Healthcare IT Blog

Your intake coordinator is staring at a consent form, unsure whether the new rules let her share a patient's SUD treatment history with the primary care office down the hall. Your compliance officer is wondering if last year's forms are still valid. If that sounds familiar, you're not behind. You're just catching up to a rule that's been rolling out for two years. And if your program bills per diem or ASAM levels of care, the compliance stakes are even higher -- the payer rules governing inpatient SUD billing intersect directly with how Part 2 records can be used and shared.

Most behavioral health and addiction treatment organizations do not switch EHRs because they want to. They switch because the general-purpose system they started with cannot keep up with ASAM level-of-care documentation, 42 CFR Part 2 consent rules, or the reporting a payer now demands before it will pay a claim.

Your clinician finishes a session and spends the next ten minutes reformatting the note to fit a template built for a strep throat visit. The PHQ-9 score from last visit lives in a different tab. The consent form for a patient with a co-occurring substance use disorder is a scanned PDF nobody can find during an audit. None of that shows up in a sales demo.

Denial rates are climbing. Prior authorization is consuming staff time organizations can't afford to lose. And most BH systems weren't built to handle any of it. Here's the reality — and what the practices holding their ground are doing differently.

Run a behavioral health practice? Visit our Behavioral Health Solutions page → to see how ADS supports practices like yours. A per diem claim for a residential patient comes back denied. The level of care does not match the authorization on file. The consent form for the disclosure is outdated under the new federal rule. And your utilization review team is now reconstructing three weeks of documentation to defend a stay that already happened.

When behavioral health practices evaluate whether to keep billing in-house or outsource revenue cycle management (RCM), the comparison often begins with a single number: the biller’s salary. Unfortunately, that number rarely reflects the true cost of managing behavioral health billing internally.

Something changed on January 31, 2026 that most behavioral health practices are not prepared for. Medicare updated its telehealth requirements for mental health services, and the consequences are not warnings or penalties. They are automatic claim denials with no path to appeal.

Telehealth has permanently reshaped behavioral health care.

For psychiatrists, inpatient behavioral health facilities, and substance abuse treatment programs, 2026 is a pivotal year.

Behavioral health providers and stakeholders face unique financial and administrative challenges that can directly impact the stability of their practice.