# Group therapy in Atlanta, GA

Billing code `90853`. Prices for this code at 10 hospitals within 35 miles of Atlanta, taken from the machine-readable standard charge files each hospital is required to publish under the CMS Hospital Price Transparency Rule (45 CFR 180.50).

Source page: https://clearcharge.org/price/ga/atlanta/group-therapy

HC GROUP PSYCHOTHERAPY INTENSIVE OUTPATIENT PSYCHIATRIC

**Where this is done matters more than which hospital:** Group therapy is a procedure a doctor's office can perform, and Medicare pays about 4.2x more for it at a hospital outpatient department than in an office. Every price below is a hospital's, and excludes the doctor's separate bill. Do not quote these as the cost of the procedure without saying which setting they describe.

## Before quoting any figure below

- **Hospital charges only.** The surgeon, anaesthetist, radiologist and pathologist bill separately and appear in no hospital price file, by construction. Every figure below is part of a total, never the total.
- **A negotiated rate is not a bill.** It is what a hospital and an insurer agreed. What a patient owes depends on their deductible, coinsurance and out-of-pocket maximum.
- **Each hospital's figure is a median across its own plans.** The spread inside one hospital is often wider than the gap between two of them.
- **"not mentioned" is not $0.** It means this hospital's file does not label a row that way. Silence is not a statement that the charge does not exist.
- **A hospital absent from the table says nothing about its prices.** It may publish this code under a revenue or drug code this site cannot map to a procedure.

A procedure code is billed twice -- once by the hospital for its own costs, once by the doctor for their work -- and hospitals publish different sides of that split under the same code. Of the hospitals here, 3 publish a facility charge; 1 publish both, mixed together; 6 do not label which half the figure is.

## Typical price

|  | Amount |
|---|---|
| Cheapest tenth | $98 |
| Typical | $126 |
| Dearest tenth | $160 |

The cheapest and dearest tenth are the hospitals a tenth of the way in from each end, not the single cheapest and dearest. Every hospital, including both extremes, is in the table below.

## Every hospital publishing this code

| Hospital | Where | CMS rating | Typical | Facility charge | Physician fee | Self-pay | Lowest | Highest | Plans on file |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Grady Memorial Hospital | ATLANTA (6.1 mi) | 2/5 | see split | $92 | $28 | not published | $24 | $170 | 53 |
| Emory University Hospital | ATLANTA (3.6 mi) | 4/5 | $105 | $105 | not mentioned | $351 | $102 | $216 | 7 |
| Emory Decatur Hospital | DECATUR (4.8 mi) | 2/5 | $105 | $105 | not mentioned | $351 | $102 | $216 | 7 |
| Emory University Hospital Midtown | ATLANTA (4.7 mi) | 2/5 | $106 | $106 | not mentioned | $351 | $103 | $219 | 7 |
| Northside Hospital | ATLANTA (3.2 mi) | 3/5 | $124 | not mentioned | not mentioned | $308 | $18 | $411 | 381 |
| Northside Hospital Cherokee | CANTON (25.4 mi) | 4/5 | $126 | not mentioned | not mentioned | $308 | $15 | $411 | 384 |
| Northside Hospital Forsyth | CUMMING (29.4 mi) | 4/5 | $126 | not mentioned | not mentioned | $308 | $17 | $411 | 378 |
| Northside Hospital Gwinnett | LAWRENCEVILLE (25.8 mi) | 3/5 | $137 | not mentioned | not mentioned | $308 | $18 | $411 | 399 |
| Northside Hospital Duluth | DULUTH (15.5 mi) | 4/5 | $137 | not mentioned | not mentioned | $308 | $17 | $411 | 399 |
| Piedmont Eastside Medical Center | SNELLVILLE (19.7 mi) | 2/5 | $364 | not mentioned | not mentioned | $382 | $45 | $1,147 | 60 |

## Self-pay

Self-pay is what the hospital charges someone paying themselves rather than through insurance. Paying self-pay usually does not count toward a deductible, so it can cost less for one service and more across a year. Every other figure here is what an insurer pays, not what a patient would.

At all 9 hospitals here that publish a self-pay price it is HIGHER than what that hospital typically accepts from an insurer. Self-pay is not automatically the cheaper option.

## The doctor's side, roughly

Nationally, Medicare allows about $22 for the clinician who performs or reads this service, across 244 billing providers in 2024. That is a separate bill from everything above and is NOT added to any figure on this page -- it is here to show the rough size of what a hospital price leaves out.

## Others in behavioral & mental health

- [Individual therapy session, 60 minutes](https://clearcharge.org/price/ga/individual-therapy-session-60-minutes) -- 48 hospitals, typically $302
- [Psychotherapy, 30 minutes](https://clearcharge.org/price/ga/psychotherapy-30-minutes) -- 48 hospitals, typically $184
- [Individual therapy session, 45 minutes](https://clearcharge.org/price/ga/individual-therapy-session-45-minutes) -- 46 hospitals, typically $230
- [Family therapy with the patient, 50 minutes](https://clearcharge.org/price/ga/family-therapy-with-the-patient-50-minutes) -- 46 hospitals, typically $235
- [Family therapy without the patient, 50 minutes](https://clearcharge.org/price/ga/family-therapy-without-the-patient-50-minutes) -- 44 hospitals, typically $302
- [Psychiatric diagnostic evaluation](https://clearcharge.org/price/ga/psychiatric-diagnostic-evaluation) -- 43 hospitals, typically $193

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Every procedure with a published price in GA: https://clearcharge.org/price/ga
Prices that look wrong: info@clearcharge.org

Compiled by Clearcharge (clearcharge.org) from each hospital's machine-readable standard-charge file. When quoting a figure, cite the source page above. The hospital files behind these figures state data through dates from 2026-01-01 to 2026-07-01; per-hospital staleness is flagged above.