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The NEO Inventories Normative Update is now available with a new normative sample that is more representative of the current US population. Visit parinc.com/neo.
Hey folks, welcome to the podcast. I’ve got a fantastic guest here today.
[00:01:00] Christine Li is the founder and CEO of Mentaya. Mentaya is a platform that automates out-of-network billing, eliminates the need for superbills, and helps clients and clinicians get paid for out-of-network services. She is driven by a commitment to mental health and a deep belief in empowering therapists. She started Mentaya to tackle the headaches of out-of-network billing, making it easier for therapists to collect their full cash rate, while enabling clients to use insurance to get up to 80% back on private pay services. She believes that mental health clinicians can absolutely build thriving cash-pay practices while playing a key role in expanding access to mental health care.Before Mentaya, Christine was a Product Manager at Google, where she focused on creating impactful, user-centered products in Google AI and YouTube. So she comes from an extensive background in tech, and as you’ll see during the interview, has a real motivation and commitment to helping providers and [00:02:00] clients in this whole insurance billing mess.
You will also hear during the interview that we have been using Mentaya for several months now, at least the benefits checker, and have found it to be super helpful and increased our conversion ratio for private pay clients because they know what to expect and what they might get back from their insurance company. So, I hope you enjoy this conversation with Christine about Mentaya and making out-of-network billing a little easier.
Like you know, this is the time of the year when I am recruiting for my mastermind groups. New cohorts will start in January 2025, probably mid-January. There are cohorts for beginner, intermediate, and advanced folks, depending on where you’re at in your practice development. These are group coaching experiences with accountability and support aimed at connecting you with other folks doing testing and running businesses and doing the best that you can in that process. You can go to thetestingpsychologist.com/consulting and [00:03:00] get more info.
For now, let’s go to my conversation with Christine Li from Mentaya. As you will hear, if you want to try Mentaya for free for a month, there is a link in the show notes. So make sure and go check that out if you want to take a step toward simplifying out-of-network billing.
Christine. Hey, welcome to the podcast.
Christine: Thank you so much. Got to be here.
Dr. Sharp: I’m glad to have you. This is awesome. I feel like I’m talking to a little bit of a celebrity. You play a big role in our practice here because we use Mentaya ourselves. I feel super grateful to get a little bit of your time and then you’ve got a lot going on. So thanks for being here.
Christine: Thank you for [00:04:00] those kind words. I’ve never been called a celebrity before. So that is an interesting thing to hear.
Dr. Sharp: Here you go. It’s a good way to start the morning. I’ll start the interview the same way I start everyone, which is just asking you why this is important to you. You have an interesting career in tech, I think, that we might get into, but you chose to go in this direction with your experience. So I’d love to hear, why spend your time, energy, and emotional energy on something like Mentaya?
Christine: I have thought about this a lot because you were right. I used to work in tech. I worked as a Product Manager at Google. For me to have left my very cushy job to try something like starting a company like Mentaya was definitely a big decision. And so for me, it definitely started with my interest in mental health. I don’t know how much of my backstory you know, but I unfortunately…
Dr. Sharp: I’m about to hear.
[00:05:00]Christine: Okay. I went to high school that had a lot of mental health issues. This is a trigger warning. We made national news for suicides by school. This was back years ago when mental health wasn’t really talked about. I had just started high school. I’d actually just moved there and I don’t even think I knew what mental health was because no one really talked about it back then. There was definitely a stigma around it. I think we just didn’t really have that many resources or know how to handle something like that.I wouldn’t say just because of that, I was like, “Oh, I am so big in mental health, this is my passion”, but I do think it’s stuck with me. And I think slowly throughout the years, like in college, I realized that I was naturally interested in it and gravitated towards it. I worked with some therapists in college to try to build something with them, to make it easier for them to run their practices and [00:06:00] with their clients. It was a project. I didn’t turn it into anything.
Around COVID, when I was still at Google, I started thinking more about what I wanted to spend my energy on. Obviously, that was a time where a lot of people started talking about mental health. I started realizing the importance of it more broadly as a society because I think before that, it was the people who knew and were interested in mental health and the people who are like, Oh, I don’t really know too much about it. COVID was definitely, I guess in equalize where everyone dealt with their own things during COVID and therapy became a hot topic.
