Dental patient care or tackling high dental A/R: Which is priority #1?

As a dental practice owner, you’re constantly balancing two seemingly competing priorities: delivering exceptional patient care and maintaining your business’s financial health. You want to focus on people, not payments — but when unpaid balances pile up, you can’t ignore the pressure to improve your bottom line.

So, which should be your top priority: your patients or your collections?

Here’s the truth: both are vital to the profitability of your practice. Fortunately, they’re not mutually exclusive.

With the right systems and support in place, you can have happy patients and healthy finances — you don’t have to sacrifice one for the other. 

DCS offers both long-term and limited-term services to conquer your high accounts receivable (A/R) — Insurance Billing and Special Projects, respectively. Their level of commitment differs, but both services free you and your team to focus on patients while our experts clean up your A/R and collect on those aging claims.

But let’s take a step back. You don’t have to sacrifice patient care for profitability, and vice versa. However, there’s only room for one at the top of your to-do list. Which comes first?

Key takeaways on tackling patient care and high dental A/R:

• Patients are the core of your dental business, but…
• A growing A/R means there’s less revenue to run your business.
• Relying on experts makes it possible to balance these two key aspects of your business

Amazing patient care needs to be your primary mission

There’s no question that providing high-quality patient care is the heart of a successful dental practice. When patients feel valued and cared for, they return, refer friends and family, and build trusting long-term relationships with your team.

In fact, a patient-centric experience has a direct and positive effect on patient retention and growth. Here’s how…

From a warm front-desk greeting to clear communication about treatment plans, your practice’s reputation depends on how you make patients feel. But when financial stress is felt by you and your team, your patients will also feel the discomfort in a multitude of practical ways.

Production pressure can lead to rushed appointments, distracted staff, and awkward payment conversations due to hurried or skipped treatment presentations. These kinds of flawed interactions  take a silent toll on the pleasant patient experience you’re trying to build.

An uncomfortable or unhappy patient may not pay their bill or return to your practice, and they might not go quietly. They could leave a poor review online and share their miserable experience with friends and family — word-of-mouth can work against you as well as for your benefit.  

Not to mention that patient care is often the most rewarding part of the job. You’re there to focus on the patients you’re building trust and relationships with, but that’s difficult when you’re bogged down by calling insurance companies about unpaid claims and an endless list of administrative tasks.

Still, focusing on patients while ignoring your A/R leads to a different set of problems.

High dental A/R has a catastrophic impact on your dental practice

When insurance and patient balances go unpaid, your revenue slows to a crawl. High dental A/R doesn’t just sit there quietly; every day it actively creates real consequences for your team and your practice, such as:

• Cash flow problems that limit your ability to invest in new technology, staff, or continuing education
• Staff burnout as your team spends more time chasing payments and less time on the patient care they were hired to provide
• Lost revenue from aging accounts that become increasingly hard, and then impossible, to collect

Read more: The #1 report your dental team needs to understand: The insurance aging report

Ask any dental professional how they feel about managing their insurance aging report, and most will tell you how much they hate it. But they dig in and take care of it because they know it’s a vital part of collecting all the revenue earned by the practice.

Even understanding its significant impact on the bottom line, the aging report is hard to make time for when other tasks demand immediate attention. It’s understandable if you feel like you’re ignoring patients when you’re laser-focused on calling insurance about unpaid claims — if the office is busy, you probably are.

But if you don’t attend to collecting revenue, you’ll face problems repairing or replacing clinical equipment, paying bills, paying employees, or even paying yourself.

It may seem like you can’t win, but you can! You just need streamlined processes and supportive systems.

So how do you prioritize patient care while also reducing a high A/R?

Here’s the big realization: managing patient care and reducing high A/R are not in conflict. In fact, they’re more connected than you might think.

For example, when your billing process is efficient, your patients understand what they will owe and why. This clarity builds confidence that they are both well-informed and well-cared for, which leads to prompt patient payments without pushback or repeated follow-up.

For those in-network, the effort put into insurance verification and treatment presentations not only educates the patient on their plan and payment responsibility, but also allows your team more time and energy for patient care, since they won’t spend hours communicating with patients angered by their bill. 

If you’re thinking that this still sounds like a lot, remember that you don’t have to figure it all out on your own. With the right partner, you can successfully tackle both priorities without burning out your team or sacrificing your patients’ experience.

DCS offers Insurance Billing Services to dental businesses that want to free up their in-house team by bringing in third-party experts to handle their insurance claims — both submissions and follow-ups.

Imagine your office operations when your team doesn’t have to spend hours calling insurance or working the insurance aging report — because our billing experts are handling those tasks for them. 

If you prefer a limited-term engagement to clean up your aging report, eliminate looming timely filing threats, and make it easier to manage, we have a dedicated team for that too: Our Special Projects Services will research, resubmit, and follow up on old claims to bring your insurance aging report back to a manageable state. Without deadline pressure, your team will find it easier to balance billing tasks with patient care. 

DCS is here to manage that tedious part of your dental practice, so you and your team can focus on the more meaningful part — patient care.

You’ll collect more while worrying less. 

You don’t have to choose between reliable revenue and patient care when you partner with DCS

Your patient care doesn’t have to suffer while you tackle your A/R.

At DCS, we manage insurance billing and reduce A/R for dental practices like yours,  so you can put your focus back where it belongs — your patients.

Here’s how our billing experts do it:

• They follow up consistently on unpaid insurance balances to minimize your aging report
• They work alongside your team to ensure clear communication for timely billing 
• They reduce the daily administrative strain, so your team is free to deliver amazing patient experiences

You can provide excellent patient care while maintaining a strong and steady cash flow. In fact, to grow a successful, sustainable dental practice — you must.

That’s where DCS comes in. We’re more than a billing service; we’re your partner in creating  smoother, more profitable operations where your team thrives, your patients feel supported, and your revenue flows consistently: Book a free 30-minute consultation today.