You have to have someone in charge of managing the millions of dollars that flow through your dental business. With the complexities of dental insurance and patient billing, AND the huge responsibility of practice management—it’s impossible to have one in-house team member handle it all.
Here it is, already September, can you believe it?? This year seems to have flown by so quickly and it’s now football season, my favorite time of year (Go Dawgs!). However, this time can be stressful for your dental practice and in particular the person sending out patient statements and getting denials due to frequency. As you know, most (not all but most) insurance plans start on January 1 of each year. These dental plans are now starting to deny certain procedure codes due to frequency and here’s why; Most dental plans only allow 2 exams per year.
Your dental practice brings in less than $40,000 in insurance per month. Your insurance revenue plus your patient revenue is covering your payroll, your rent, or your mortgage on your space, utilities, new equipment: your usual expenses and maybe some unexpected ones.
Outsourcing billing has become pretty common for dental practices. Dealing with insurance is such a time-consuming process that it only makes sense to either have at least one person dedicated to it on your team, or outsource the insurance billing process to someone else. As you use these billing services, you might ask yourself, “Am I overpaying for my insurance billing?”
A common belief is that fee-for-service (FFS) dental practices do not need insurance help from an outside source, such as a dental billing service. In most cases however, that’s actually not true! Your fee-for-service dental practice may receive insurance reimbursement, even if you're out-of-network. What is a fee for service dental practice? How to file dental insurance claims as an FFS provider? Let's clear up how being an FFS dental practice can affect your insurance billing process.
Performing insurance verification is both time-sensitive and time-intensive. It’s also costly. On top of that, it’s hard to find someone who actually likes to do monotonous work. When it boils down to it, you need someone performing accurate insurance verification on your behalf for the least amount of dollars possible.
For reasons unbeknownst to us, while dentists are in school, working hard through their rigorous classes, they take minimal, if any, courses on how to run a business. Yes, the main priority for them is tending to people’s oral health, but owning a dental practice equates to owning a business. To have a successful dental practice, you have to know how to generate and collect revenue! You’re forced to figure out all of these skills on your own, with no one warning you how much work goes into owning a business. We at Dental Claim Support know a lot about what is going to help your practice make money. We have been helping dentists all over the United States increase their collections percentage since 2012. Our team of remote billers will all start by telling you this: In order to have a successful dental practice, you need to have a high collections percentage.
How do you know if you are running a successful dental practice? Happy patients and happy employees are a key factor, but are you actually making money? Many dentists struggle with the financial side of running a dental practice. It’s not that it’s just difficult to keep up with, it’s that most dentists don’t want to or know how to. Most dentists like to fix teeth, plain and simple.
You’re a dentist with your own practice, dealing with the after effects of 2020. Your collections percentage is down, and it’s affected the revenue of your business. You’re scared, anxious, considering cutting overhead costs, and possibly unable to perform certain procedures due to lack of revenue. To put it simply, your business is facing its worst case scenario. Learning where the disconnect is between your office, your patient and the insurance company can help you figure out where your money is going and why it isn’t in your pocket where it belongs.
