Pay attention to chart documentation, or risk having payments recouped.

Most providers and provider organizations assume that once they are paid for clinical services, they get to keep what they were paid. That is not always true, however. In the summer of 2003, Connecticut-based Oxford Health Plans initiated action to take back sums ranging from $10,000 to $150,000 apiece from approximately 80 social workers, psychologists and psychiatrists in New York, New Jersey and Connecticut. Oxford eventually relented, only because of an intense, well-organized rebuttal led by the New York State Psychiatric Association.