Home Forums Discussions Coding and Billing Getting paid for mental health screening

We like to screen our patients for anxiety/depression/bi-polar disorder. The code for this is 96150. But despite communications asking PCPs to do more of this, we have a hard time getting paid. There seems to be a variety of blocks put in place to not pay for the screening. E.g., the patient must come in specifically for this problem (I forget which company that was). Now, Alice has liked to do this even before all of the publicity about undiagnosed mental illness, because she found that so many of her patients seemed to have some type of disorder but she had no way to actaully screen and have data on it. We now use PHQ-9 and MDQ as part of our intake forms. But we can't get paid for it. Usually. Does anyone (PCPs)get consistently paid for mental health screening?