The dental administrative team is the heart of a dental office. But, as we all know, with great power comes great responsibility — and your admin team’s responsibilities hold several challenges.
These “admin headaches” are tasks that are often small, but there are dozens of them every day, and all of them are vital to the success of your dental business. They must be done, and they put a continuous strain on your admin team.
RCM services, like the ones offered by us at DCS, help heal these admin headaches. Our experts take on the tasks your admin team loathes, which frees up your team to focus on patient care and more profitable facets of running the office.
In this article, we’re covering 5 of the dental admin headaches that RCM services alleviate.
Which ones would your admin team be delighted to never do again?
1. Hours on the phone — and on hold — with insurance companies
This is the big one that we hear all the time from dental teams.
As you know, when you work through the insurance aging report, you oftentimes have to call the insurance companies to give or get clarification. This means moving through the automated receptionist, struggling to reach a real person, and sitting on hold, sometimes for over an hour!
This process is necessary, but it is time-consuming and requires your staff’s full attention to appeal previously denied claims and collect that revenue. And they are likely spending more time on the phone with insurance companies than ever before, because it’s only getting more and more difficult to receive reimbursement on these claims.
When you have RCM experts doing the claims work for you, you’ll face fewer denials due to expert eyes submitting your insurance claims, and your team won’t even have to deal with the few denials that may occur — our RCM experts will appeal them for you.
No more long calls to payers that (sometimes) don’t lead to a solution. Instead, your team can use their valuable time to focus on things actually happening in the office — not waiting on hold for an insurance representative a thousand miles away.
2. A lengthy insurance aging report that keeps growing
Speaking of denials… no one loves working the insurance aging report, especially when it keeps growing. It’s like a snowball rolling down a mountain that you can’t keep up with — it just gets bigger and bigger.
We get it! Whittling down the aging report is a tedious process that doesn’t always yield the results you and your team want, especially when there are other administrative tasks on their plates — and there always are.
But working the insurance aging report is how to maximize your insurance revenue, which can oftentimes account for nearly half of a dental office’s overall revenue. So, the aging report needs to be worked on often.
We’ll let you in on a little secret: Our experts at DCS love the claim appeals game. Yes, that’s right! They think of appeals as a game that they are dying to win — for you!
And to ensure they win a lot, they have the tools and knowledge that support working through your aging report quickly and accurately. In fact, they’ll appeal multiple claims at one time, starting with your oldest claims to beat the timely filing clock.
Related: How to close 90% of your claims fast: 3 ways a dental biller helps
When you partner with RCM services, you won’t have to lock a dental team member in the back office until they get a handle on the insurance aging report. Our account specialists will work the report for them and for you, and they’ll love doing it.
With our support, your team members can be front and center of the office, and creating an amazing experience for patients, instead of buried in the back office under piles of paperwork.
3. Compiling and interpreting complex financial reports
Collecting and interpreting data is a crucial part of running a dental office. It helps you understand the business’ performance — what’s going exceptionally well, what’s running as normal, and where changes need to be made.
But understanding financial reports is easier said than done. And while your team might know the basics of your practice’s financial reports, they might not have the tools and experience to pore over each report, point out trends, and then translate those into decisions about where changes need to be made.
Again, this is something RCM experts can do for you.
Here at DCS, specifically, we provide clear, comprehensive financial reporting and analysis that can help with your decision-making as a practice owner or leader.
Our experts will continually look at your numbers and make suggestions on how processes could be improved and/or simplified for maximum efficiency — and maximum profitability. We even send you a daily deposit report that details the reconciliation of what our experts collected for you that day.
This way, your admin team doesn’t have to struggle with data they don’t understand, and you won’t need to make time to interpret it: We’ll do that for you, and are happy to answer any questions you have about it.
4. Preparing for and delivering treatment presentations
Treatment presentations are a critical step in your patient’s journey, and also in your revenue cycle. They are your opportunity to be transparent with patients about why they need their treatment, what their costs will be, and what their payment options are.
Being honest with patients about the cost of their treatment is the best way to earn their trust. But oftentimes, teams don’t have time to assemble or deliver a comprehensive treatment presentation. It requires a full breakdown of the patient’s insurance coverage, plus the time it takes to sit down for a one-on-one conversation and answer questions.
Not having time for this can be a huge headache for dental teams, because they know how important it is, but they rarely have time to do it well.
Related: 3 tips to successfully communicate your patient's dental treatment plan presentation
But when you partner with full-cycle RCM experts like DCS, most of your billing processes will be handled by our team off-site, so that your team will finally have time for treatment presentations.
This will improve not only your patient relationships, it will also improve the rate at which you collect payments from patients. When there are no surprise bills, and they are aware of exactly what they’re expected to pay out of pocket, they can plan and prepare to pay on time.
5. Following up with patients about their outstanding balances
As you’ve experienced, collecting from patients can sometimes be the biggest headache because of how delicate the situation can be — and it’s especially delicate if the treatment presentation was incomplete, like we mentioned earlier.
But you need those patient payments: They’re the other half of your revenue.
RCM services certainly help with patient payments, and when you partner with DCS, your patient billing process will be completely automated for everyone’s convenience.
Your patients will receive automatic statements and payment reminders via text or email, and they can pay their bill online using their digital device. And your team will no longer have to reach out to patients about their unpaid balances or process checks that arrived by mail.
Automated patient billing reduces the time, costs, and headache of issuing paper statements, and in addition to monitoring outstanding balances, it also monitors direct deposits instantly.
Our customer at Aspire Oral & Maxillofacial Surgery, Sarah Christ, explains her experience with our patient billing services:
“We did not blink an eye when we found out that DCS also had a patient billing service that could piggyback on top of their insurance billing services. We know that we can leave it to DCS to handle the filing of the claim. And we know that with our team working with you, and us working with our patients, it’s just going to be an overall pleasant experience.”
Read more about Aspire OMS’ story here.
With a rock-solid treatment presentation plus automated patient billing, there’s no gray area for your patients about what their treatment is going to cost, and every convenience when it comes to paying for it.
Thanks to your team and ours, every patient will be aware and prepared, and they’ll know you’ve got their back. And that results in a patient for life and plenty of referrals, which are invaluable.
Ready to heal your administrative headache with RCM services?
To recap, our full-cycle RCM services heal the following dental admin headaches:
- Hours on the phone — and on hold — with insurance companies
- A lengthy insurance aging report that keeps growing
- Compiling and interpreting complex financial reports
- Preparing for and delivering treatment presentations
- Following up with patients about their outstanding balances
These headaches aren’t just a pain for your dental admin team, they can also result in costly errors and missteps that delay payments, decrease your overall revenue, and slow or interrupt your cash flow. Not to mention, they can negatively affect your patients’ experience at your practice.
Many of our experts at DCS have previously worked in dental offices, so they understand the pain and stress these administrative headaches cause. That’s why they’re so passionate about helping dental teams like yours.
Heal these headaches by partnering with a trusted RCM provider: Book a free 30-minute call today.
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