How does Dental Claim Support educate their billers?

You’re looking to outsource your dental billing, but you’re nervous about handing your insurance receivables over to someone you barely know. How much do they actually know about billing or communicating with insurance? Will they know what to do in tough scenarios? Will they actually increase my collections percentage?

When you’re searching for an outsourced dental billing company, you have a list of criteria, questions or expectations for the company. At the top of that list, you should be asking “how does your outsourced dental billing company educate its dental billers?” When you outsource your billing, you should be able to trust that the people posting insurance payments and running your aging report know what they’re doing. The more educated these billers are, the more efficient they will be at getting your practice paid.

This is something Dental Claim Support takes a lot of pride in. With years of experience in the industry, we’re confident that you are receiving the best service possible and you will see an increase in your dental practice’s revenue. 

In this article, you will not only learn about how we hire experienced billing professionals, but also how we educate and train them. 

What is Dental Claim Support’s standard for hiring a remote dental biller?

We’re not in the business of hiring just anyone that needs a job or a side-gig. We hire people who are already familiar with dental billing in general, specifically insurance. Knowing insurance and how it works, top-to-bottom is key. 

Preliminary screenings

As all businesses do when hiring, we review each applicant thoroughly. They must complete an application, submit their resume, and complete a DISC personality assessment. We’re looking for dental billing experience but we want our remote billers to be personable too. It’s important for each person we hire to fit into our company culture, which is pretty upbeat and close-knit.

During our pre-screening phone interview, we get a sense of what kind of person they are and how they communicate. We get a feel for how they speak to others, how they respond to on-the-spot questions, and how articulate they are.

Experience is important however, knowledge is key! Our remote billers should have an idea of what they’re doing before we bring them on. This experience can be anything from a former office manager, insurance coordinator, treatment coordinator or even a billing coordinator.

We strongly believe that the perfect fit is not necessarily the one that’s tenured. Regardless if they have been dealing with insurance for as little as 2 years or upwards to 20, it’s what they know that truly makes them a great biller. And that is exactly what we are hiring.

Full interview

Once the applicant has been reviewed and their experience has been verified, our hiring team will then conduct a more extensive interview, asking more specific questions such as: 

1. How do you post insurance payments in your preferred dental software?
2. How do you handle a partially paid claim?
3. How do you handle outstanding claims?
4. What clearinghouse experience do you have?
5. Do you have any formal dental training or certifications?

Hiring assessments

Once we know they’re capable of the basics, our hiring team puts the interviewees through a skills assessment that asks not only multiple-choice questions including X-ray competency, but also scenario-based, open-ended questions for which they write short answers for. These cover topics such as coordination of benefits, experiences with difficult appeals, software questions, etc. 

These assessments are reviewed by our HR department and if a qualifying score is recorded, then the interviewees will go through the next step: an explanation of benefits (EOB) assessment. This step is critical in how they actually apply the knowledge they have to real insurance payment situations. 

They will read multiple EOBs, determine the patient’s financial responsibilities, any PPO write-off adjustment amounts and determine if the plan did coordinate benefits properly. So they’re running through many different, real-life scenarios. These assessments tell us what we need to know about their experience.

If they are able to complete these assessments seamlessly, meet all of our criteria, and get rave reviews from their references, we move forward in the hiring process. 

Training our remote dental billers 

As you can tell, our new remote dental biller hires already know a lot about billing, but we spend a good amount of time training them on our systems, specifically. 

We enroll our new hires into our Dental Claims Academy. In these courses, they will learn about our proven systems and processes that streamline our billers, regardless of their backgrounds, in the top three dental software programs (Open Dental, Dentrix, and Eaglesoft).

Dental Claims Academy is a huge component to our training process since the courses are specifically designed to educate our billers on our processes. The courses outline various real life scenarios such as splitting claim payments, claim notation, insurance claim reporting, line item posting, and so much more! Concluding each course, our billers must pass (and we only consider 100% passing) a short quiz over the topics covered in the course. 

Once our billers complete DCA, they are tested again in a simulated posting portion of our training. They are given multiple checks to post in one of our training softwares and must also have a qualifying score to pass. We take this portion of training very seriously and pride ourselves on accurate insurance accounting (posting, adjustments, patient portions due).

The final step is where we test our billers on the nitty gritty portion or what we like to call the bread and butter of our business-Insurance Aging Reports. This is where we really shine and ensure all of our billers do too. They MUST be able to dig deep and get to the bottom of what is causing a claim to get hung up. We run them through a mock up of various claim denial scenarios and then let them tackle some actual claims on an aging report. 

Cleaning up aging reports is a main priority for all of our remote dental billers, and this is emphasized during training. This means you’re going to get paid for those procedures insurance companies have delayed payment for! 

Overall, the training portion can take anywhere from 2-4 weeks depending on a billers availability and ability to shine. Consider it a mini boot camp if you will. Some excel and pass with flying colors the first time and others do not make the cut. We are very intentional in our hiring and training process and only onboard the elite. 

Continuing education for our dental billers

Education is a staple within our company. We’re always empowering our employees to be curious and eager to learn more in order to feel more confident and successful in their positions. 

Our Dental Claims Academy not only trains our employees through courses, but also offers continuing education webinars, hosted by our Chief Claims Officer and Director of Brand Education, Dilaine Gloege. She covers those nitty-gritty, harder to understand facets of dental billing such as CDT codes. Through these webinars, our dental billers are always up-to-date on any regulatory or code changes within the industry. 

Our previous DCA webinars are now available for purchase HERE!

Ready to increase your revenue?

Our billers handle the largest part of what brings in your revenue: insurance. If they don’t know what they’re doing, there’s a chance they might miss some payments from insurance, or let your aging report pile up… AKA, you might not get paid what you’ve earned. 

As you research outsourced dental billing companies, you should know if your biller is going to be educated and passionate about increasing your collections percentage. You deserve to work with someone who has already been set up for success, so that they can help YOU be successful as well. 

We can’t promise perfection, but we can promise our dental billers are educated and well-rounded on all things dental billing. To learn more about how our billers work with you, read our blog article, “How Dental Claim Support collaborates with dental offices: who is responsible for what?”