AI revenue integrity for behavioral health

Downcoded sessions and denied admissions cost behavioral health recoverable revenue every day.

Behavioral health revenue lives in high-volume time-based sessions and high-stakes level-of-care stays, time-tier downcoding, missing E/M add-ons, concurrent-review lapses, and MAT/OTP frequency edits. Manual billing teams catch a fraction of the errors. Ember catches all of them.

57%denial rate reduction
100%encounters reviewed
3 daysto first results

Trusted by specialty groups and health systems

Where behavioral health revenue leaks

Top behavioral health denials Ember resolves

Ember addresses the recurring authorization, documentation, benefit, and billing issues that delay or reduce payment for behavioral health care.

01 · Authorization

Sessions deny when authorization requirements or visit limits are missed.

Behavioral health plans may require authorization by session, episode, or level of care. Ember helps teams track authorization status, session limits, and frequency requirements before care turns into a denial.

Session authorization · Visit limits

02 · Insufficient documentation

Claims fail when the record does not support the service, setting, or billed session.

Telehealth modifiers and place-of-service reporting must align with the documented encounter. Ember reviews the session record for the details needed to support the billed service and reduce preventable documentation denials.

Telehealth modifiers · POS

03 · Coordination of benefits

Carve-out plan complexity sends claims to the wrong benefit or payer.

Behavioral health benefits may be administered separately from the member's medical plan. Ember helps teams identify the responsible plan and coordinate benefits before submission.

Carve-out plans · Benefit coordination

Three engines.
One source of truth.

Ember connects clinical documentation, payer policy, and contract terms into a single intelligence layer. Built for the time-based sessions, telehealth rules, and level-of-care reviews behavioral health billing requires.

01 · Foundation

Data Engine

Bridges the clinical and the financial. Unifies documentation, coding decisions, payer policy, and contracts across every session, admission, and provider.

T. Brooks

Session #B-70244

Unified
Documentation
Individual therapy, 53 min
Coding
90837F33.195 (telehealth)
Payer policy
Optum · Behavioral
Contract
Rate §2.1

02 · Audit

Coding Engine

Reviews 100% of sessions and encounters against national standards, payer-specific policies, your internal guidelines, and your payer contracts. Every flag carries a rule citation.

Audit#B-70244
90791Diagnostic evaluation
Pass
9083453 min documented, undercoded
Flag

Code 90837 — 53 min supports 60-min tier

CPT time rules · confidence 0.96

03 · Recovery

Appeal Engine

Reads CARC and RARC codes, identifies the applicable medical-necessity policy and contract terms, drafts the appeal letter, packages documentation, and tracks every claim to adjudication.

Re: Claim #B-70244 · Denial CO-50

Partial hospitalization meets medical-necessity criteria under LCD L34520: documented acuity and failed lower level of care, per contract §2.1

Denial received
Appeal drafted
Submitted · in review
Adjudication pending

Audit upstream.
Appeal downstream.

Two workflows do most of the work for behavioral health practices. The first prevents denials before they happen. The second recovers the ones that slip through.

Pre-bill audit

Catch the downcoded session before the claim leaves.

Ember reviews every session against coding standards, payer behavioral policy, and your contracts. Time-tier downcoding, missing add-ons, telehealth modifiers, and level-of-care auth gaps are flagged before submission.

  • 1

    Ingest the encounter

    Pulls session notes, documented time, treatment plans, and level-of-care records from your EHR and practice management system.

  • 2

    Validate against rules

    Checks psychotherapy time tiers and E/M add-ons, telehealth modifiers, MAT/OTP frequency, and level-of-care auth status against each payer's specific policies.

  • 3

    Recommend with citation

    Returns the suggested correction tied to the exact payer policy, coding rule, or contract term.

  • 4

    Educate the provider

    Coding patterns drive clinician-level coaching, so session documentation and time capture improve across every provider.

Session review#B-70244
99213E/M, med management
Pass
9083453 min, undercoded
Flag
90833Add-on therapy missing
Flag

Recode 90837 + add 90833 — time supports both

CPT time rules · confidence 0.97

+23%

Clean-claim rate

100%

Encounters reviewed

+5%

Net collection rate

Automated appeals

Pull. Review. Push.

When a denial occurs, Ember identifies the root cause, retrieves session notes, treatment plans, and concurrent-review records, references payer medical-necessity policy and contract terms, drafts the appeal, and tracks it through adjudication.

