Which of these A/R issues is draining your dental business profits?

Dental accounts receivable might be the reason for your low cash flow, and A/R creates other problems as well — from personnel to the patient experience. Expert RCM services have effective, lasting solutions to heal your hurting bottom line.

Your dental accounts receivable (A/R) is a record of what you’re owed from insurance companies and patients for services provided. When dental professionals think of their billing process, they think of their A/R. 

But collecting from your main sources of revenue — insurance and patients — is a multistep process, especially in a dental business. When challenges to those collections processes arise, your cash flow will be negatively affected. 

And the consequences of low cash flow? You’ll have a hard time paying expenses such as staff salaries, rent or mortgage payments, equipment repairs, etc. And it’s impossible to grow your business when you’re struggling just to keep up.

But this is not all doom and gloom — we’re here to offer you solutions that include streamlined processes that will bring higher revenue and consistent cash flow. 

Key takeaways about dental accounts receivable challenges:

1. When your processes are broken, both your team and patients are negatively affected
2. You can have systems that make it easy for insurance and patients to pay quickly
3. Automating parts of your revenue cycle benefits your team, your patients, and your dental business

Understanding dental accounts receivable and its challenges

As we briefly mentioned before, your dental accounts receivable (A/R) is a record of what you’re owed from patients and insurance payer for services rendered. This comes in the form of your patient A/R (patients with outstanding balances) or your insurance aging report (a list of outstanding claim payments), and likely both. 

These are pillars of your practice's financial health, and they require diligent tracking and frequent management, which includes outreach about late payments until the bill is fully paid. To maximize your revenue, you must collect what you’re owed from both sources — but without time and expertise, that’s easier said than done. 

Here are a few challenges unique to dental accounts receivable: 

• Insurance rules and regulations change. The requirements for accurate claim submission update annually, as codes are added, altered, and removed. If your team is unaware and submits outdated forms or information, insurance companies will be quick to return denials.
• Patients don’t understand insurance as well as you do. They need the limitations of their benefits explained to them and their questions answered, or else they might disagree with their bill and not pay the amount they owe.
• Paper statements are unreliable. When you mail something off, it’s most likely going to end up in the right place — but it still might not make it to your patient. Even if it does arrive, it’s easy to ignore a paper bill these days.

These are just the overarching challenges of A/R. Let’s get into detail on how these challenges can really impact your dental business and its cash flow…

The Hidden Costs of A/R Challenges

The impact of A/R challenges ripples to all parts of your dental business, including places you might not expect: 

• Delayed cash flow. Okay, you know this one. But we have to mention it because of how vital it is to running your business. When revenue is held up because of appealed claims, slow-to-pay patients, and manual bank deposits, it impacts every single part of your business — from daily operations to making payroll to your long-term goals.
• Lost revenue. You might be thinking, “Isn’t lost revenue the same as delayed cash flow?” Not quite. Delayed cash flow means there’s still a chance you could receive it. Lost revenue includes timely filing losses and billing write-offs. This unrecoverable income can accumulate to the point where you’re seeing a huge dip in your bottom line.
• Increased administrative costs. Paper statements and reminders cost money to mail out (paper, postage, printer ink, etc.), and A/R problems cause your team to feel stressed out, burned out, and stretched thin. This leads to low morale or even staff turnover, and both can be costly, chaotic, and time-consuming consequences. Read more here. 
• Negative patient experience. There’s nothing dental patients hate more than receiving a bill they didn’t expect. If your team doesn’t have time to verify insurance and present treatment to patients, your patients will likely be unpleasantly surprised by their bill and perhaps not want to pay it in full. This impacts your revenue, and also your patients’ experience at your practice. A faulty billing system could lead to bad reviews, lost trust, lost goodwill, and lost business. 

Read more: Does your dental RCM process hurt your bottom line? Answer these 5 questions to find out

As you can see, the consequences of A/R challenges are severe and impact every area of your business. We’re not saying this to scare you, just to illustrate how high the stakes are.

But don’t worry, you’re not leaving this article without a solution. 

Heal the wounds inflicted by dental A/R challenges

Revenue cycle management (RCM) services performed by a competent and compliant provider are the best course of action to heal your A/R wounds.  

This means turning to experts to handle steps of your revenue cycle — especially your insurance billing and patient billing. This reduces the time and effort your team spends mailing out payment reminders to patients, calling insurance to appeal claims, and contacting patients about outstanding balances.

The right experts will do all of those things for you — and they’ll also automate steps of your revenue cycle to increase efficiency, reduce errors, and quickly collect revenue with no hands-on effort. 

We offer a full range of RCM solutions here at DCS, with services handled by our trained and experienced Account Specialists and top-tier technology.

Our revenue cycle management services include: 

• Credentialing and re-credentialing
• Patient scheduling
• Insurance verification
• Insurance billing and aging report management
• Patient billing and collections

When you let experts manage your revenue cycle, you’ll see the following benefits: 

• Increased cash flow. When DCS gets a hold of your revenue cycle, you’ll see two things: fewer claim denials because your insurance billing process is streamlined and monitored by experts, and also an influx of cash because your patient billing process is automated for easy and convenient online payments. These improvements will increase your cash flow now and continually, opening the door for growth and future success.
• A productive dental team. When DCS manages your A/R, your administrative team will be freed from the stress of trying to collect from patients and insurance. We all know how time-consuming appealing insurance claims is, and collecting outstanding balances from patients is a huge headache as well. But when these billing systems are handled by our RCM experts, your team can focus on running your office and providing amazing patient care. Which leads us to…
• Improved patient experience. Your patients are why you have a business, so it’s crucial that you and your team cultivate productive and lasting relationships. But when your team is distracted by A/R challenges, they’re not paying attention to your patients — and your patients will notice. They’ll also notice general chaos or disorganization in your office, particularly if their bill is inaccurate, or it’s a pain to pay it. The good news is that when your billing processes are streamlined and your team is cohesive, focused, and communicative, your patients will notice that, too, and you’ll have a happy patient for life. 

A/R challenges don’t have to jeopardize your entire dental business. When you turn to the RCM experts at DCS, you’ll get easy revenue you can count on and stress-free billing processes your team and patients will love.

Each service entails different features and costs, which you can learn more about here. 

Take back control of your dental accounts receivable to boost your dental business profits

To recap, here are some of the costly consequences of broken A/R systems: 

• Delayed cash flow
• Lost revenue
• Increased administrative costs
• Negative patient experience

But this doesn’t have to be your reality — with our help, you can take back control of your dental A/R. You shouldn’t be thinking about your accounts receivable in the middle of the night and waking up in a cold sweat. 

DCS offers end-to-end revenue cycle management services that provide you with everything you need to collect from patients and insurance companies with ease and efficiency — and without stress or chaos.

Your in-house team will focus on curating a delightful patient experience and growing your practice, while our experts and automated technology take on the vital behind-the-scenes RCM tasks that support higher revenue and consistent cash flow. 

Take back control of your dental A/R: Book a free 30-minute consultation with DCS.