I was really excited to figure out what I wanted to work on next. It had to be something that I was really passionate about and mental health is one of those things. And so, I really wanted to, for me, build something that helped both the provider side and also the clients, because in healthcare, a [00:07:00] lot of times, incentives are not aligned where things help the patient. And so it’s like, great, let’s make everything really easy and inexpensive, but that’s at the cost of the provider. And so, for me, it was important for me to build something that helped both sides and enabled and helped providers to get paid well and get paid fairly while trying to make mental health care more accessible.
Dr. Sharp: I love that. I love the balance between the two because like you said, I think they are opposed sometimes or it feels like we take from one to give to the other. I’m looking forward to digging more into the software and how that actually happens, but I love that was the objective from the beginning.
As far as the story, let’s continue this theme, I’d love to hear the origin story, like how it came about, and [00:08:00] for some of my own background as somebody who launched a tech or software company two years ago in the mental health space as well, the process of finding the idea and figuring out, is this going to work, who’s this going to help, and how do we do this? That’s a crazy process. I’d love to hear just a little bit more about how you decided to take the leap and go specifically this direction with your idea.
Christine: I think those are actually two different questions.; how did I decide to take the leap and then how did I come up with this idea?
As for how I decided to take the leap, I was at Google for several years doing product. I love thinking about product. I’m always someone who is looking at different products and services and automatically thinking about ways to make it better or simpler, easier for people to use. That’s something that comes natural to me and I really enjoyed that. But I think, for me, after [00:09:00] spending some time there, while it was a great place to grow, I wanted to do something where I could feel more directly the impact I was having in a space that I really cared about.
Google is very big. You’re in a big company and they have a great mission, but you’re one of a bunch of people and you’re not as close to the end customer who’s using your products and you’re maybe not having a level of impact on people’s lives that I wanted to have. I think that combined with COVID happening, I spent a lot of time thinking about what I wanted to do next, and I was like, now’s the best time. I have a lot of energy. I want to pour myself into something, but it has to be something I care about. It can’t just be some random thing.
And so I was not in it to just create a business that would make a lot of money for me. Obviously, that would be great. Who doesn’t want money, But for me, it was more about having an impact on the world in a way that was [00:10:00] meaningful to me. And so for me, that was how I came to wanting to do something in the mental health space.
Dr. Sharp: Very cool. Let’s talk about Mentaya in a little more detail. If people don’t know what it is, I’m sure there are some folks out there who don’t know what it is, give me the elevator speech and then we’ll go into more detail.
Christine: We’re essentially an out-of-network billing platform, you can think of us as that, but that sounds scary because you’re like, ooh, what is out-of-network billing, what do we do, what does that mean for me as a therapist or a psychologist? We basically help and empower therapists and psychologists to make their full cash rate while we help their clients get money back on therapy through out-of-network benefits. A lot of people don’t know that they have insurance plans or insurance benefits that allow them to get money back on services, even if it’s out-of-network. And so, if you’re seeing a gastric [00:11:00] therapist, you can actually get the financial benefits up to 80% back on the services. And so it’s a win for both. Therapists and psychologists get paid whatever their full rate is, and then their clients or patients get a percentage of their session costs covered.
Dr. Sharp: I love that. I don’t know. You jump in and tell me if this is totally off base, but I think of it like you are greasing the wheels or automating to some degree the superbill process. A lot of us know what superbills are, but this is a few steps ahead of that and making that whole process a lot easier for, I think, clients and clinicians. Is that fair?
Christine: Yes, that’s a great way of explaining it. I think a lot of clinicians do think, oh I’ll just provide my clients a superbill, here’s super bill, and then they’ll just deal with it themselves because part of the reason, from what I’ve heard why some [00:12:00] clinicians don’t want to take insurance, they just don’t want to deal with insurance at all. They’re like, I can give you a superbill. You can do it yourself. Good luck. Here are some maybe resources or links you can look into.
But oftentimes, if you think about yourself as you’re a clinician, this is your job, and you don’t even want to deal with insurance. Imagine the average patient. No one knows anything with insurance. No one wants to deal with it. A lot of people don’t even understand what a superbill is or what to do with it. And so we basically take care of all of that so that you and your clients or your patients don’t have to do anything related to insurance. We completely try to shield you from ever having to deal directly with insurance companies. We’ll deal with this. We’ll take care of it for them and they just get their money back.
