Find Out What Your Billing Is Costing You
Answer a few quick questions about your practice. Get a personalized benchmark report with industry comparisons and a dollar estimate of what you could recover.
How your denial rate, days in A/R, and aging compare to industry standards
An estimate of how much revenue your billing operation could recover annually
Where to focus first to recover that revenue
Takes about 2 minutes. No payment info required.
What a billing assessment measures
A billing assessment turns the health of your revenue cycle into four numbers you can act on. Together they show how much of the revenue you earn actually reaches your bank account, and how much leaks out through denials, slow payments, and write-offs. The assessment compares your practice to behavioral health benchmarks across four levers.
The first lever is your denial rate, the share of claims payers reject on first submission. Behavioral health practices stay healthy under 8 percent. The second is days in accounts receivable, the average time it takes a claim to get paid. Strong practices stay under 40 days. The third is the share of your A/R over 90 days old, which should stay under 15 percent. The fourth is your first-pass appeal recovery rate, the percent of denied claims you overturn and collect on the first try. A healthy rate sits above 60 percent.
Each lever maps to real dollars. A denial rate two points above benchmark, claims aging past 90 days, and hours of staff time spent reworking rejections all add up. The assessment estimates the annual value of closing those gaps so you can decide where to focus first.
How to read your benchmark report
Your report scores each metric against a healthy threshold and flags it as on track, watch, or off track. Here is what each number means and where the line sits.
Denial rate
The percent of claims denied on first submission. Healthy is under 8 percent. Above 12 percent signals a process problem in eligibility, coding, or claim scrubbing that is costing you collected revenue.
Days in A/R
The average days from claim submission to payment. Healthy practices stay under 40 days. Past 50 days, cash is tied up and claims drift toward timely filing limits.
A/R over 90 days
The share of your outstanding balance older than 90 days. Keep it under 15 percent. Above 25 percent, a meaningful portion of those claims is likely to be written off.
First-pass appeal recovery
The percent of denied claims you overturn and collect on the first appeal. Above 60 percent is healthy. A low rate means denials are not being worked consistently.
Why behavioral health practices lose revenue
Behavioral health billing is harder than general medical billing, and the reasons are structural rather than a sign that anyone is doing a bad job. Many payers require prior authorization for ongoing therapy, so a single lapsed auth can cause a string of denials before anyone notices. Recurring weekly sessions multiply the surface area for error, because each session is a new claim that depends on current eligibility and an active authorization.
On top of that, most practices run lean. Billing often falls to one admin who is also answering phones and scheduling clients, or to the owner late at night. When no one owns claims full time, denials pile up, appeals slip past deadlines, and aged A/R quietly turns into write-offs. The revenue was earned. It just never got collected. A clear benchmark report makes that leak visible so you can close it.
Frequently asked questions
What's a good denial rate for a therapy practice?
A healthy denial rate for a behavioral health practice is under 8 percent. Between 8 and 12 percent is a watch zone worth investigating, and a denial rate above 12 percent usually points to a fixable problem in eligibility checks, coding, or claim scrubbing. Every denied claim that you do not rework is revenue you earned but never collected.
What does days in A/R mean?
Days in accounts receivable measures the average time between submitting a claim and getting paid. It is a direct read on how fast cash moves through your practice. Healthy behavioral health practices stay under 40 days. Once the average climbs past 50 days, claims are aging toward timely filing limits and your working capital is tied up waiting on payers.
What is a healthy percentage of A/R over 90 days?
Keep accounts receivable older than 90 days under 15 percent of your total A/R. When more than 25 percent of your balance sits past 90 days, a meaningful share of those claims will likely be written off, because older claims are harder to appeal and closer to filing deadlines.
What is first-pass appeal recovery rate?
First-pass appeal recovery is the share of denied claims you successfully overturn and collect on your first appeal. A healthy rate is above 60 percent. A low rate, under about 35 percent, usually means denials are not being worked consistently or appeals are missing the documentation payers require.
How is recovery opportunity calculated?
The assessment estimates recovery opportunity from three parts. First, the denial gap: claims denied above the 8 percent benchmark, adjusted for the appeals you already recover. Second, aging risk: likely write-offs from claims aged past 90 days beyond the 15 percent benchmark. Third, billing labor: the loaded cost of in-house hours spent on billing. Added together, they estimate the annual revenue and cost a stronger billing operation could unlock.
Why do behavioral health practices have higher denial rates?
Behavioral health runs into structural headwinds that general medical billing does not. Many plans require prior authorization for ongoing therapy, recurring weekly sessions multiply the chance of an eligibility or auth lapse, and small practices often have one admin handling billing alongside everything else. Those factors push denial rates up unless someone is actively managing claims.
How long does the billing assessment take?
The assessment takes about two minutes. You answer a few questions about your practice size, denial rate, accounts receivable, and billing labor, then you get a personalized benchmark report comparing your numbers to industry standards. No payment information is required.
Do I need exact numbers to use the assessment?
No. If you are not sure of a figure, you can mark it as not sure and the tool fills in a behavioral health industry average so your report still calculates. For the most accurate estimate, pull your real denial rate and days in A/R from your practice management software when you have them.
Want to walk through your numbers with our team?
We review behavioral health billing reports every week. A free 30-minute consultation gets you a concrete plan for closing your biggest gaps.
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