The whole mystery of credentialing is not easily explained.
Credentialing is the process that you have to go through to become a contracted provider with a health insurance company. WA State is the only state that allows this as far as I know.
It is really a mixed blessing. These companies lure you in with ideas that you will be getting a steady influx of new clients but forget to tell you what you have to do to get paid.
I am recently up for re-credentialing with a – I don’t know what the term is – third party network is all I can come up with. They represent about 6 different insurance companies. I just received the forms to fill out and the contract. These contracts really make you sign your rights away. You have to accept what they will pay you (which in all cases but one is way less than what I charge per hour.) I am hoping to opt out of the one’s that pay the least as it allows for in the contract, but when I asked one of their credentialing representatives, I was told it wasn’t possible. I’ll call again on Monday. This is the problem with these companies is that someone else will tell me a totally different answer.
The problem is that we really lack professional support from our associations. Our profession is so divided between 3 major associations, we lack any real cohesiveness to stand up for ourselves.
When I went to an AMTA-WA sponsored meeting with the insurance companies and other experts, the insurance companies said they are doing this basically because they can!
What they are doing as far as paying us such low rates and making it harder to get paid. And they are also creating a definition of “Medical or Clinical Massage” by creating a separate credentialing for that category of provider. The insurance companies are creating specific credentials that we need to have in order to be called a “Clinical Massage Therapist”. It is being taken out of our hands because our profession lacks the courage or the understanding of what is happening.
The benefits and pitfalls of credentialing – By Whitney Lowe
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Blogging helps build traffic and get the search engines viewing your site.
Here is an example of a blog nicely done by a massage therapist
http://www.650massage.com/blog/baysix.html
Julie,
I think it lies more with the fact that there’s no real definition or description of what we really do as massage therapists.
And because the massage industry is fairly new in the insurance industry there’s much room for improvements.
In reality, we’re not medical massage therapists because there isn’t any medicine involved in our work, i.e. surgery, Rx, Dx. Calling ourselves medical massage therapists is a misnomer. On the other hand we’re more likely to be clinical massage therapists.
Many of us work in clinics. It doesn’t have to necessarily look like a medical clinic; because we don’t deal with medicine.
Thank you for your blog. I couldn’t figure out if I wanted to use a blog with my website or not. I didn’t know what in the world I’d put in it. I certain couldn’t share client’s info there.
It would be nice to hear from the general massage client base however for feedback.
You’re doing a great job here.
Kimberly, LMP