Dr. Sharp: It sounds so nice. Speaking as a patient, I don’t know if you’ve had this experience, but I’ve been on the patient side of things and tried to get a superbill for out-of-network services and submit a superbill. I have a pretty deep understanding of [00:13:00] insurance and how to do it, and it was not easy. And so, anything that we can do to make that process a little simpler for folks goes a long way, especially for those of us, like we were talking ahead of time, like we have pretty high ticket service items in our practice. We’re charging thousands of dollars for these services. Anything we can do to help people get some of that money back, it makes it a lot easier pill to swallow, I think, from there.
Christine: I know that. Especially with testing, it’s often thousands of dollars. And so, if people are able to get even 50% of that back, that is so much money that they can get back that other…
Dr. Sharp: Do you ever hear… Oh, go ahead.
Christine: I was going to say, that otherwise was just would have been left on the table.
Dr. Sharp: Right. I think that’s the thing. Do you have any statistics on how many [00:14:00] plans out there have some out-of-network benefits? I know it’s hard to get into details as far as how much, but even just a basic question, because people will push back and they’re like, Oh, nobody uses out-of-network benefits. My deductible so high. It’s never going to help. And I’m like, I don’t think that’s true. I think it actually can be helpful if you try it. So do you have any statistics on all that stuff?
Christine: I have statistics from what I’ve read from articles I’ve read online, and then we obviously have our own data on what percent people who use Mentaya or run their benefits through the calculator have out-of-network benefits. Most plans do have out-of-network benefits.
I will say what you’re saying is a real concern. Not every plan with out-of-network benefits is going to be that helpful because there are plans that have like $5,000 or $10,000 deductibles, but there’s also a lot of plans. You would be surprised how many plans we’ve seen that have $500, $1,000, even if $2,000 sounds really [00:15:00] high. Whether you’re doing testing or you’re going to therapy sessions, you hit that pretty quickly and you’re still able to get thousands of dollars back on therapy. I actually looked into this the other day.
We have helped people get reimbursed. I’ve always known thousands, like people are getting hundreds or thousands of dollars back. I didn’t realize we were in the $10,000s until I looked at the data. We’ve gotten several people more than $10,000 back on therapy sessions, testing, and things like that. That is a lot of money that people don’t realize sometimes they’re eligible for.
Dr. Sharp: Yeah. I think people forget about out-of-network benefits, at least with the practices that I talk to or people that I maybe do some consulting with. It’s either I go private pay and make a ton of money, screw all of my clients and don’t give anybody access, or I take insurance and screw myself and don’t make any money and everybody is sad. But [00:16:00] this out-of-network benefit thing is a real thing and it can help both parties.
Christine: People definitely think it’s either one or the other. It’s either, I’m private pay, I have nothing to do with insurance, I get paid and that’s it, or I have to go all the way on the other side, but there is a middle ground where you can still get paid your full fee and your clients or patients can save money on therapy or testing.
People oftentimes don’t even know their in-network insurance benefits, let alone out-of-network. I don’t even think most people understand the concept of out-of-network. There’s some study that was saying the insurance literacy is extremely low in our country. Obviously, insurance companies don’t make it easy to understand, but it was some crazy stat around, I might be butchering this, but it was something like 50% or something of college graduates did not understand insurance. It was something. Don’t quote me on that.
Dr. Sharp: It’s not surprising.
Christine: I don’t remember the exact stat, but it was something [00:17:00] surprising.
Dr. Sharp: That’s crazy. I think you’re right. There’s so much to dig into there as far as how we can help people understand, but I think talking about the platform might bring it to life a little bit. Maybe now is a good time to talk about what this actually looks like in real life; what Mentaya does, how do we use it, what’s the process? Let’s go there for a little bit.
Christine: I’ll start with an obvious, I know you’re using the platform, but we have basically two core products. The first one we call an instant benefits calculator and the second one we call our claim submission tool or like automated superbill submission tool.
I’ll start with the first one, which is our instant benefits calculator. This is a really nifty widget that you can use, put on your website, send to clients, but essentially, all it asks for [00:18:00] are your client’s name, insurance member ID, and date of birth, and then from that, we can automatically calculate their benefits and estimate how much they might be able to get reimbursed for therapy. We let them know things like their deductible, what they have to pay first on which they can expect to get reimbursed afterwards.
