The MHP office is located on the second floor of the State Line 47 building on the Southwest corner of State Line Road and 47th Place in Westwood, Kansas. The address is 1901 West 47th Place, Suite 220.
The office staff are available in the office Monday through Thursday from 8:00 AM to 5:00 PM and on Fridays from 8:00 AM to 4:30 PM (occasionally staff are only available until 12:00 noon on Fridays). Telephones will be set to voice-mail from 11:30 AM to 12:30 PM daily in addition to nights and weekends. Occasionally, when staff are busy, you may get placed into the voice-mail system during normal office hours. Each psychiatric clinician has their own office hours that are available upon request.
Please complete all of your forms and make them available to our office staff at least one business day before a telemed appointment. The forms are available on this website for download or by calling the office and requesting them. Once in-office appointments are available again, plan to arrive at least 15 minutes early to your first appointment to allow for necessary paperwork with the office staff.
If you have been treated by another psychiatric clinician, please fill out a release for us to obtain your prior medical records before you come to the appointment. You can download the form on this website and send it to your prior clinician. If your primary care doctor has already started treating you with psychiatric medications, please fill out a release for us to obtain their records as well.
If you plan to use your medical insurance to cover all or part of your visit, please make sure you verify that the psychiatric clinician you will be seeing at MHP is covered on your plan and bring your insurance card to the visit with you. Even if you have insurance coverage, failure to bring your card may make it impossible for us to properly bill your insurance company, making you then responsible for payment for any service you receive that is not covered by your insurance.
During the actual visit, your psychiatric clinician will ask you questions about what symptoms or problems you have been experiencing that have caused you to schedule the appointment. They need to know if you've seen another clinician about your symptoms before, so having contact information about your past providers will be helpful (it's even better if the records are available to your clinicain during your visit). They will also want to know about all of your medications (not just medicine that psychiatric providers have given you) and all of your past medical problems.
The psychiatric clinicians at MHP all follow a bio-psycho-social model of clinical practice so they can treat the patient as a whole person and not just someone with a disease or condition. As a result, they may ask fairly sensitive and personal questions in order to try to better understand what they need to do to help you and why you might be having the symptoms that you are having.
Because of an antiquated system that separated mental health from other medical services, determining your coverage and benefits for visits to our clinic is significantly more complicated than it is with your other medical coverage. Most insurance plans use separate divisions or entirely different companies to manage your mental health benefits. Because of this confusing system, it is not possible to know for sure whether the psychiatric clinicians at MHP are in-network providers under your plan without contacting your insurance company directly. If you come for an appointment and have not contacted your insurance company to determine whether your clinician is in-network, you may owe for the entire cost of the visit.
Currently, the psychiatric clinicians at MHP are network providers for: Aetna, Blue Cross/Blue Shield PPO (Preferred Care Blue) and HMO (through New Directions as of 7/19/21), Cigna, Multiplan, United Healthcare, and possibly a few others.
None of the doctors at Mental Health Partners are providers for Tricare/Champus, Medicaid (Kancare, etc...) or Medicare (or its equivalents,such as Medicare Advantage). Private contracts may be required if you have Medicare, Medicaid, or Tricare/Champus and payment would then be done on a "cash" basis with a possible discount depending on your situation.
If we are not covered by your insurance we still offer competitive "cash" basis fees with a significant discount for those that keep their account balance paid (see the question about fees below).
If a psychiatric clinician at MHP is not covered by your plan and you still wish to see them, you might also be able to have some of your office visit charges covered if you have out-of-network benefits. If this is the case, you would use a receipt that we provide (a "super-bill") that contains all the information required by insurance companies to reimburse you directly. This requires that you pay for the visit in full before we can provide you with the "super-bill", and you will have to file the claim with your insurance company without any additional help from our office.
Frequency of follow-up visits is determined by each individual psychiatric clinician in discussion with their patient on a case by case basis. Aside from one-time consultations, the frequency of treatment follow-up visits typically varies between every 1-2 weeks and every 2-3 months, depending on the preference and needs of each patient. If you receive medication from one of the clinicians at MHP, you must come for follow-up visits at the frequency discussed with your clinican in order to continue receiving your medication. Missing appointments without giving proper and timely notification, especially if it happens on multiple occasions, may result in your termination of care from the office.
