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Do you know what can really drive a mental healthcare professional crazy? When psychiatrists, psychologists, and social workers have to deal with the billing for patient services. Their time is way too valuable to spend it on such frustrating mundane tasks. They can help so many more patients if this headache is outsourced to a service provider by working with behavioral health billing consultants who take care of everything.
The Value of Peace of Mind
One thing mental health care workers need to spend a bit more time on, is protecting their own peace of mind. Job burnout is common for mental health care workers. Many suffer from being over-stressed while at the same time neglecting to take care of themselves.
They might be forced to take some time off to recover from a physical illness. However, they may not notice that they are being worn down mentally because this can be an incremental process that makes its negative impact felt over time.
High Burnout Rates for Mental Healthcare Professionals
A study published in the medical journal, Administrative Policy Mental Health, called Burnout in Mental Health Services found that up to 67% of mental healthcare professionals suffer from job burnout. Most of those studied suffered from emotional exhaustion. Many suffered from depersonalization. They suffered from these problems even while also feeling the satisfaction of high personal accomplishment in their work.
Improved Billing Administration Provides Stress Relief
Sole practitioners and small clinics that specialize in treating behavior mental health problems can improve operations and workflow by working with behavioral health billing consultants to lighten the paperwork burden placed on the practitioners and the staff for the billing processes. This allows the staff to focus more on patient services. It also allows time to be taken off, by the mental health care providers, for personal recovery and de-stressing.
Even larger administrative groups are finding that dealing with job burnout is important. Job satisfaction increases when healthcare practitioners concentrate on patient care instead of having to deal with all the busy work that normally is part of the billing process.
The High Cost of Employee Burnout
Not only is an individual who is suffering from job burnout affected by the negative condition, but there is also a tendency for the organization to be negatively impacted as well. Employee turnover is higher when job satisfaction decreases. Absenteeism becomes more of a problem and the efficiency of an organization is challenged when there is a high level of job burnout experienced by the staff.
Managing a heavy caseload creates a high possibility of overworking that leads to fatigue, exhaustion and then burnout.
Summary
Organizations that embrace a strategy of outsourcing the administration of billing find that this provides significant relief for the mental healthcare staff. Cost-efficiencies are possible as well. It makes a stronger long-term strategy to improve billing processing by outsourcing the work, to take some pressure off of the staff to give them more time to spend with patients and less stress.