This is a useful tool for therapists who are looking to, or clinicians who are looking to attract more clients because when you’re having that initial call with them and inevitably they ask, Oh, what’s your fee? Then you can say, instead of just being like, Oh I don’t take insurance and this is what it costs, you can say here’s what it costs. You might have these benefits that allow you to get reimbursed for a percentage of the cost of my services. And so, that definitely makes it easier for potential patients or clients to want to start services with you because you’re like, oh, it’s not as expensive as I originally…
[00:19:00] Dr. Sharp: Right. I think I told you before we started that we’re using that benefits checker in our practice. That’s been our main use of Mentaya. It’s great. Just to describe it from a practitioner standpoint. We have it bookmarked on the browser for our scheduling team, and when they’re on a call with somebody and it’s an out-of-network or client who we don’t take their insurance, they just jump on the benefits checker. It’s 10 seconds to put the information in and they can tell them right there, this is what it would cost or this is how much money you might get back from your insurance plan, even though we’re out-of-network. It’s helped us convert a lot more private pay clients that we otherwise would have with just saying, Oh, our fee is, whatever, $3000 and good luck. So, it’s super cool.Christine: That’s awesome to hear. A lot of practices also, I don’t know if you have it on your website, but…
Dr. Sharp: We don’t have the widget on the website. We’re just doing most scheduling with it
[00:20:00] Christine: That’s an opportunity as well. A lot of practices will put it. I’ve seen so many creative things done with it. One thing we suggest is putting it on your website so that prospective clients or patients who go to your website can immediately see, especially juxtaposed with where your fee is instead of just Oh, here’s my fee or here’s the fee services, it’s here’s the fee, but here you might have out of network benefits. And so they can check it themselves as well. So you can potentially cap for people who don’t even get to the point where they’re having an intake call.We’ve also seen people use, we have a link, which it sounds like you bookmarked that you can put anywhere. Some people put at the end of their email signatures, people put it on their Psychology Today profiles, people put it in all these different places where they’re essentially doing marketing for themselves to say, Hey, I know I don’t take insurance, but you might be able to use your insurance to get money, if that makes sense.
Dr. Sharp: Oh, that’s fantastic. Yes, you can put that link everywhere, I suppose. Cool. So that’s the first part of your product. And [00:21:00] then the second part?
Christine: The second part is our actual claim submission tool. If you think about the chronological order, you get some client who’s Oh, great. I didn’t realize I had these benefits. Sure. Let’s start. I would love to do testing or start therapy sessions with you. And it’s like, okay, great. But then the client is okay, cool, I know I have these benefits. How do I actually use them?
Without Mentaya, generally, you’re like, Oh, I can give you a superbill or you can call your insurance company, figure that out yourself. With Mentaya, what a lot of practitioners then say is, Hey, I use Mentaya, fully optional up to you if you want to use it, but they can take care of submitting the superbill or that claim for you such that you don’t have to do anything. It’s also important to know, it’s not just submitting it because sometimes you submit it, it gets rejected, the insurance company is like, oh this doesn’t qualify or you need to [00:22:00] change this and that. And so we take care of all of the follow up process for them so that they don’t have to basically be on the phone with insurance and what does this thing mean? Why did this get rejected? And so we take care of all of that so that your client doesn’t.
Dr. Sharp: Say more. What do you mean when you say we take care of all of that? Is it the claim gets submitted and then does the client hear anything after that point? Or is it all happening in the background? Y’all are just doing it. What’s that experience from the client side?
Christine: That’s really good question. So the way that it generally works on the client side is, I’ll start with the provider side actually. On the provider side, we need to know when the sessions happen. We essentially skip the generating a superbill step and go straight to just verifying a session, submitting a claim. So what that means is, we need to know that the session has happened. We can send you a text. You say, [00:23:00] yes to the compliant text or you can click a button in our platform to be like, yes, the session happened. So then we go ahead and we can submit the claim automatically to the insurance company.
And then what happens is we’ll monitor it and get automatic updates from the insurance company to make sure that it’s going through. Sometimes insurance will come back and say, hey, we actually need this extra paperwork or something. We have a team on our end who will take care of that and resubmit it until it goes through. Sometimes we’ll get on the phone with insurance companies to figure out what’s going on. We do all of that behind the scenes. The client and the provider get notified occasionally when it’s hey, just wanted to let it might be a little bit more delayed because the insurance company requested this additional paperwork that we need to take care of but we’ve taken care of that already. We generally don’t need client or provider input besides just yes, the session has [00:24:00] happened. So we take care of everything after the fact, but we’ll keep you posted and you can see your claim status and your portal after you’ve submitted.
