The Missing Course: How Your Education Didn’t Prepare You for Private Practice
As a student in graduate school, listening to your professors emphasize the beauty of therapeutic breakthroughs and the importance of evidence-based interventions, you likely developed the rose-colored vision of owning your own practice someday. You were taught to expect that the biggest challenge in private practice would be mastering your craft as a therapist. But when you finally donned your cap and gown, ready to make that private practice dream come true, you likely discovered nobody warned you about the hurdles of private practice operations—especially how to successfully take insurance.
Here’s the brutal fact: no one teaches you how to run a practice in school. Sure, you can navigate the DSM-5 like a pro and handle even the most complex cases, but when it comes to figuring out billing codes or deciphering the cryptic rejections from insurance companies, you’re left feeling like an amateur trying to fix a leaky faucet with a stethoscope.
You were taught to be a therapist. You were not taught to be a private practice business owner. And that’s why we wrote a book.
Things You Probably Didn’t Learn in Graduate School About Running a Private Practice
Credentialing: The First Hurdle
If you choose to accept insurance - and that’s a big if - you probably learned that you need to credential with an insurance company. But did you learn how to credential, and what the information on your credentialing application means for the future processes of your practice? You may have even been through the credentialing process and still don’t understand it!
Insurance Billing Basics: Steps for Therapists to Successfully Take Insurance teaches you the reason why credentialing is important and the concepts you need to understand to credential (and re-credential) to have a successful working relationship with the insurance company.
No more blindly filling out the heaps of paperwork and crossing your fingers that it works- do it with confidence in a process that will yield results!
How to Make Money
Did you learn that you can choose to accept insurance and private pay clients? Did you learn that you need to make enough money in your practice to cover your costs (including paying yourself)? And did you learn how to actually collect money from your patients, including what amount to charge?
Insurance Billing Basics guides you through these questions and more, helping you to think through elements of your business plan that are necessary for a practice’s success. We teach you the core concepts, and give you the freedom to set goals for your practice with knowledge of the business framework of a practice.
Once you have business goals established, processes are also covered that ensure that you get paid what you deserve for helping clients untangle their deepest struggles, providing comfort, and transforming lives. You make a big impact- you deserve a just paycheck.
Revenue Cycle Management
Imagine this: It’s a Friday evening, and you’re ready to wrap up your week when you see it—a claim rejection. It’s written in the cryptic language of insurance denials, referencing a rejection code that, after some Googling, seems to mean, “We reject this claim because we felt like it.” Suddenly, your plans for a relaxing weekend vanish as you spiral into an abyss of research, emails, and music.
Your education didn’t teach you that private practice isn’t just about helping people—it’s also about playing chess with insurance companies, managing the stages of Revenue Cycle Management from beginning to end. Without the right knowledge and tools, this kind of thing can turn good therapists into frustrated business owners. Or worse yet…, it burns them out of the mental health industry altogether. It doesn’t fit the rose-colored vision you developed in school, but Revenue Cycle Management is part of the package of accepting insurance.
And it’s not just billing. There are scheduling snafus, client no-shows, tracking deductibles, and trying to figure out why one insurance company pays $120 for the same session and another reimburses at $65.
Revenue Cycle Management is the chess game- Insurance Billing Basics is the Scholar’s Mate (if you're not a chess player, it's a series of moves that get you to checkmate). We break down everything you need to know about Revenue Cycle Management, setting up your systems, avoiding common mistakes, and ensuring you get paid what you’re owed. You can get your weekends back, knowing that you have the knowledge to approach insurance billing problems as they arise.
How to Take Control of Your Practice Dream
If you’ve made it this far, you probably realize that your education didn’t prepare you for the realities of private practice. That’s not your fault—but staying stuck in this cycle is. We wrote Insurance Billing Basics precisely because we’ve seen too many therapists struggle with these issues unnecessarily. Written in plain English (with just a dash of wry humor), it’s the resource we wish every therapist had from day one of private practice.
It’s the best $20.00 investment in your practice you will make.
Don’t let billing challenges keep you from growing your practice or serving your clients. You became a therapist to change lives, not to spend your evenings deciphering claim codes. Let us help you build the systems you need.
Your Next Steps
Ready to take control of your private practice? Start by grabbing your copy of Insurance Billing Basics. If you’re curious how outsourcing billing could transform your practice, contact us for a free consultation.
Because no one taught you this stuff in grad school—but that doesn’t mean you have to figure it out alone.
