Behavioral Health & Substance Use Disorder·Published September 2026

$3.28 million in revenue leakage identified, recovered, and eliminated

An inpatient behavioral health and substance use disorder provider across four states was losing revenue in the gaps between charge capture, authorization, eligibility, and A/R follow-up. MBS ran an onsite revenue cycle diagnostic, quantified every leak, and put controls in place to close them.

Revenue leakage recovered: $3.28M
A/R days: 40 to 21
Authorization approval rate: 98%
Collected within 60 days: 94%

Talk about your numbers

Specialty

Behavioral Health & Substance Use Disorder

Practice size

~15,000 patients a year

Locations

Pennsylvania, Delaware, Washington DC, Maryland

Setting

Inpatient

Case timeline

Jul – Oct 2024 (4 months)

Engagement objective

What the client needed

Identify revenue leakage and quantify the financial impact.
Implement corrective and preventive controls.
Streamline and standardize revenue cycle operations.

Starting position

The challenges

Charge capture gaps and missed billing: about $500,000 at risk.
High accounts receivable and timely filing failures: roughly $1.3–1.5 million recoverable.
Fragmented authorization management: about $750,000 at risk.
Eligibility not consistently verified: about $350,000 at risk.
Ineffective denial posting and delayed payment posting, costing leadership visibility.

Solutions

What MBS put in place

Clear ownership, agreed onsite

Onsite revenue cycle diagnostic to assess workflows, identify process gaps, and uncover leakage.
In-house and outsourced responsibilities defined through collaborative onsite planning.
Reconciliation-based payment and denial posting.

Front-end controls

48-hour authorization checks and utilization review consolidation with unified authorization tracking.
Daily eligibility verification with escalation for inactive or terminated policies.

Charge capture and A/R discipline

Centralized charge capture and daily claim submission with escalation controls.
Centralized accounts receivable worklists with priority follow-up.

Impact

What changed

$1.60 million in additional annualized revenue through process improvement, plus $1.68 million recovered from outstanding claims.
An average of $7.87 million in revenue collected each month.
Improved cash flow predictability and reduced authorization and eligibility-related revenue risk.
Faster claim submission and accounts receivable resolution.
A scalable RCM foundation supported by dashboards and tracking tools.

Recovery

Where the $3.28 million came from

Recovered revenue by RCM function

Recovered revenue by RCM function
RCM function	Financial impact
Charges and claims	$500,000
Eligibility verification	$350,000
Authorizations risk mitigation	$750,000
Accounts receivable recovery	$1,680,000
Total revenue leak recovered	$3,280,000

Time to first results

The full diagnostic, corrective controls, and recovery ran over a four-month engagement from July to October 2024.

Why it worked

The operating model behind the result

An onsite diagnostic that quantified each leak instead of estimating a single number.
Responsibilities split explicitly between the client's team and MBS.
Preventive front-end controls on authorization and eligibility, not just back-end recovery.
Daily submission and priority A/R worklists with escalation built in.
Dashboards and tracking that keep the controls in place after the engagement.

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