Dr. Sharp: Sure. This might be a nuanced question specific to testing, maybe it happens with therapy as well, so if you’re not sure about this, no worries. Something that we run into specifically with in-network, but I’ve heard stories where it happens without a network too, is the pre-authorization process. Insurance companies will kick claims back because we didn’t have the correct pre-authorization for the services. Have you noticed that coming up through the system or is there anything to say about that from your side? How do you handle that?
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Let’s get back to the podcast.
Christine: I can’t say because I’m not personally monitoring every single claim at this point.
Dr. Sharp: You’re not doing this work, Christine? You’re not sitting in your C-suite monitoring claims?
Christine: Oh my gosh. Funny story. I actually quick tangent. I have called so many insurance companies. At the very beginning, I was working with insurance because I wanted to feel and really understand how to do all that. But anyway, back to the question. I can’t say that we’ve never had that. I know I’ve vaguely heard a couple of random instances. I will say [00:27:00] it’s very infrequent from what I’ve heard. In-network is actually quite different from out-of-network. The rules of what happens in-network don’t always apply to out of network.
Here’s an example. For associate therapists, a lot of times insurance companies don’t allow them to bill in-network because they’re not fully licensed, right? Only licensed clinicians can. And so, people assume Oh, you’re pre-licensed, you can’t work with insurance, but a lot of times they’ll approve out-of-network claims. And pre-auth is very common for in-network, but for out-of-network, it’s actually not as much of a thing from what I’ve seen.
Dr. Sharp: Nice. That’s fair. That’s actually a good tip. I did not know explicitly about that pre-licensed issue.
Christine: Glory to Christ!
Dr. Sharp: Yeah, that’s great. So then just to recap from the provider side then, because we don’t use this portion in our practice, just full disclosure, but it [00:28:00] sounds like, the the practice owner or clinician will “submit an out-of-network claim” through Mentaya. It sounds pretty easy. You put in a little info, confirm that it happened, and then it’s off to the races. So the client is not actually doing anything in that process. Is that right?
Christine: Correct. We do have the client at least make an account and put in there transformation just so it’s an acknowledgement of, Hey, I’m creating an account. My provider is going to be doing something with that. I’m aware of that. So the client is involved in that sense. It’s like a one time thing. Generally, we don’t need the client involvement because we basically just asked the practitioner to let us know if the sessions happened and provide a CPT code diagnosis, things like that, so that we can submit a claim.
Dr. Sharp: And then how does the client get paid? Is it a paper check? Is it direct deposit? How does that work?
Christine: It depends on what they have set up with their insurance company. Each insurance [00:29:00] company is a little bit different, but the default is a check in the mail. But if they have direct deposit set up with their insurance, the insurance company generally just deposits.
Dr. Sharp: Nice. We have to talk about the fee structure. I assume you’ll have to make money somehow. So how does the fee work for the client or the practice?
Christine: For the benefits calculator, that is optional. The way that it works, sorry, let me take a sip. It is free to use the platform to submit claims for the practice. Submitting claims, we, by default, charge the client. There is the benefits calculator which is optional. You don’t have to use it, but it is $29 a month per practice, which I feel like for mental health practices…
Dr. Sharp: It’s a steal.
Christine: …they’re so inexpensive. Again, that’s fully optional. So if you are like, I don’t want to spend the $29 a month or I don’t need that, I just want to submit claims. You can do that for free. [00:30:00] We charge the clients 5% and that’s 5% of the session or whatever claim it is. And so if it’s a $200 session, it’s $10. If it’s a $2,000 thing, that is $100. But if you think about how much, and that’s part of why the benefits calculator and claim submission go well together, because you can estimate how much you’re going to get and most times people get back way more than they would pay in the fees, and so it’s generally a no-brainer for clients.
And then I will say, if you want, we don’t say this publicly on our website anywhere, but if you want as the practice, you can actually take on the cost of the 5% fee. The reason we don’t put it online is because we don’t want people to, we don’t want clients to see that there’s an option for the practice to do it in case that reflects poorly on the practice where it’s like, Oh, I see that you have the option to, you decided not to do that. And so we think a lot about wanting to make sure that [00:31:00] we’re navigating these things carefully, but I just, in case you were curious, you have the option to cover the cost as well.
Dr. Sharp: That is interesting. I would guess some practices might want to do that. It’s good to know.
