It is an unpleasant fact that many dental practices lose revenue and have to write off hundreds or thousands of dollars each year due to inefficient insurance billing processes. Most dental practices are not receiving what they are owed. To solve this issue, the best solution is to outsource dental insurance billing. Let’s understand why.
For a dental office, there are two components of billing:
Patient billing is the amount that is collected from a patient, whereas insurance billing is the amount claimed by the office from the insurer. By outsourcing dental billing, you ensure the following increases your billing and collection.
Maximizes dental claim ratio
A good dental insurance biller will maintain a claim ratio of more than 90-95%. As any unpaid insurance claim is a big hit to the practice, a high claim ratio will ensure that the business remains healthy, cash-rich, and profitable
Improves the fundamentals of the business
Let’s be real. The primary responsibility of a dental practice should be to provide the greatest possible care to their patients. However, a dental practice needs to focus too much on its billing process to ensure proper cash flow and revenue generation. How can this help? It takes away the valuable time that could be spent with patients or patients with unscheduled appointments or simply connecting with your team.
Outsourcing dental billing services ensure that your practice is relieved from the burden of dental billing, which in turn allows you to spend more time and build healthy relations with your patients, which in the long run improves the dental practice’s process, reputation, and ultimately financial position.
Reduces complexity and improves the consistency of claims
Insurance agencies try everything in the book to reject claims, whether it be changing the policies, requesting complex documents that some practices may have difficulty arranging, or simply delaying the process until it surpasses the approval window.
It is best advised that a claim be made within 24 hours of the service performed, as most insurance agencies have strict windows within which claims must be filed. Additionally, claims older than 30 days should be strictly monitored under an aging report, as many insurers will not accept claims older than 60-90 days.
Outsourcing billing ensures you have a dedicated team of experts that continuously adapt to changing codes and file quick and precise claims.
It also improves the practice’s efficiency by streamlining the following:
Reduces operational costs and overhead
Dental practices recruit skilled employees for dental billing operations. These employees, like any other employees, require training, benefits, vacation, and finally, the capital. It takes time for employees to become subject matter experts (SMEs) in the process, and even then, the process keeps continuously changing.
Outsourcing the dental billing process gives your practice access to various experts on various aspects of billing. The team keeps an eye on trends that affect the billing process. For example, when an insurance provider is observed to ask for multiple corrections, the team can adjust their strategy of dealing with that insurer by forming standard operating procedures (SOPs) for the dental practice and reducing the time after which the claim moves into the aging report.
Even when a claim is denied (whether it be at your dental practice or another), a team of dental billing experts is highly efficient in following up to understand the root cause and retraining the team and dental practice to adjust to new processes to ensure non-repetition of similar denials.
This will ultimately reduce overall operational costs by almost 35% and drastically reduce adjustment time with the billing service provider.
To summarize, outsourcing dental billing services not only improves your claims and finances but also helps your practice’s competency and reputation in the long run. It is a must-have for the dental practice to perform at its highest efficiency.
