FAQs
The 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 3:00 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 doctor has their own office hours that are available upon request.
Please plan to arrive at least 15 minutes early to your first appointment to allow for necessary paperwork. All of the doctors have paperwork for you to do that will help them to evaluate you in the appointment and the office staff have additional paperwork for you to fill out. Individual doctors may require additional pages of forms filled out, so please arrive early for your first appointment unless you decide to complete all of your forms early (they are available on this website or by calling the office and requesting them).
If you have been treated by another psychiatrist, please consider filling 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 doctor. If your primary care doctor has already started treating you with psychiatric medications, you should consider filling 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 doctor you will be seeing 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 (you are responsible for payment for any service you receive that is not covered by your insurance).
During the actual visit, the doctors will ask you questions about what symptoms or problems you have been experiencing that have caused you to schedule the appointment in the office. They need to know if you've seen another doctor about your symptoms before, so having contact information about your past providers will be helpful (it's even better if the records are available during your visit). They will also want to know about all of your medications (not just medicine that psychiatrists have given you) and all of your past medical problems.
The doctors at Mental Health Partners all follow a bio-psycho-social model of psychiatric 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 doctors at Mental Health Partners 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 doctor is in-network, you may owe for the entire cost of the visit.
Currently, the doctors are network providers for Aetna, Blue Cross/Blue Shield PPO (Preferred Care Blue only), Cigna (Dr. Martin only), Multiplan, United Healthcare, and possibly a few others. None of the doctors at Mental Health Partners are Medicare, Tricare/Champus, or Medicaid (Kancare, etc...) providers. Private contracts may be required if you have Medicare, Medicaid, or Tricare/Champus and payment would have to be done on a "cash" basis with a possible discount depending on your situation (see the question about fees below). 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 doctor 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 must use a receipt that we can provide 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 receipt, and you will have to file the claim with your insurance company without any additional help from our office.
Follow-up visits are determined by each individual doctor on a case by case basis. They can range from just a one-time consultation to regular appointments for treatment and follow-up. The regular visits typically vary between every 1 to 2 weeks and every 2 to 3 months. If you receive medication from one of the doctors at Mental Health Partners, you must come for follow-up visits 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 from the office.
Beginning January 1, 2013, the American Medical Association dramatically changed the way that all psychiatrists must bill for their services. This has made calculating fees for a single visit quite a bit more complicated than they once were. Generally, a self-pay patient will incur a fee of $300 for an initial visit, $200 for a ~40 minute follow up visit, $160 for a ~25 minute follow up visit, and, occasionally, when offered by your doctor, $80 for a ~10 minute follow up visit.
The actual fee schedule that is based on the Current Procedural Terminology (CPT) codes that we are required to use is available upon request, and actual visit fees for complicated visits and insured patients may vary depending on the circumstances. For patients that do not have medical insurance, there may be a discount depending on the doctor you are seeing, but only if the balance of your account is kept at $0. This discount is subject to change.
Aside from your normal appointment fees, the most common charge in our office occurs when the doctors provide psychiatric consultations or psychotherapy over the telephone. Most other psychiatric offices handle telephone calls with an "on call" physician and by providing very limited services (suggesting a follow up appointment or further evaluation at the emergency room or psychiatric hospital). All of our doctors are available to their own patients at any time to handle urgent situations (with some exceptions of "on call" coverage during vacations, etc...). For any routine matter, it is much preferred for patients to receive their care during a regular office appointment.
The doctors at Mental Health Partners believe that you should have access to your own doctor who, when it is appropriate, might be able to make more significant changes to your treatment or provide psychotherapy over the telephone. No insurance company currently offers to cover this type of service. If you choose to take advantage of it, it will be billed directly to you at the following rates:
0-5 min ($ 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 doctor has to do outside of your regular visits will also incur a time based fee that is identical to the above noted telephone charges. Common uses for this include Family and Medical Leave Act (FMLA) paperwork, letters, disability paperwork, some medication prior authorization paperwork, patient assistance paperwork, and any other administrative task that requires direct involvement of your doctor.
Copies of medical records that are sent to a new doctor are typically free, however, copies for non-physicians 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 testimony. Additionally, there is a $10 fee when you come to pickup handwritten prescriptions done by your doctor outside of a normal clinic visit.
Unless canceled at least 1 business day in advance, our policy is to charge for missed appointments at the rate of $100.00. The doctors at Mental Health Partners do NOT double book appointments in order to insure patients are seen in a timely fashion. When appointments are not canceled 1 business day in advance, there is not enough time to schedule another patient during that appointment time.
Please expect to be charged for any appointment that you miss or fail to cancel on time. Although there may be extraordinary situations where the doctors may forgive some or all of the charges associated with a missed appointment or late cancellation, do not count on this being the case. The doctors will only discuss fees with patients during regular office appointments and the office staff are unable to determine when circumstances warrant special consideration.
First of all, please try to let your doctor know if you need refills for medications at your normal office visit. 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 try to telephone, fax, or electronically request a refill for you.
If you have tried this method and given us 2 to 3 business days to respond, but are still told by your pharmacy that no refill has been authorized, please call the office staff. We will need your name, birth date, medication name and strength, and the directions you have been given to take it (i.e. twice daily, at bedtime, etc...). The most common reasons for mishaps with medication refills are not providing enough wait time and not checking with the pharmacy to see that it is already done. All of the doctors at Mental Health Partners try to refill medications as quickly as possible. Thus, making multiple phone calls can only slow the process and not speed it up.
The doctors at Mental Health Partners 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 regular office appointment. All prescription refill requests require 2 to 3 business days notice and cannot be filled on an emergency basis. It is your responsibility to monitor the prescription prior to completely running out and to give the doctors a reasonable amount of time to call and for the pharmacy to refill the medication.
