After months (or maybe years!) of working with your outsourced dental billing company, you’re happy with the results you’ve seen: a shorter insurance aging report, higher collections, up-to-date payment posting, and a less stressed administrative team so that everything runs smoothly. You’re reaping the benefits of outsourcing your insurance billing, and feel that your practice is in an amazing place financially.
As the leader of your dental practice, you can’t help but wonder, “What’s next? Do I still need this service now that I’m collecting more money from insurance and the backlog of unpaid claims seems to be fixed?”
You may feel ready to make a change, even when everything is going right and you’re not sure what your next step is. As a billing company, we have seen offices improve immensely after outsourcing their insurance billing, only to end their services with the billing company. We’ve also seen the fallout from this.
While this might be the right decision for some, there's a good chance your practice could revert right back to where it was when you explored outsourcing in the first place.
In this article, you’ll learn why it might not be in your best interest to let go of the team that runs your streamlined billing process just because your insurance collections are improving and your aging report is cleaned up.
The truth is, a billing company is not like a band-aid that heals your practice’s lack of revenue and excess unpaid claims. It’s more like a set of muscles you keep exercising every day to stay healthy. Just when you start to feel good, that means you should keep going instead of quitting.
Who is now going to take over your dental insurance billing?
If you’ve seen your insurance collections increase and your aging report decrease, you might think you don’t need outsourced billing services anymore. You got what you wanted:
- A higher insurance collections rate
- Lower insurance aging report
- Lower stress for your administrative team
- A more streamlined billing process
You might feel done once your collections are up-to-date now, but will these benefits continue after you let go of your billing company?
If you have one person in charge of running a super-efficient billing system, those benefits certainly could continue.
As we mentioned, insurance billing isn’t something that’s fixed. It’s an ongoing process that needs to keep pace with new regulations, codes and insurance terms that change constantly. To be cost-effective, it works best when the person or team doing your billing is continuously updated with the latest information and has no other distractions.
It’s a full-time job that needs to be at least one person’s dedicated responsibility. Earlier we compared it to exercise.
We all know that in order to feel great, you have to move your body regularly and not remain stationary. Once you begin a workout routine and continue that for a few weeks, you start to feel great physically and mentally. There! The problem of feeling tired and weak is fixed, right? So now you can cease the exercise and maintain that great feeling, right? Of course not. We all know you have to keep going and make exercise a part of your lifestyle.
It is the same thing with insurance billing!
You want to transition to hiring someone in-house: here are some pros and cons
Just because insurance billing-related tasks were well run and maintained, does not mean they will stay that way if you hand them off to someone else, especially if they already have other responsibilities.
Someone is going to need to have the time to diligently handle insurance collections and aging reports. This means you need to hire an insurance coordinator, and that person has to have the right knowledge and processes to run a super-efficient billing process. Otherwise, you’re going to see a drop in those collections numbers.
Pros to hiring an in-house insurance coordinator
There are a few benefits to hiring an in-house insurance coordinator. They will be in your office, in person, working with your team face-to-face, and will be YOUR employee. You might enjoy the sense of loyalty that comes with having someone handling your claims in person, especially since you will be paying their salary.
They will be able to ask any questions about any patients and their insurance information to whoever is handling patient billing. This will also be face-to-face and won’t require an email, phone call, or video chat. In a lot of ways, hiring an insurance coordinator feels more convenient.
Cons to hiring an in-house insurance coordinator
The biggest con to hiring an insurance coordinator versus a billing company is the cost and expertise. When comparing costs objectively, an insurance coordinator’s annual salary far exceeds the cost of outsourcing a dental billing company, assuming their collection rate is equal. That’s hard to do even if you hire a skilled and experienced one (which you should!).
Spoiler alert: if you’re paying an $18/hr salary, that costs you $2.9K more each month than our fee to collect up to $40K in claims revenue each month.
Are you paying someone more than $18/hr to work insurance claims? If you said ‘yes’ to this question, you are likely overpaying for your service.
A lot of people can’t believe this, but it’s true. Deep dive into comparing the cost of an outsourced dental billing company versus an insurance coordinator in our Learning Center.
To give you an idea of just how big the cost difference is, think of it like this: you could save over $30k per year by outsourcing your insurance billing instead of paying an insurance coordinator salary.
There is also the risk that the insurance coordinator you hire is not a seasoned expert on dental insurance, especially if you are hoping to hire someone on the low end of the salary range. When you hire an outsourced billing company, their billers are required to have a few years of billing experience and then once hired, go through a rigorous training process.
Hey, we get it. Outsourcing your insurance billing to a remote billing company isn’t for everyone, and maybe you want to explore other options. Either way, you need one person accountable for your insurance billing, who isn’t already wearing too many hats. You also need to weigh your options, especially when it comes to how much it’s going to cost your practice.
What will happen if I stop using my billing company and don’t hire an insurance coordinator?
You now understand that outsourced billing companies aren’t a temporary solution for your insurance billing and that you need someone who knows how to stay up-to-date on all the changes involved when handling insurance.
If it sounds like these are your only options, it’s because the other alternative of letting go of your billing company and NOT replacing them with an insurance coordinator will lead to the following:
- Lower insurance collections
- Longer insurance aging report
- More unnecessary write-offs
- More insurance claim denials
- An overworked or stretched thin administrative team
It’s inevitable that whoever gets handed the job of insurance billing will have to make it their second priority to the more urgent day-to-day needs in a busy office. Why do we say this? Because other things will come first that are right in front of your administrative team.
Learn the 4 reasons one person should be held accountable for your dental insurance billing here.
Does a patient need to be checked in? Is the phone ringing? Is a patient trying to schedule their next visit or pay for their current one? These things are a priority because you can’t postpone dealing with concerns that are, happening in person. Unfortunately, time pressure leads to billing mistakes and missteps make it harder to make your patient happy in order to retain business!
As a healthcare provider, your in-person responsibilities can be time-consuming. This combined with insurance billing is too much for one person to handle.
That is why letting go of your billing company (without a backup plan) is not a good idea.
Maintain your dental practice’s high collections and low aging report
We aren’t here to force anyone to outsource their insurance billing but if you are seeing good results and are happy with them, that doesn’t mean you should let them go without having a plan for your insurance billing.
Dental ClaimSupport has seen dental offices come, go, and sometimes come back because they didn’t yet grasp the value of the freedom gained when you have a cost-effective insurance billing process in place.
Relieving the dental team of insurance strain and responsibility can allow the team to focus on what is in front of them in the office. They can take care of the office and patients while we handle the sticky mess that is insurance, and maintain that high collections percentage and clean, low aging report.
Learn more about how important it is to have one person accountable for your dental insurance billing and how making that move can benefit your practice’s revenue in our Learning Center.
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