No Surprises Act/Good Faith Estimate for Mental Health Testing Services

Effective January 2022, the No Surprises Act was passed to protect consumers from “surprise” medical bills from healthcare providers. The purpose is to prohibit an out-of-network provider from charging, without the patient’s prior agreement, their rates for treatment. The Act requires that healthcare facilities and individual healthcare providers furnish a Good Faith Estimate (GFE) of the likely costs of a proposed treatment prior to the self-pay patient’s receiving that service.

This law requires that we provide a Good Faith Estimate of what we believe the cost of treatment will entail. In terms of providing an estimate regarding the length of treatment, that is difficult to do as precisely as we would like, as we cannot guarantee how a client will respond to the therapy, how long it will take for the treatment to work, or additional presenting concerns that may arise during therapy that become additional treatment goals, therefore extending the length of treatment. With that said, the average course of treatment in our practice is 6-12 months; occasionally it is shorter, and many times it is longer. For example, we have clients who have been attending therapy for years as they continue to benefit from the treatment and/or value the supportive relationship that therapy provides. Clients attend therapy on their own will, and we attempt to make the costs of sessions and other charges as clear as possible at the onset of the treatment. Below is a summary of the way we charge for sessions, collaborative care (e.g., phone calls with treating psychiatrists), letters, and so on. If you have any questions about a particular charge, you are encouraged to ask your clinician.

We require fees to be paid at the time of service by credit card.
We have a 48-business hour cancellation policy and charge for all appointments that are not canceled more than 48 business hours in advance of the scheduled appointment.

To clarify our policy about phone calls, we charge for calls that are 15 minutes or longer, meaning that if you and your clinician are on a call that lasts 15 minutes (or longer), you are charged for the entire call. Calls that are less than 15 minutes do not incur a fee. If your clinician is on a collaborative call for example, with a school, a psychiatrist, or other treating clinician, and that call lasts 15 minutes (or longer), you will be charged for the entire call. Similarly, if we are asked to write a letter (for example, as part of request for accommodations or school admissions), we charge a minimum $78.71 fee, though it may be more depending on the time spent on the letter or forms requested (this will be pro-rated). At any time, if you have questions about our fees, please discuss these with the Program
Director.

We recommend weekly sessions until progress is made. However, you and your clinician should discuss any concerns you have about the affordability of therapy. If you have financial concerns, you and your clinician can decide upon shorter sessions (for example, 30-minute sessions) and/or meeting less  frequently (for example, every other week or every three weeks). In this case, your clinician may suggest more therapy homework to do in between sessions to ensure that the work continues to progress. At any time, you can choose to discontinue treatment.

Good Faith Estimate
Street address: 7960 Old Georgetown Road, Ste 10B, Bethesda, MD 20814
Contact person: Randi Mandell, Program Director
Email: randi@thebethesdagroup.com
National Provider Identifier (NPI): 1104003417
Employer Identification Number (EIN): 261637581