Pull12
CO-50

Level-of-care necessity

CO-151

Frequency exceeded

Review7
CO-97

Add-on bundled

Push9
CO-197

Auth not on file

Learn
PAID

PHP stay appeal

-57%

Denial rate

-45%

Cost to collect

+9.3%

Net revenue per visit

The full revenue cycle

From eligibility to adjudication. Covered.

Audit and appeals are the workhorses, but Ember protects behavioral health revenue at every stage of the cycle.

Eligibility Verification

Confirms active coverage and behavioral benefit structure before the visit, and flags telehealth and level-of-care coverage gaps before they become billing problems.

Prior Auth & Concurrent Review

Secures authorization for IOP, PHP, and residential admissions, generates the clinical documentation payers require, and tracks continued-stay review deadlines automatically.

AI Medical Coding

Reviews 100% of sessions, time-based psychotherapy, E/M add-ons, MAT/OTP, and telehealth, against national standards and payer rules before claims submit.

Pre-bill Audit

Predicts and prevents denials before claims go out, catching time-tier downcoding, missing add-ons, and frequency-edit issues before they generate write-offs.

Denial Management

Full appeal lifecycle for every behavioral denial type, level-of-care necessity, frequency edit, bundling, and auth failure, tracked to adjudication.

Underpayment Recovery

Parses contracts to model what each session, admission, and MAT claim should pay, then surfaces line-item underpayments at scale.

Session and level-of-care revenue, recovered

-57%

denial rate

-45%

cost to collect

100%

encounters audited

3 days

to first results

Based on Ember AI benchmarks across customer practices. Results vary by payer mix and specialty.

Frequently asked questions

Everything you need to know about how Ember fits into your revenue cycle.

Yes. Ember AI connects seamlessly with all major EHRs and PMS platforms, including Epic, Oracle Cerner, athenahealth, and eClinicalWorks, as well as payer portals. Our standards-based integrations automate prior authorization, eligibility verification, and claims submission, allowing you to preserve existing infrastructure while modernizing the revenue cycle.
Ember AI deployments are measured in weeks, not months. Most organizations complete pilot launch in under 30 days and scale enterprise-wide within a quarter. We provide a structured onboarding playbook, technical support, and change-management guidance so your teams achieve measurable ROI rapidly with minimal IT lift.
Yes. Ember AI is fully HIPAA compliant, SOC 2 Type II attested, and HITRUST e1 certified, and signs Business Associate Agreements (BAAs) with all covered entities. Protected Health Information (PHI) is encrypted in transit and at rest, supported by role-based access controls, detailed audit logging, and continuous monitoring. Your organization retains complete ownership and control of its data.
Health systems, MSOs, and health plans using Ember AI typically achieve:

- 65% less manual effort, as reported by customers
- Faster cash acceleration
- Prevent 55%+ of denials

We provide ROI benchmarks and dashboards so you can track outcomes from day one.
Yes. Ember's coding and scrubbing logic is specialty-aware, it understands time-based psychotherapy codes, E/M add-on therapy, MAT and opioid treatment program billing, level-of-care rules for IOP/PHP/residential, and telehealth requirements, and validates documentation against payer medical-necessity criteria before submission.
Ember reads the documented face-to-face time and selects the correct psychotherapy code (90832, 90834, 90837), and pairs add-on psychotherapy with an E/M service (90833, 90836, 90838) when both are supported, so sessions are billed at the level the documentation proves instead of being downcoded or denied.
Yes. Ember applies the right codes and frequency rules for medication-assisted treatment and OTP services, buprenorphine, methadone, and weekly bundled OTP G-codes, and confirms coverage, so addiction-medicine claims aren't denied on bundling or frequency edits.
Yes. Ember checks eligibility, secures prior authorization for IOP, PHP, and residential admissions, gathers the clinical documentation payers require, and tracks continued-stay review deadlines, so authorized care doesn't turn into a denied stay mid-treatment.
Ember connects to your existing EHR/PMS and payer systems with standards-based integrations, no rip-and-replace. Most teams pilot in days and see measurable ROI before scaling across service lines.

See what your behavioral health practice is leaving on the table

Bring us 30 days of denial data. We'll show you where the revenue is and exactly how Ember would recover it.