Christine: A lot of practices actually do that. And then we frame it as your practice or your therapist has decided to cover the cost so that it’s completely free for you. And then that’s more like a gift to their clients rather than a standard.
Dr. Sharp: I get where you’re coming from. Just thinking about it from a financial perspective for a practice, gosh, if we, I’m trying to think, a $10 charge on a session, if you were going to spend or pay your admin team, I don’t know, at least even a half hour to argue with insurance over a claim, that’s cheaper than it is to pay the admin team.
Christine: That is the goal. The goal is that it is low enough where we can, obviously we are a business and so we need to make money somehow, but [00:32:00] it didn’t feel like it’s a lot of money. It should be pretty reasonable. Most people are like, this is a no-brainer for me.
Dr. Sharp: Sure. That’s fantastic. It’s been, like I said, super helpful for us. I feel like that $29 for the benefits checker is just a complete steal. It’s so easy. It just works.
Christine: Perfectly said.
Dr. Sharp: That sounds good. I would love to hear about strategies to help this be effective: how to talk to clients about it, how to get people to buy in, so to speak. Maybe we start there and then we’ll see where that goes.
Christine: Yeah. We know that a lot of clinicians love scripts. We have all of these scripts that you can use with your clients, it’s in our help center, it’s in our product that you can copy and paste. And generally, for the benefits calculator, we talked about this a bit, we [00:33:00] recommend putting it in all the different places in which you do any sort of marketing, even if it’s your website, or your different therapist directed profiles so that people know.
Generally, the way that we encourage you to frame it is, you can call yourself an insurance-friendly practice. A lot of therapists like using that term because you don’t take insurance, you’re insurance-friendly, right? You help people use their insurance benefits. But you explain to clients that, Hey, just because I don’t accept your insurance directly does not mean you can’t use your insurance benefits to get part of the cost covered.
And so that’s really powerful because I think from the consumer or the patient perspective, most people are either like, Oh, I just need to find someone who takes my insurance, or I just have to shell out a ton of money. And most people, again, don’t know that there’s this middle ground of there’s something in between where you can get part of it still covered and still find the best [00:34:00] highest-quality service that you’re able to afford. And so that’s how we encourage clinicians to speak about it with their clients. Just make them understand that it’s not one or the other. It’s not oh, I have to take insurance and you can use your insurance. It could be, I don’t take insurance, but you can still use your insurance. So that’s on the benefits calculator.
On the claim piece, it’s essentially, you worded it perfectly, an automated superbill submission, essentially, plus all the follow ups and not just submission, but actually taking care of that. And so generally, we encourage clinicians to talk to all their clients about it, maybe send out an email blast, bringing it up in a session, but in a very hey, this is helpful for you. I don’t get anything from this, but I just want to help you because I care about you and I want to help you. We don’t generally have clinicians put any pressure on their clients to use it. If it’s help for them, great. [00:35:00] If they’re already, if you’re one of the few that you’re already submitting your superbills and it’s going well, then that’s great for you. But a lot of people need help on that or don’t even understand how it all works. And so just asking and checking in with your clients to see if this might be helpful for them is a great way to start.
Dr. Sharp: Yeah. I have to think it’s a selling point for a lot of private pay practices to do a service for the client and skip that step of them needing to submit a super bill, which can be complicated and challenging. Have you found at least thus far, like particular practices that seem to benefit a lot from Mentaya or any practice profiles or use cases that lend itself more toe being successful with it.
Christine: That’s a really good question. We get a lot of emails about, oh my gosh, I [00:36:00] used the benefits calculator and I filled my practice with a bunch of private pay clients that I was struggling with before. We get a lot of these emails. I’m trying to think about the success stories or a specific type of profile.
I think generally what we tend to see is there’s solo practices and there’s group practices, but the solo practices that seem to do really well with Mentaya try to use it. Actually, the common thing is they try to put it everywhere they can and use it with as many clients as they can. I think those are the practices that see the most success because then you’re getting as many clients to understand. You’re educating as many people on their out-of-network benefits as possible, and hopefully a lot of them end up wanting to start services with you.
And then on the claim submission piece, that helps a lot with retention. So if you’ve ever had this might be more traditional talk therapy, but do you ever [00:37:00] have clients go from, Hey, can we go from weekly sessions to biweekly or monthly? It’s getting expensive. If your things work like that, that’s where we’ve helped the most, where people start realizing, oh, that’s expensive. And so you can say totally, if you want, I just wanted to let you know, you might have these benefits that allow you to get money back on therapy. Have you been submitting your super bills? Because that could actually cut the cost by 50% or 70% or whatever it is and you can continue seeing me every single week. Those are very concrete examples of how it’s helpful.
