Office Manager

Office Manager — Outpatient Behavioral Health

Position Title: Office Manager Department: Administration / Practice Operations Reports To:Clinical Director

FLSA Status: Exempt (Salaried)

Schedule: Full-time, on-site; occasional extended hours to support evening clinic or audit deadlines

Setting: Outpatient mental health and substance use treatment (IOP/OP, medication management, individual and group therapy, AcuDetox/NADA services)

Position Summary

The Office Manager is the operational anchor of the clinic. This position owns everything that happens between the moment a person first calls and the moment their claim is paid: front-office flow, insurance verification and authorization, multi-provider scheduling, intake completion, chart integrity, records requests, vendor and facility management, and day-to-day supervision of administrative staff.

 The Office Manager is accountable for the administrative half of regulatory compliance, including Joint Commission standards, HIPAA, and 42 CFR Part 2 for substance use records.

This role demands exceptional multitasking ability. On any given day the Office Manager will hold multiple provider schedules, several open authorizations in different stages, a payer on hold, a walk-in at the front desk, and a partially completed intake packet simultaneously, and without losing track of any of them. The successful candidate can be interrupted mid-task, handle the interruption competently, and return to the original task without error or restart.

Essential Duties and Responsibilities

1. Practice Operations & Front Office Management

• Own daily clinic flow: opening and closing procedures, lobby coverage, phone coverage, check-in/check-out, and patient throughput.
• Serve as the escalation point for patient complaints, scheduling conflicts, and front-desk problems; resolve at the lowest level possible and route clinical concerns to the Clinical Director immediately.
• Maintain a trauma-informed, de-escalated front-office environment. Model and enforce professional, non-judgmental communication with patients who may present in crisis, intoxicated, agitated, or distressed.
• Develop, document, and maintain written front-office workflows so that the practice does not depend on any one person's memory.
• Manage supply inventory, vendor relationships, equipment service contracts, shredding services, and facility maintenance requests.
• Coordinate with the Safety Officer on environment of care items observable at the front office: unobstructed egress, secured records, lobby safety, visitor control, and incident reporting.

1. Insurance Verification, Authorization & Revenue Cycle

• Verify eligibility and behavioral health benefits for every new patient prior to the first appointment, and re-verify at each plan year, plan change, or lapse in coverage.
• Document verification results completely: effective dates, copay, coinsurance, deductible and remaining deductible, out-of-pocket maximum, telehealth coverage, visit limits, and whether authorization is required for the specific level of care.
•  Maintain an authorization tracker with unit counts and expiration dates so that no session is delivered on an expired auth.
  
• Collect copays, coinsurance, deductibles, and outstanding balances at time of service; reconcile daily cash and card receipts and prepare the daily deposit log.

1. Multi-Provider Scheduling

• Build and maintain the master census across multiple therapists, prescribers, group facilitators
• Optimize schedule utilization: fill cancellations from a maintained waitlist, manage overbooking rules for high no-show cohorts, and protect prescriber slots for follow-ups and new starts.
• Operate and enforce the no-show and late-cancellation policy, including reminder calls/texts, documentation of contact attempts, and notification to the treating clinician when a pattern emerges that may indicate clinical disengagement.
• Coordinate group programming logistics: rosters, room assignments, capacity limits, and attendance tracking that feeds clinical documentation.
  
• Track and report scheduling metrics: time from first contact to intake, time from intake to first clinical session, utilization rate, no-show rate, and cancellation rate

1. Intake & Admissions

• Own the administrative intake process end to end: initial inquiry, screening for appropriateness and level of care, benefit verification, packet distribution, and scheduling of the clinical assessment.
• Ensure the intake packet is complete before the assessment is billed — consent to treat, consent for release of information, HIPAA Notice acknowledgment, financial responsibility agreement, patient rights and responsibilities, grievance procedure, telehealth consent where applicable, and demographic and emergency contact data.
• For minor patients, verify custody and consent authority before services begin, obtain and file the supporting documentation (custody order, guardianship, or parenting plan), and escalate any ambiguity to the Clinical Director before scheduling.
• Collect and record health equity and social-need data elements as required by organizational policy and accreditation standards.
• Route any screening response indicating imminent risk to a licensed clinician immediately per the clinic's risk escalation protocol. The Office Manager does not conduct clinical risk assessment.
• Maintain the intake pipeline and report conversion and drop-off rates to leadership.

Required Qualifications

• Bachelor's degree in healthcare administration, business, or a related field preferred.
• Minimum three years of progressively responsible medical office experience, with at least one year in a supervisory or lead capacity.
• Demonstrated hands-on experience with insurance verification and prior authorization in a behavioral health, substance use, or medical specialty setting.
• Proficiency with an electronic health record and practice management system; ability to learn new systems quickly and train others on them.
• Working knowledge of HIPAA. Willingness and ability to become fluent in 42 CFR Part 2 within 90 days of hire.
• Strong proficiency in Microsoft Excel or Google Sheets — able to build and maintain a tracker, not only read one.
• Demonstrated ability to multitask at a high level in a fast-paced, high-interruption clinical environment: managing concurrent priorities, shifting between unrelated tasks on demand, and maintaining accuracy and follow-through across all of them.
• Ability to pass a criminal background check and applicable registry screening.

Preferred Qualifications

• Prior experience in an outpatient behavioral health, addiction treatment, or community mental health setting.
• Experience supporting a Joint Commission, CARF, or state licensure survey.
• Experience with credentialing and CAQH maintenance.
• Bilingual (English/Spanish) capability.

Core Competencies

Operational judgment. Distinguishes what must be escalated from what should be solved on the spot, and does not send clinical questions to the front desk or administrative questions to a clinician mid-session.

Multitasking and task-switching. Manages numerous concurrent, unrelated workstreams without dropping any of them. Tracks open loops in a system rather than in memory, prioritizes fluidly as urgency shifts through the day, and re-sequences the plan when a clinician calls out or a crisis walks in. Comfortable operating with several applications, two phone lines, and a live lobby at once.

Detail discipline under interruption. Completes verification and authorization work accurately in an environment with a ringing phone and a lobby. Accuracy does not degrade as volume and interruption increase — the same care goes into the eleventh verification of the day as the first.

Boundaried warmth. Treats patients with dignity and without judgment while maintaining professional boundaries, confidentiality, and the ability to enforce policy.

Confidentiality instinct. Understands that in behavioral health and SUD treatment, an acknowledgment that someone is a patient is itself a disclosure.

Systems thinking. Builds repeatable processes and documentation instead of heroic individual effort.

Composure. Remains regulated and effective when a patient is escalated, a payer denies, or a clinician calls out with a full panel.