Why Dietitians Don’t Have to Choose Between Accepting Insurance or Cash
Most dietitians and CNSs think you have to choose.
But I am a girl who loves options.
So trust me when I tell you I would never rope myself into something I needed to commit to without wiggle room.
Hi, I am Amy Plano, The Reimbursement Dietitian. I help dietitians and CNSs scale their insurance practices to six figures. In today’s blog, I will explain why dietitians don’t need to choose between accepting insurance or cash in their private nutrition practices.
Accepting Insurance or Accepting Cash?
The cool thing is you can choose to do one or the other.
Or you can choose to do both.
As an insurance-based dietitian, you can bill insurance for the face-to-face time you spend (in person or virtual) providing Medical Nutrition Therapy (MNT). For the ‘other’ stuff, you can directly charge the patient. Therefore, if a service you offer is NOT MNT, you can totally 100 percent offer it to the patient. You can charge them (NOT insurance!) directly for the service(s) if they want it. This means the age-old fallacy that you have to choose between accepting insurance or accepting cash is false.
If you prefer the video version of this blog please feel free to watch below.
So Many Options for Dietitians
The sky is endless relative to the a la carte services and programs you can offer your patients. It depends on who your ideal client is and what services you think they would benefit from as the subject matter expert.
Some services RDs offer include DUTCH Testing, GI Mapping, meal plans, metabolism testing, DEXA scans, online courses, email check-ins, etc. I could go on and on about these types of services because there are so many things many dietitians can do in addition to MNT that support their patients in getting incredible outcomes.
However, it boils down to what services help deliver the best results for your clients.
Is This Sh*t Even Legal?
Of course, it is silly. I have personally been utilizing this model since 2009 with my PCOS patients.
Dietitians can ONLY bill insurance for the time spent counseling the patient. Therefore, for anything else they do (aside from charting, which is part of the billable portion for MNT), the patient can be billed for the services.
But securing patient consent is necessary, and patients can’t be forced to purchase these extra services.
If you participate with their insurance and they have diagnoses covered on their plan, you must allow them to receive only the MNT portion.
However, if you create these services well, their hand should shoot right up, and they will say, “I need [insert your AMAZING services] in my life. Here is my credit card.”
Join My Master Class all about those options: so you don’t have to choose between accepting insurance or cash
If you struggle with creating this TYPE of demand, I can help. I will be presenting live on Thursday, August 22, 2024, at 6:00 pm, on How to Integrate High Ticket Programs & Packages into Your Practice.
HERE is a link to enroll in this EPIC Master Class.
By the end of this Master Class, you will be able to describe the four critical aspects of reimbursement necessary to packages, identify my 6-phase process for seamlessly integrating insurance with packages, create a package of your own using insurance, define which types of services can be billed to the patient, define what services MUST be billed to insurance, explain what paperwork must be used when selling a la carte items in your insurance-based practice, identify at least ten potential revenue channels insurance-based dietitians can create in their practices, and formulate a pricing structure that gets you paid your worth.
As you guys know my Master Class always sell out. So jump on this opportunity today.
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