Dr. Sharp: I love that. I’m going to backtrack just a little bit and ask another question about the pricing just to clarify it. The 5% number makes sense. The clients pay 5% of the session fee. So just to be super clear, like for us, where we’re submitting, we’ll call it a single claim [00:38:00] that might be, I don’t know, $2,000. I think you used that earlier. So is it priced per claim or like per hour of service? They might be the same thing, but if we submitted a $2,000 bill, essentially, then is it 5% of the $2,000 versus 5% of our hourly rate?
Christine: It’s 5% of the total. It ends up being the same thing because you end up either having a bunch of CPT codes at different rates that all add up, but it’s just 5% of the full bill for the client. For most clients, it’s either, it’s going to be very obvious. You either have these out-of-network benefits, which a lot of people do, and you’re like, this is a no-brainer because I wouldn’t do this otherwise myself, or you’re like, I have a $20,000 deductible and this does not make sense. And so generally it’s pretty obvious.
We also have the pricing on our website. We’re pretty transparent about our pricing and how we make money. It’s like literally one of the tabs on our website. For anyone listening, you [00:39:00] can just go on our website to learn more.
Dr. Sharp: Yeah. I appreciated that one when we are signing up. It’s super clear. Let me see. I was going to jump back to the strategies and the success stories, but maybe on the opposite side. Have you found that there are any practices that are not a good fit or have struggled with it? Any exclusionary factors, if that’s a thing?
Christine: The only thing I can think of, it’s very specific to insurance company, Blue Cross Blue Shield of Texas, does not, you know how before I said that associate therapist actually or pre-licensed clinicians oftentimes are able to get reimbursement, an exception to that is Blue Cross Blue Shield of Texas. And so we’ve seen a couple practices where they have, we’re just like, sorry, we just can’t submit claims for your pre-licensed clinicians because they’re just going to get rejected. They have a policy that they don’t accept [00:40:00] insurance claims out-of-network or probably in-network as well from pre-licensed clinicians. But that’s the only thing I can think of where that was just like, we’re so sorry about that.
In a lot of cases, we try. We do have a risk free… Oh, this is probably important to mention. We have a risk free guarantee where if we submit a claim and we charge you or your client and it doesn’t go through successfully, then we’ll give a full refund of our fees. So we don’t just say, all right, that’s it. We actually make sure that it goes through and if it either doesn’t, or you’ve been waiting for an exorbitant amount of time and then we still can’t figure out how to do it, we’ll just give you a full refund of the fees because we never want to make money for a service that weren’t able to […].
Dr. Sharp: It’s great. It’s good to know. I know there’s some there are some folks listening. I’ve heard so many horror stories about Blue Cross of Texas from the community.
Christine: Really?
Dr. Sharp: Yeah, it’s a it’s been a whole discussion point [00:41:00] over the last two years in my Facebook group of psychologists. They’re known for being terrible.
Maybe we start to close in talking about how y’all are a little bit different from some of the other options out there on the market. The biggest one I know about is Reimbursify. I think there’s there are two others maybe when I was doing the research, but if people were asking, why should I pick you, of course, that’s a question, what would you say to folks?
Christine: Obviously, I’ve heard of Reimbursify. I think there are two other options out there. A lot of them have actually shut down, I think, from what I’ve seen. But at least the difference between us and Reimbursify, I can’t say that I know enough about them to know exactly how they do things, just anecdotally from what I’ve [00:42:00] heard, the main differences are we actually make sure the claim goes through. I’m scared to say this. I don’t know if this is fully accurate, but from what I’ve heard, they’ll just submit the claim and then they don’t really track. I don’t know if you know what happens to it, things like that. And so that’s the main difference for us where we have this risk-free guarantee where we either get it through or you get a full refund of the fees.
Another thing is I think they charge the clinician some amount when the clients file claims while for us it’s free. Your client pays for the claims.
Dr. Sharp: Yes.
