As a dental business owner, you need to be aware of your insurance aging report. But did you get into dentistry to make sure insurance companies pay claims, or to fix smiles? It’s safe to say we will go with the latter. However, if you’ve seen a waterfall of insurance payments turn into a trickle, the first place to investigate the “why” is your outstanding insurance aging report. You may see that you have thousands of dollars outstanding that should be in your pocket. There needs to be an urgency to getting this money into your bank account. The longer a claim sits untouched, the less chance it has of being paid.
Like many dental offices, you may have just seen a spike in your insurance aging report. Claims just don’t seem to be paying like you want them to, and your collections are fluctuating each month. This is worrisome, to put it lightly. But what causes this? Because we are self-proclaimed “dental nerds” at Dental Claim Support, we actually enjoy researching claims. We have seen every single reason a claim does not process or pay that will inevitably increase your insurance aging report. This report isn’t necessarily “fun” to work on, but if you treat it as a game or challenge, you may change your mind on the matter.
Bottom line – as a dental office, you want your claims paid faster. You’re not collecting as much as you should and you’re tired of payment delays. We all use software technology to be more efficient and produce quicker results. The software technology that dental insurance companies have been using saves them money and gets your claims paid much quicker.
Every dental practice needs at least one team member responsible for handling insurance claims. Whether your office is PPO dependent or fee for service, insurance billing tasks are required to provide quality service to your patients. These tasks, created by the dental claims billing process, force offices to hire full time staff, part time staff, or extend the dental billing workload to other team members. Dental Claim Support, an outsourced dental billing company, was founded to help dentists with the mismanagement of dental billing within dental practices. The mission of Dental Claim Support is to ensure dentists get paid by eliminating insurance strain.
Most dental practices like you, struggle with how to best achieve storage of these Explanation of Benefits (EOB) documents. As an outsourced dental billing provider, our expert account executives note the many different ways a practice elects to store EOBs. This article will review various ways to store the EOB, any problems associated, and the best practice to consider to help you make an informed decision about storage of EOBs. So, what exactly is an explanation of benefits and why are they important?
Is there a Dental Insurance Degree? The dental insurance industry is such a unique niche market. There is not an actual school, university, or even trade school that one can attend to learn dental insurance specifically. Medical billing tends to have more Healthcare certifications and degrees qualifying those in the medical field.
Your dental practice management software is programmed to generate a secondary claim once the primary insurance payment has been posted. Standard practice is to submit the secondary claim with all necessary attachments immediately following the automatic generation of the claim. The preferred method for submitting secondary claims electronically with the primary insurance explanation of benefits (EOB) attached. However, some payers are particular about the size of the attachment and will reject the EOB if it is not the original size showing all pertinent information about the primary payer.
Xrays Affect Dental Insurance Reimbursement Quality dental radiographic images are essential for accurately diagnosing and treatment planning. However, some dental radiographs may be considered of non-diagnostic quality even when combined with what is seen clinically, a definite diagnosis may be confirmed. From an insurance reimbursement point of view, if the image is not of diagnostic quality, the service is subject to denial. Dental consultants reviewing your claims do want to approve reimbursement of your claims; however, they face the challenging task of approving based on the documentation submitted with the claim. There are a few steps that can be taken to reduce claim denials due to lack of quality radiographic images.
