When you start receiving dental RCM (revenue cycle management) services, the expectation is that your dental practice is going to transform. You’re expecting a cleaned up dental insurance aging report, higher collections, and a less stressed out in-house team.
It’s been a few weeks or months since you began working with your RCM services company. Why is your insurance aging report still high?
Well, there are several factors that determine how quickly your dental business receives balances due for your services you do. The key is to pinpoint the factors you control as a dental practice leader, so you can educate your team. Knowing how to set up a streamlined workflow plays a huge role in the success of your RCM services.
In this article, we’re sharing 3 reasons why it may take longer than you expect to see improvements in your accounts receivable, even after you’ve started using RCM services. By understanding these reasons, you’ll be able to smooth out the collection process, resulting in higher revenue for you.
1. Creating claims is taking longer than recommended
Regardless of the RCM service you use, creating dental insurance claims is the responsibility of your dental team. The treating dentist is responsible for ensuring the accuracy of services filed on the claim.
Your schedule needs to make the creation of accurate claims a routine part of each day. Once your team completes the work of creating and batching dental insurance claims, your billing service team will take it from there.
How quickly you receive payment depends partly on how long it takes to create, approve and batch claims.
We recommend creating insurance claims daily, ideally 24 business hours after the patient’s treatment. That way, the process of submitting claims for payment can begin as quickly as possible.
If it takes your dental team a week to create an insurance claim, payment will be delayed more than necessary. Even after it’s created, batched, and your biller submits it to insurance, it could still take weeks to be reimbursed.
This means it will sit on your insurance aging report longer than it needs to.
Related: Dental claims service: 3 factors that affect a practice’s results
If the process to create and batch your claims isn’t timely, the number of records on your insurance aging report will likely stay high, even with an expert biller working through it.
So make sure your team is creating and batching claims within 24 business hours of the patient’s treatment. It’s easier to review the information and documentation when it’s fresh on everyone’s mind. Then, your claims are more likely to pay you sooner rather than later.
Most practice management software has two different reports that you may want to include with your daily reports:
- Procedures not attached to insurance claims
- Claims not sent
Run these reports to check for services that have yet to be filed on insurance claims. Be sure to exclude pre-determinations when you run them.
2. Not enough time has passed since your RCM services started
It takes time to uncover reasons for nonpayment for each record on the aging report. Research is the first step when you begin using a dental billing or RCM service provider before you can see your insurance aging report decrease.
Ask yourself this: How long has the A/R balance been increasing, before the RCM service started?
That’s a good indicator of how long it could take for a new dental billing process to “clean it up.”
If your insurance aging report percentage has many records nearing the timely filing limit, these take first priority for your expert biller. You can think of it as the project that gets precedence when working on outstanding claims to be paid.
And if the insurance aging report has gone unreviewed for some time, the results could take a few months to see. This leads us to our most common question.
When can you expect results from RCM services?
Well, as we mentioned, how soon you see results depends on how quickly the reasons for denied payment can be resolved for accounts receivable in your dental practice.
If the amount of missing or incorrect information is extensive, it’s going to take at least a few weeks to make a real dent in your list of unpaid or denied insurance claims.
Then it will take a few more weeks for insurance to respond with payment for these claims. But little by little, you will start to see that list dwindle, and your insurance collections increase.
It’s a common misconception that dental billing services are a quick fix to get your practice’s collections back on track. But dental billing work takes continuous dedication and expertise. For practice managers who want lasting results, consistently using a third-party dental billing service like DCS is the new normal.
Without that expertise, it’s common for the insurance aging report to revert to its previous state.
That’s why you typically should keep your RCM services long term. With experts dedicating their time to your unpaid insurance claims, you will steadily begin to see your collections increase, and your insurance aging report decrease.
All good things take time, especially if you want sustainable results.
3. The process to ensure the accuracy of outgoing insurance claims needs to improve
Accuracy is a big factor when you want to capitalize on the value of working with RCM services.
While you need reliable billing experts with the knowledge to appeal denied claims, cost control still depends on creating accurate, clean claims to begin with.
Well, to be frank with you, needlessly appealing claims isn’t a great use of time. And it can really keep you from seeing cost savings from bringing your insurance aging report down.
Related: 4 things your dental insurance claim needs for reimbursement
Appealing claims is time-consuming, even for experts. Dental insurance companies constantly find new ways to delay or deny payment. Errors and omissions on claims only compound the obstacles to receiving your reimbursement quickly.
So although the expert is trained on efficiently getting your claims paid, if they have to appeal many insurance claims, you’re going to see lower collections and a higher aging report.
It’s your team’s role in this partnership to try their best to create clean, accurate claims so that your RCM service provider can take the steps to ensure you’re paid ASAP.
Your collection process depends on efficient work from all hands
The relationship with your expert biller is not one-sided. Your RCM service provider depends on a good partnership with your team to make revenue flow easily into your dental business.
To help your team create and batch clean claims with complete information, your DCS billing partner also serves as your guide. Teams that work together collect the most from their accounts receivable in the shortest time.
Without a teamwork approach, your biller will either spend more time reaching out to you to get accurate information, or spend more time on your aging report.
If this happens regularly, collecting the balance on your insurance aging report will take longer, because of the time it takes to appeal every insurance claim.
Make sure your team is taking the time to create and batch clean claims so that your biller can get paid quickly. This is how you will see your insurance aging report balance begin to decrease and your revenues increase.
Ready to get the most from your dental RCM services?
If your expert biller appears to be doing their job and the insurance aging report isn’t coming down, it could be due to the factors listed in this article. And through healthy communication and process adjustments, the solution can be found so that your RCM services can make you more profitable.
Revenue cycle management is more than a system to collect money. It's the health of your billing system that will make or break any dental business. And this is what our RCM services at DCS will help you do - collect more and worry less to ensure your practice succeeds.
DCS provides a revenue cycle management services that ensure dental teams thrive. Our services empower team members to focus on patient care so that you collect as much as possible for your practice.
To learn more about our RCM services and how they can transform the financial health of your practice, schedule a call with one of our billing experts.
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