When you hired your front desk team, was dental billing training a part of their required experience? It’s common for a front desk team to be hired with little to no dental billing training, in the hopes that the team will learn on the job. Unfortunately, this can negatively impact your revenue. And it can even add stress to your team.
Dental billing training for your administrative team is crucial to ensure proper cash flow and revenue. When your team is not properly trained on insurance billing and everything that comes with it - mistakes may be made that lead to claim denials or fraudulent insurance claims.
Insurance claims account for about 50% of your overall revenue and ignorance of insurance fraud is not an acceptable excuse, so mistakes need to be avoided.
Dental ClaimSupport has launched our own educational platform, Dental Claims Academy. It is a training resource for dental teams to utilize in order to improve their billing knowledge. Our team of experts with over 10 years of dental billing experience have put together courses, webinars, and forums for your team to use.
We have seen how education like this can transform a dental team’s knowledge and in turn - the practice’s stream of revenue.
In this article, we will explain why investing in dental billing training is so important for practices, and how it can positively impact your dental practice’s workflow and revenue.
Why is training important when it comes to the dental billing process?
Your dental team’s knowledge of the dental billing process affects every aspect of your practice. If they are not fully trained on how to create insurance claims for patients, batch, submit and track them, your practice could miss out on crucial revenue.
But not being trained on dental billing affects more than your money. If your team files a patient’s claim incorrectly, it could affect the patient. Depending on your payment structure, they could have been depending on a check of reimbursement from insurance. Or perhaps your team collected the incorrect out-of-pocket amount and you have to send them another bill in the mail.
Mistakes like these due to lack of training drive your patients away and also cause stress for your team. Have you ever been in a job where you felt like you had no guidance? And your confidence just seems to dwindle every day? It’s possible that your team feels this way if they haven’t been continuously and properly trained on dental billing.
These are the big parts of your practice that will benefit from dental billing training: your revenue, your patients, and your team.
But wait - what parts of the dental billing process does my team need to be trained on? Let’s get into it.
What topics need to be the focus of dental billing training?
Honestly, your team needs to know every part of the dental billing process. Especially if you are handling it in-house, from start to finish. But let’s get specific.
Your team needs to be well-versed in the following topics:
- Dental billing tips and best practices
- Dental anatomy and terminology
- CDT Coding
- Dental claims administration
- Compliance issues
- Discounts and copay forgiveness
- PPOs
- Federal and state regulations
- Insurance payment posting and posting insurance write-offs
- Coordination of benefits
- Recordkeeping
- How to read an EOB
- Insurance web portfolios
- Dental software
- Insurance aging reports
- Insurance verification
- Fee capping of non-covered dental services legislation
- Credentialing in-network providers
If this feels like a lot, it’s because it is. And it’s all equally important! All of this information changed pretty often as well. So making sure your team is ahead of the curve might feel difficult, but it’s more than doable.
And when your team understands these topics, they will feel empowered in their roles to execute each task accurately and efficiently.
Why does dental billing training need to be continuous?
You know how we mentioned that all of the topics listed above change? This is why dental billing training needs to be continuous.
Unfortunately, insurance companies love finding new ways to delay reimbursing your claims. An easy way to do this is to change their rules, regulations, and protocol requirements. It’s not fair, but it’s the reality of dental billing.
Plus, coding rules such as CDT codes are updated every year. Your team always needs to be aware of these updates and how they will affect the way they fill out claim forms.
We’re not suggesting that they spend an hour every day doing some kind of training. But once a week or month they should be revisiting any training resources they have access to. This will keep your team sharp on how they move through the dental billing process.
Are there resources available for dental billing training?
Yes! There are YouTube videos, there are online communities such as DentalTown, and some billing companies offer free and paid resources. We even have a Dental Billing Support Facebook Group that has plenty of dental professionals discussing all kinds of topics.
As we mentioned, a lot of these resources are free. For example, we have our articles, like the one you’re reading now. If you visit our Learning Center, you can see we have articles covering all kinds of topics, from coding and compliance to how to best file a claim, to how to manage your dental practice.
There are also more in-depth, paid resources your team can utilize. For example, as we mentioned above, Dental Claims Academy is a platform you can buy access to for your team.
Whichever educational path you choose, your team’s billing knowledge will improve, and your practice, as a result, will as well.
Ready to invest in your dental team’s training?
When your team feels like they have all of the knowledge and resources they need to perform their job, their entire outlook on their workday will change. Not only will your practice collect more with their improved billing skills, but they will enjoy their work more. Without the stress of not knowing how to handle insurance challenges and questions, they can create a smoother billing process.
Dental Claims Academy offers courses on all of the topics we mentioned above. It also offers CE credit and support from other dental billing experts.
Turn your team into dental claims experts who collect your insurance payments promptly, protect your license and your practice, and free you up to focus on your patients.
Learn more about Dental Claims Academy by visiting our website.
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