As you get ready to bring on a dental billing company, you might be imagining all of the benefits you’re going to reap as you get much-needed support for insurance billing with outsourced experts. From the streamlined process, to the relief of insurance strain, the possibilities for your practice to increase your collections percentage should bring you a lot of excitement.
However, there’s a possibility not everyone on your team will be ready to embrace the change with open arms.
Have you communicated with your administrative team what this change will look like and how it will also benefit them? If you don’t have a plan to introduce your team to this billing company, they could feel blindsided, nervous they are being replaced, judged that their work wasn’t “good enough,” or just flat out annoyed that they have to learn to communicate with someone outside of the office.
As a dental billing company, we’ve seen people at the front desk struggle with misunderstanding, often shown as resistance. This can happen when the person signing the contract hasn’t realized how important it is to communicate the reasons to handle insurance claims differently and explain the new relationship.
Some staff members view a dental billing company as a threat to their value in the office. This leads to a lot of unintended -- and avoidable -- friction before work has even begun.
In this article, you will learn 3 tips to help properly introduce your dental team to an outsourced dental billing company. Understanding how to communicate this change with your team will help the transition go smoother, and give your practice a fair chance to reap the benefits of more time, money, and energy.
You’ll gain not just a more efficient billing process and higher collections, but freedom to have a more meaningful impact than sitting on hold with insurance companies.
Tip #1: Be open with your dental team when you’ve made the decision to outsource your insurance billing
First things first: give your team some lead time to understand what’s going on. Fewer surprises mean fewer complaints. This is a major change for your administrative team. They aren’t used to someone else coming in and taking over a portion of their responsibilities.
Informing your team might look like having a big group meeting with your entire dental team, and sharing that you’ve decided to outsource your insurance billing, and what the onboarding process is going to look like for everyone. You especially need to be honest with whoever it will directly affect, namely your insurance coordinator or whoever has been previously handling the insurance billing.
It’s important to let those most impacted know you appreciate their efforts, and that you’d like to handle the most complicated parts of insurance billing in a new way to help them focus on other responsibilities.
Your team still has many tasks to contribute to your income and success, including:
- Scheduling appointments
- Gathering insurance information from patients
- Performing insurance verification
- Creating and batching claims
- Communicating with patients and collecting patient balances
- Sending patient statements
When the change in workflow is shared with plenty of time for the team to process the decision, they won’t feel caught off guard or blindsided when the onboarding process actually begins. This will make the transition and future relationship with the remote dental billers and your team much more productive.
Tip #2: Explain that the dental billing company is not a threat to their employment
In most cases, when you, the dentist, hire a dental billing company, it just means your team needs help, not that you need to replace anyone.
A HUGE fear we see with dental teams when it comes to outsourced billers, is that they are being replaced. It’s a completely reasonable fear, especially if the person has been on the in-house dental team for several years. If you’ve been doing the insurance billing, it’s easy to feel like your efforts weren’t appreciated or that your livelihood is being threatened.
This is almost never the case, and if you’re the decision-maker you need to explain this to your team. Reassure them that the billing company you have hired is there to relieve your dental team of the most time-consuming and stressful tasks of getting insurance claims paid. They aren’t coming in to interfere with the relationships already built within the administrative team, or patients.
Your staffing decisions are totally independent of adding remote claim support
Unless you determine someone continuously does their job badly with no visible effort to improve, no one is being fired!
As a dental insurance billing company, our purpose is to take the complicated, ever-changing maze of codes, policies and regulations off the administrative team’s shoulders, while helping bring more money, improve compliance with all the fine print, and make it much easier for you to smile at each other and your patients.
This leads us to our last tip for introducing your dental team to an outsourced billing company.
Tip #3: Take the time to explain how the billing company will work and how it will benefit everyone
People naturally fear the unknown. This is true for most people, and this is what can sometimes cause a bumpy transition when onboarding with a dental billing company. If your team hasn’t been fully informed on what the billing company’s purpose is, what it does and how it may affect their job, they might be resistant to the change.
As you grow, you need a super-efficient claims process that gets undivided attention to be successful. When you first started out, you may have relied on one person to deal with insurance and getting your patients’ claims paid.
However, when you don’t have one person whose sole responsibility is insurance billing, it means whoever is handling it is also juggling other responsibilities.
Not only have you grown, but the collection process has gotten more complicated. Insurance billing might have been simpler years ago. And now, this part of your billing process needs a dedicated team that works together to stay on top of changing codes, rules and insurance policy details.
The remote billing team will make the lives of your in-house team easier
This remote billing team is laser-focused on making sure insurance claims are sent, appealing denied claims and following up on unpaid claims. It’s the kind of responsibility that’s not workable for anyone in the office team if you have to squeeze it into an already busy schedule.
Your team will learn this during an orientation with the dental billing company. However, as the leader, you’ll help your team succeed even more if they hear from you what the billing company will be handling versus what your team will be responsible for.
You will receive plenty of information that will help you explain everything (should you work with us). Your team will appreciate your support and transparency, and have a better understanding of what their future role in your practice is going to look like.
Learn the 5 things you’re still responsible for once you hire a dental billing company in our Learning Center.
Make sure your in-house team is ready to embrace your decision to work with a dental billing company
You made this decision for very good reasons. While the change might be surprising, it doesn’t mean you’ve made a mistake. Like we said, fewer surprises mean fewer frustrations within your dental team. Be transparent about your expectations when working with your new dental billing company.
You need everyone to be on board, on the same page, ready to go once onboarding begins in order to set your practice up for success.
To help your team to fully embrace working with the dental billing company, there are a few expectations you can set
It’s crucial to get your team in the right mindset to be all-in on the change that comes with outsourcing your insurance billing.
- Encourage them to have a positive attitude about this change
- Tell them to be ready to make communication their top priority
- Remind them that the more successful the new process, the more income for your practice, and more freedom to focus on growth and patient care
Clearly communicating your expectations from your dental team will ensure a smooth transition as you introduce a dental billing company into your practice.
Ready to meet with your dental team to share your plan for success?
The conversation with your dental team and hiring a billing company might seem daunting, but introducing them and preparing them properly for this change is key to the future you envision. It will ensure a smooth transition that will help both your dental team and an outsourced billing company do their jobs efficiently and effectively.
Dental ClaimSupport values everyone on your dental team and puts a huge emphasis on a clear line of communication in order to clear up any questions your team may have about this decision.
Your decision to outsource your insurance billing opens the door to huge improvements in not only your team’s quality of work-life, but also your revenue. You will gain much greater power to collect what you produce as you work with expert dental billers on your (virtual) team, as long as your in-house team is ready to embrace the idea and keep an open mind.
Learn more about how to get your team into the right mindset to work with a dental billing company successfully by reading our article, “3 ways your practice can successfully work with a dental billing company.”
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