If you’ve got concerns like low collections and a high insurance aging report, you may be looking hard at outsourcing your insurance billing. And you may wonder: What would motivate a remote biller to help me? Unless you know what makes working with skilled experts so affordable, you might still feel hesitant to add a dental billing service to your administrative team.
Great questions include: How will remote billers remain motivated to collect insurance claims for you? Why do they even care? How do you know the billing team will process dental insurance claims correctly? Why would they want to help your dental practice?
Our billers at Dental ClaimSupport have a lot of reasons why they’re motivated to collect your insurance claims for you – and do it right. Our mission is to eliminate insurance strain for dental teams, and our method is to ensure our billers have support from a collective knowledge pool and have financial incentives to help improve the financial health of your dental practice.
In this article, you’ll learn how a dental billing service can create incentives and motivations leading to a win-win for your practice and your dental biller. After you learn more about why a dental biller would want to help your practice, you’ll have a better idea of why you can trust them. When you know how it works, you can feel more comfortable adding a remote biller to your administrative team.
Let’s dive into why an outsourced dental biller is motivated to increase your insurance collections.
Many outsourced dental billers get the low collection problem - they are previous insurance coordinators or office managers
We can’t speak for every dental billing company, but most outsourced dental billers were previously office managers, insurance coordinators, or had a similar administrative dental office role. They get it.
Through this experience, they understand how frustrating it can feel when you submit a claim and receive a denial that you didn’t expect. They also understand what it’s like to be stuck on hold for hours with insurance companies, trying to get claims paid.
These are hyper-specific frustrations that not everyone can sympathize with, but most outsourced dental billers can.
A biller’s years of experience can channel the frustration into paid insurance claims
Because the biller does know what it’s like to receive denied claims through their previous experience, they take that experience and fight tooth and nail (pardon the pun) to get the claim appealed and paid in a timely manner. The biller will have patience when they have to sit on the phone with insurance companies, and won’t give up until the claim is paid.
Remote billers treat insurance claim appeals like a chess match and know all of the strategies and best practices to get your practice the money it’s owed.
They have great attention to detail which leads to rare mistakes on the claims they send in the first place, but when those denials inevitably do happen - they’ll have the experience and motivation to get the claims paid by submitting the proper documentation necessary for prompt reimbursement.
Remote billers have financial incentives to collect more for your dental office
Another reason the dental biller is motivated to collect your claims for you? It’s how they’re paid!
Most outsourced billers are not paid hourly. Your biller (or billing team, depending on the size of your practice) gets paid depending on how much money they post to your accounts! So they are hyper-motivated to get your insurance claims paid.
Most billers are 1099 contractors. They don’t necessarily get the same paycheck every other week as a W-2 salary worker would. Because of this, their personal income depends on the dollar amount they actually post for each practice they work with.
And your team is motivated to get claims paid because they know from experience how your revenue model - to collect what you produce – conflicts with the insurance company model to pay less however the fine print allows.
Because your expert biller keeps up-to-date with all insurance details they know how to increase the revenue of the practice. Having this common goal regarding your financial success puts everyone on the same team. Once the in-house dental team and remote biller work together, you will have the most streamlined and profitable claims system.
The remote biller’s performance is evaluated based on the financial success they bring to YOUR dental practice
The numbers say it all!
After a few months of working with a dental billing company, you should start to see an increase in your collections percentage. They should be posting payments to your software almost every day and working the insurance aging report at least once a week.
Through this consistency and regular dedication to your insurance collections, your insurance collections percentage should steadily begin to rise and your insurance receivables fall.
A good billing company sets the bar high and expects their client’s insurance receivables to become healthy and remain healthy. Setting a high goal of having the claims that are over 30 days from the date of service be only 10% of the total outstanding claims promotes a win-win for the practice and the biller.
In other words, we strive to keep your current claims (under 30 days outstanding from the date of service) to be the majority of your total claims at 90% of the total claims outstanding. This is a direct result of the outsourced biller’s performance.
When an outsourced biller dedicates their time and attention to insurance billing, the overall collections from insurance and the patients are going to increase. Your cash flow will improve. The outsourced biller’s (for lack of better words) boss knows this too!
The outsourced biller will want to maintain a high collections percentage for the sake of their performance reviews
A good biller will want to maintain a healthy number of insurance claims under 30 days old to keep the outstanding claims over 30 days at less than 10% of the entire outstanding claims.
The remote billers take pride in their performance. Obviously, they want their audits and reviews to be positive. Your team should be evaluating your biller, but the biller’s employer will be evaluating them as well.
If they are not doing enough to increase the collections for the offices they work with, then their work performance may not be up to par with what the dental billing company expects.
Because of this standard, their position could be called into question. So - the outsourced biller is motivated to improve the financial performance of your office because it’s a direct reflection of their work!
Here’s a caveat though: No matter what dental billing company you work with, if a biller is not performing the way you want, you will want to compare your total amount of insurance claims and your total amount of insurance claims that are over 30 days outstanding from the date of service.
If you see your insurance receivables increase, your insurance revenues decrease, or your outstanding claims over 30 days increase, you may want to talk to your remote biller to understand what is going on. Also, note that orthodontic claims are usually paid monthly or quarterly over the estimated length of treatment, the orthodontic claims may inflate your insurance claims that are aged over 30 days.
It is important that you are able to build a professional relationship based on trust and confidence with your biller. You should have an open line of communication with your remote biller. We say this because administrative teams may sometimes feel resistant to the change of outsourced dental billing, and be biased towards the biller. But if both parties can remember the purpose of what the dental billing company does, there is sure to be a success in getting your claims paid.
Ready to learn more about what you can expect from a dental billing company?
When you explore outsourcing your dental billing, it can feel like a huge change that you’re unsure of. Why do these people want to help me? What’s in it for them? Why would they work harder than an in-house employee?
Outsourced billers know the time, expertise and concentration it takes to work on insurance billing. They also know how much patience it takes to communicate with insurance companies. Through their previous experience of billing or working in a dental office, they know how insurance billing can keep a dental team spread too thin.
Not to mention, their entire job is to handle your insurance billing - their employment depends on their ability to get your claims paid.
Dental ClaimSupport only hires seasoned and highly trained dental billing professionals to handle our office’s insurance claims. Many of them were past office managers or treatment coordinators in the past - so they understand better than anyone.
They are put through a very detailed and rigorous training program that includes testing before they are working as a remote biller in a practice. Our billers have AGD/PACE continuing education opportunities from our DentalClaimsAcademy.com available to them so they are always up to date with the latest information on dental billing.
To learn more about what you can expect from a dental billing company, visit our Learning Center and continue your journey to outsourced dental billing.
Related Posts
Dental billing resources