Beginning in 2013, the American Medical Association dramatically changed the way that all psychiatric clinicians must bill for their services. This has made calculating fees for a single visit quite a bit more complicated than they once were. Generally, the fee for a self-pay ("cash") patient is $280-320 for an initial visit, $200-280 for a ~40 minute follow up visit, $160-200 for a ~25 minute follow up visit, and, occasionally, when offered by your clinician, $80 for a ~10 minute follow up visit. These fees are reduced by 25% for keeping your balance at $0.
Aside from your regularly scheduled appointment fees, the most common fee in our office occurs when the psychiatric clinicians provide psychiatric consultations or psychotherapy over the telephone. Most other psychiatric clinician offices handle telephone calls with an "on call" clinician and by providing very limited services (suggesting a follow up appointment or further evaluation at the emergency room or psychiatric hospital). All of our psychiatric clinicians are available to their own patients at any time to handle urgent situations (with some exceptions of "on call" coverage during clinician vacations, etc.). For any routine matter, it is much preferred for patients to receive their care during a regularly scheduled appointment.
The psychiatric clinicians at MHP believe that you should have access to your own clinician who, when it is appropriate, might be able to make more significant changes to your treatment or provide psychotherapy over the telephone. If your insurance company doesn't currently cover this type of service, it will be billed directly to you at the following rates:
0-5 min ($ 0)
6-10 min ($ 40)
11-15 min ($ 60)
16-20 min ($ 80)
21-25 min ($100)
26-30 min ($120)
31-35 min ($140)
36-40 min ($160)
41-45 min ($180)
Any administrative tasks that your psychiatric clinician has to do outside of your regularly scheduled visits will also incur a time-based fee that is identical to the above noted telephone charges. Common examples include: Family and Medical Leave Act (FMLA) paperwork, letters, disability paperwork, some medication prior authorization paperwork, patient assistance medication program paperwork, and any other administrative task that requires direct involvement of your clinician.
Copies of medical records that are sent at your request to any other medical provider are typically free. However copies for non-clinical use (such as for disability reviewers or attorneys) will incur a fee that depends on the volume of information sent--please inquire with staff regarding your specific case. There is a specific fee schedule (available upon request) for legal paperwork, record review, and deposition testimony. Additionally, there is a $20 fee for prescription of any controlled medication needed from your psychiatric clinician outside of a scheduled visit (e.g., clonazepam, alprazolam, Adderall, Ritalin).
In order to insure that patients are seen in a timely fashion, the psychiatric clinicians at MHP do NOT double book appointments, as occurs in many larger mental health offices. Unless canceled at least 1 business day in advance, the fee for missed appointments is $100, as there is not enough time to schedule another patient during that appointment time. Please be courteous to other patients by making sure to be responsible in the scheduling and keeping of your appointments.
Please expect to be charged for any appointment that you miss or fail to cancel on time. Although there may be extraordinary situations where your psychiatric clinician at MHP may waive some or all of the charges associated with a missed appointment or late cancellation, do not count on this being the case. The clinicians will only discuss fees with patients during regularly scheduled appointments. The office staff are not authorized to determine when circumstances warrant this special consideration.
First of all, please try to let your psychiatric clinician know if you need refills for medications at your regularly scheduled visits. If, in spite of your best efforts, you find that you are going to run out of medicine before your appointment, please do not start by calling our office. Instead, call your pharmacy and ask them to contact us for you. The pharmacy will then call, fax, or electronically request a refill for you. This will allow them to check to see if you already have refills that you didn't realize you have.
If you have tried this method and given us 2 business days to respond, but are still told by your pharmacy that no refill has been authorized, please send an email to your psychiatric clinician at the portal or email address listed in their bio on this website. In these circumstances please provide: your name, birth date, medication name and strength, and the directions you have been given to take it (e.g. twice daily, at bedtime, etc...). Please do not text or call your clinician on their cell phone.
The most common reasons for mishaps with medication refills are not providing enough wait time (especially for ADD meds which are not "seen" by the pharmacist until the day they can be filled) and not checking with the pharmacy to see that a refill is already done. All of the clinicians at MHP try to refill medications as quickly as possible. Thus, making multiple phone calls can only slow the process and not speed it up.
The psychiatric clinicians at MHP do not want you to run out of your medication and will always fill appropriate refill requests in a timely manner, but please do your part to manage your medications and try to get refills taken care of at your regularly scheduled appointment. All prescription refill requests may take up to 2 business days for your clinician to refill when outside of a regularly scheduled appointment time. It is your responsibility to monitor each of your medication's refill status prior to completely running out in order to give your clinician a reasonable amount of time to e-prescribe and for your pharmacy to refill the medication.
