You’re a dentist who hired a dental billing service a few months ago. It’s been a transition for your team, and you’ve seen a few problems arise. You want to give this service a fair chance, so you’re wondering, “How do I handle a service complaint with my dental billing company?”
Dental ClaimSupport has been helping dentists with their claims process for over 10 years. Through the years, we’ve handled all kinds of dentists, dental teams, and personalities! And when it comes to dental billing, problems are bound to arise.
It’s important to give dental billing a fair try. But when you have a problem or complaint about your billing services, you should be able to do something about it.
In this article, you will learn 3 steps you can take to deal with whatever dental billing service complaint you may have. These steps include defining what the actual problem is, who and how to communicate it to, and how to handle the solution moving forward. These steps will help you and your team have a healthy and successful working relationship with your billing company.
1. Nail down the problem
First thing’s first: What’s the actual problem?
When you come to your dental biller with an issue, it’s important to have it figured out beforehand, or at least a good idea of the problem so you can nail it down together. We say this because what the problem is will depend on how it’s handled.
Is it a technical problem that has a pretty straightforward solution? This could mean your team got logged out of the practice management software while the remote biller was working, or something that could be fixed pretty easily.
Is it a performance issue? Is your team catching mistakes that the biller is making when submitting claims, appealing claims, or posting payments?
Or is it a personal issue? Is your team having a really hard time adjusting to the change of outsourced dental billing? Has communication been difficult?
Each of these service complaints would be handled differently, which is why you need to have a good idea of the root of the issue so that you can articulate your concerns! And it will help your biller or point of contact understand where you’re coming from.
Make sure you’re considering multiple perspectives when nailing down the problem
We say this because you need to make sure you’re being as unbiased as possible. It’s common for dental teams to struggle with the change that comes with outsourcing your dental billing. Because of this difficulty - your team’s complaints might be more personal than anything.
Of course, personal complaints are valid.
However, if your billing team is helping your numbers increase, and is efficiently and accurately getting your claims paid - you have to decide how serious the personal complaints are.
To do this, be sure to ask multiple team members how they feel about the dental billing company, and try to understand the reasoning behind the complaints. This will make your conversation with your biller or point of contact easier.
2. Communicate your concerns with your points of contact
Okay - you’ve nailed down what the complaint is and you’re ready to express it. The best way to do this is by emailing or scheduling a Zoom call with your point of contact. This will likely be your biller or their Team Lead.
It’s crucial to make time to fully explain your complaint instead of letting it fester. It’s like any relationship - if you don’t talk about your problems, they’re just going to get worse!
By bringing the complaint to the table right when it occurs within your team, the billing company can face the problem head-on and come up with a solution for you.
When you bring a complaint to your dental billing team, it can be helpful to bring examples of where or how the problem is happening. This way the billing team can know exactly where something may have gone wrong, and avoid it in the future.
This might look like a miscommunication via email, a screenshot of the software where a mistake occurred, or anything that shows where the complaint came from.
Keep a problem-solving mindset
Once the dental billing team understands the why behind your in-house team’s complaint, they will have the next steps.
When the problem is being addressed, and the solutions are being offered by the dental billing team, make sure your team is open to the solutions. Your team might even have suggestions, which the billing team will be open to discussing.
The main goal here is to maintain a problem-solving mindset. This means not throwing the towel in when complaints come up, but working to find a solution - especially if it’s fixable!
3. Give the problem time to be solved
We know outsourced dental billing isn’t a perfect claims process solution for everyone, and it can be tempting to give up when you don’t immediately see your complaints being resolved.
Depending on the problem - it might need some time to be solved. Or it might take time for you to see the results of the solved problem.
For example, let’s say the process of your team creating claims, and your biller submitting and tracking them needs some tweaks. You communicated the concern with your biller and adjustments have been made to the process. Now, it’s a week later, and you haven’t seen your collections percentage increase or your aging report percentage go down.
Well, seeing those numbers shift is going to take time. It takes a few months of consistent, expert work on your claims to see an increase in collections.
Ready to have an amazing working relationship with your remote biller?
It’s important for your voice and opinions to be valued by the billing company you choose to outsource to. In order for your claims to be reimbursed successfully, you need to trust your biller and have a good working relationship with them.
When this relationship is fluid and full of trust, you’re going to see your insurance collections go up while your insurance aging report goes down.
Dental ClaimSupport puts a huge emphasis on the relationship between the dental team and the outsourced biller. So much so that our billers have even become good friends with the dental teams they work with.
To learn more about how your dental team can have a good relationship with the outsourced biller, visit our Learning Center.
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