I wanted to make sure I wasn’t doing something wrong. And they did show me exactly where it was. So I was assured that I was doing the correct thing.
[KYM]: That’s good. That’s smart. I mean, definitely if you can ask them to point to it in the contract, highly recommended.
[ALISON]: Yes. Yes. Yes. So, I’m curious, just going back to your introduction, you were saying that you are doing an all telehealth practice and you’re traveling and you’re living the digital nomad lifestyle. Like what was that kind of decision-making process for you? Or like, how is that, how does that affect your practice I guess to be in a different location? Or I know you said you, like, we were talking before we started recording you left where you were living and sold all your stuff because you were just like, “I’m going to be on the -…” Tell us all about that.
[KYM]: Well, I was inspired by Amber Lyda. I don’t know if you all have heard of her, but she has a step-by-step course that helps you take your practice all online. So she inspired me because she travels and works and does it and works for home. So at first I was like, “Oh my gosh, this is awesome.” And then once I got into it, I was like, “I could really do this.” So I’ve got this kind of wanderlust. I love to travel. I was taking off eight weeks a year to travel, but now I can travel and work and it’s amazing. So I basically sold everything. And the only thing I’ve really learned from this process is you’ve got to figure out where you want to have your virtual address if you’re going to have that. And mine is located in Virginia. I found a box that I’ve changed with the insurance companies and it works fine as an address. So I’m doing that. And then you want to make sure to check the state you’re living in to see if it’s okay if you practice there and then also check your local, your board and your state and make sure you’re able to like work outside of your state. So if you check those two and it’s good to go, then you can travel and work anywhere you want to.
[ALISON]: That’s amazing. Have you ever been in like a very different time zone from where your clients are?
[KYM]: Oh yes. Germany, Prague. This was before the COVID hit obviously, but yes, absolutely. Hawaii.
[ALISON]: Wow. So were you like seeing clients in the middle of the night?
[KYM]: Yes, basically, like 5:00 AM. But the jet lag is so crazy. You think it’s time to get up anyway. So it’s like, “Okay.”
[ALISON]: Wow, that’s cool. Yes, I always thought that that would be such a neat way of you know, like being able to travel. Like you don’t think you’re going to be able to do that and now with telehealth and everything that’s happening. I mean, obviously the pandemic just accelerated all of that for us. Just finding a way to make that work is awesome.
[KYM]: Yes. It’s been amazing. COVID slowed us down a little bit, but I was telling you earlier, we are living in Miami right on the beach. So it hasn’t been too bad to be able to work down here and just hang out on the beach when I have a lunch break or whatever.
[ALISON]: Yes. Yes. That’s awesome. So post pandemic, where are you going to go?
[KYM]: Well, we’re thinking Maui or Alaska. We don’t know. We want to spend like a summer in Alaska just because I don’t know if I could do the cold. I’m not really a cold person, but, yes. And then we’ve mapped out like a cross country trip where we might spend a week here, two weeks here, three weeks here and just kind of do that for a little bit.
[ALISON]: Nice.
[KYM]: I’m excited about it.
[ALISON]: Yes, it’s awesome. So any other words of wisdom for us about insurance billing or any other tips you have for us?
[KYM]: Just what I said before, please educate yourself on the insurance billing piece so you don’t get like stuck with a huge bank balance report like I did. You also want to know what they’re doing because it’s essentially insurance fraud if they’re not doing it correctly. So I always tell people like this is the more serious side of it. Really know what’s going on in your practice and make sure they’re doing things right, because you don’t want it to all of a sudden find out they’ve been fraudulently billing the insurance company or charging one rate to this insurance company and a different rate to this insurance company. All those things can cause you problems. So you really want to be very educated on the topic if you do decide to do private practice or a group private practice.
[ALISON]: Well, thank you so much. Can you give us some information about how folks can find you and about your insurance billing business?
[KYM]: Absolutely. So the best place would be to go to kymtolson.com and that’s [K Y M T O L S O N.com]. There you’ll find links to everything. The main thing I’ve got going on right now is what I’m calling a part boss biller system. So I have a free course that walks you through like those beginning decision points, and then I’ve got my full insurance billing course, and then I’ve got the membership. That’s the third part that kind of holds your hand through the whole process.
[ALISON]: Nice. So they can find the free course on your website?
[KYM]: Yes absolutely.
[ALISON]: Obvious where it is.
[KYM]: Yes, and I’m getting a revamp of the website so soon. It’ll be really obvious. Right now that you have to dig a little bit.
[ALISON]: Okay. Well, excellent. Well, I appreciate you taking the time to talk with us today, Kym. It was really helpful.
[KYM]: Thanks so much. Take care.
[ALISON]: If you aren’t familiar with our new membership community called Group Practice Boss and you are an established group practice owner who’s looking for ongoing support, you’re wanting to scale up, but you don’t know how, you’re wanting just to have a trusted group of other private practice owners to ask questions to when you get into a tough spot, check out our program called Group Practice Boss. It is at practiceofthepractice.com/grouppracticeboss. It is an awesome community that we started and by we, I mean Whitney Owens and I, and every month we do a deep dive into a different topic related to group practice. So definitely check that out. You can join anytime and I hope to see you there.
Once again, thank you so much to Therapy Notes for sponsoring this show. It makes notes, billing, scheduling, and telehealth a whole lot easier. And if you’re coming from another EHR, they make the transition really easy. Therapy Notes will import your client’s demographic data free of charge during your trial so you can get going right away. Use the promo code [JOE] to get three months free to try out Therapy Notes.
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This podcast is designed to provide accurate and authoritative information in regards to the subject matter covered. This is given with the understanding that neither the host, Practice of the Practice, or the guests are providing legal, mental health, or other professional information. If you need a professional, you should find one.