Christine: And then I think the main thing that I’ve heard, and this is anecdotal from, obviously, it’s a little biased because we hear from the customers who move over to us. They say our customer support is a lot better. A lot of times people, we’ve heard that they’re trying to cancel their account on Reimbursify. They [00:43:00] can’t cancel it because you have to contact them and they just never respond. And so you’re just paying for this thing you can’t cancel it. And so for us, we always make sure that we make it easy to cancel. Even our benefits calculator, we don’t lock you in. It’s month to month. We should probably build an annual subscription at some point, but we genuinely, if it’s useful, subscribe and use it. If it’s not useful, you can pause it. And so, I feel like we’re very provider-friendly and also client-friendly in that way.
If you ever have any questions or issues, you can always email our support team. We have a direct support line. We generally respond within one, if not two business days to your request and we won’t ever do things like lock you in and you can’t cancel your account. Even sometimes people are like, I forgot to cancel my benefits calculator but I didn’t use it last month. Can I get a refund? And we’re like, yeah, sure. If you’re not using it, you can get a refund. I think that’s probably the main differences between us and them.
[00:44:00] Dr. Sharp: That’s fantastic. Customer service goes a long way. I can account for a lot of even like product issues, if you have great customer service, not to say that they’re product issues, but being able to talk to somebody and actually figure it out helps a lot. That’s fantastic.Christine: That’s something that is very important for us. I think a lot of it is, it’s it’s a space a lot of people don’t really know much about. Out-of-network insurance. It’s scary. And so we really want to make sure that we have everyone with the right resources to be able to use it as effectively as possible.
Dr. Sharp: Nice. I love that. I appreciate you spending so much time with me. Is there anything that I missed, anything that you’d like to highlight about your platform or share with folks as we start to wrap up?
Christine: Oh, I think the one thing we talked about right before is you have an affiliate link, and [00:45:00] this is a gift for all the listeners, anyone who is listening, you can try out the benefits calculator for free for a month using the code, I think it was “testingpsychologist”.
Dr. Sharp: They’ll figure it out. They know.
Christine: Yeah, testingpsychologist, and that’s the only thing that you would pay for as a therapist or psychologist on the platform. And so essentially if you use the code, you can try everything out for free for a month see how you like it, try it out. Put it everywhere, put it on your website, try using it in your intake calls, and just give it a shot.
Dr. Sharp: That’s awesome. I’ll make sure to put the affiliate link there in the show notes so that folks can access it pretty easily. And if they, let’s just say, are driving, they forget about it, whatever, what’s the easiest way to learn about [00:46:00] Mentaya, check it out once they get to the office?
Christine: You can email our support team. It’s support@mentaya.com. Super straightforward. You can even say, Hey, what was the link on this podcast today I listened to it. We’ll send you all of that.
Dr. Sharp: Oh, nice.
Christine: Any questions you have we’ll respond to you.
Dr. Sharp: Fantastic. It’s super cool. I’m just so grateful to have gotten the opportunity to chat with you for a little bit. Like I said, we’ve been using this benefits checker. We love it. Our admin team loves it. Clients are liking it. I’m grateful for the time that you decided to spend here with me.
Christine: Thanks for having me on.
Dr. Sharp: All right, y’all. Thank you so much for tuning into this episode. Always grateful to have you here. I hope that you take away some information that you can implement in your practice and in your life. Any resources that we mentioned during the episode will be listed in the show notes, so make sure to check those out.
If you like what you hear on the podcast, [00:47:00] I would be so grateful if you left a review on iTunes, Spotify, or wherever you listen to your podcast.
If you’re a practice owner or aspiring practice owner, I’d invite you to check out The Testing Psychologist Mastermind Groups. I have mastermind groups at every stage of practice development, beginner, intermediate, and advanced. We have homework. We have accountability. We have support. We have resources. These groups are amazing. We do a lot of work and a lot of connecting. If that sounds interesting to you, you can check out the details at thetestingpsychologist.com/consulting. You can sign up for a pre-group phone call and we will chat and figure out if a group could be a good fit for you. Thanks so much.
[00:48:00] The information contained in this podcast and on The Testing Psychologist website are intended for informational and educational purposes only. Nothing in this podcast or on the website is intended to be a substitute for professional, psychological, psychiatric, or medical advice, diagnosis or treatment. Please note that no doctor-patient relationship is formed here, and similarly, no supervisory or consultative relationship is formed between the host or guests of this podcast and that listeners of this podcast. If you need the qualified advice of any mental health upholder practitioner or medical provider, please seek one in your area. Similarly, if you need supervision on clinical matters, please find a supervisor with an expertise that fits your needs.