So you’ve tried outsourcing your dental billing, and after some time, you’re considering bringing it back in-house at your dental practice. It’s pretty common to assume the ideal is to keep every practice administration task in-house.
Since insurance collection is prone to dental billing mistakes, you’ll want to be smart about taking your claims process back, for your financial health.
As an outsourced dental billing service ourselves, we have certainly seen costly dental billing errors that have lost dental teams' time and money. No matter how you collect on your claims, it should be easy for you to get paid properly without these setbacks.
Because of this experience, we want to share the mistakes that can happen when dental teams bring their billing back in-house after having outsourced it. Understanding these mistakes will help you avoid them.
We’ve also laid out ways to fix these mistakes in order for you to be successful as you take care of collecting money for your practice.
Mistake #1: Dividing insurance claims billing among different employees
What was your system before? You may have had everyone pitching in, doing what they could to submit claims, follow up on them, work the aging report, and get denied claims appealed. Maybe you didn’t have the resources to make one person devoted to these tasks.
One of the biggest mistakes you could make when returning to in-house billing is going right back to a piecemeal approach to insurance billing. That’s because consistent attention wins the day. Having someone whose sole responsibility is insurance billing is key to collecting what you’ve earned from insurance claims.
A healthy billing process is a cycle that tracks your claims from stage to stage. Breaking the cycle and working in bursts as time allows, will hurt your practice income.
Completing insurance billing “whenever” will frustrate you and your patients!
Solution: Have a person already in place who can devote their time to insurance billing
Before leaving your insurance billing company plan and develop a system or standard operating procedure (SOP) for every task, from filing claims to working insurance aging reports.
Be sure to train the team members on their responsibilities, set your expectations, benchmarks, and accountability. You will want to stay diligent in managing your in-house billing system’s effectiveness. Don’t wait until the bank account is low to monitor your in-house billing system.
So before you bring your billing back in-house, make sure you have a qualified, experienced insurance billing expert with skills to match those you’re losing when saying goodbye to the outsourced dental billing company.
As you know, insurance billing itself is a full-time job. It’s time-consuming and requires keeping up with ever-evolving rules and regulations.
Mistake #2: Hiring someone quickly before evaluating their skillset
So it’s important to find someone to take over insurance billing before you let go of your outsourced dental billing company. This does not mean filling this position with just anyone, and this definitely does not mean rushing this process.
As you’re getting ready to make this change, you might feel pressured to find someone ASAP to take over this position, and that might lead to overlooking the assessment of the biller’s experience.
It’s imperative that you replace your outsourced dental billing company with someone who understands every facet of dental insurance billing.
If you hire someone without experience, they’re going to be more likely to make mistakes that will cost you in denied insurance claims. And that can add up, especially if they do not know how to effectively appeal those claims.
Solution: Have your new in-house biller take an assessment to verify their expertise
Instead of rushing to replace the outsourced dental billing company - keep them on board while you take your time finding the right in-house biller.
When you look through applicants, be sure to take note of their years of experience, but also take time to assess their skill set. Words are just words - you need to know they can maintain your collections percentage and tend to your insurance aging report without too much guidance.
They should be able to:
- Accurately create insurance claims
- Attach the required documentation for the procedure code
- Batch and submit insurance claims
- Follow up on claims that had errors or missing information that weren’t validated
- Understand and keep up with CDT code changes
- Understand insurance plans and breakdowns
- Know the proper times to follow up on submitted claims
- Know the best practices for appealing denied claims
- Know how to work the insurance aging report effectively and effectively
It might feel excessive, but it’s actually pretty common for employers to test the skill set of potential employees. You don’t want to waste your time hiring, then possibly firing someone who was not up to the challenge.
Mistake #3: Neglecting to look at reports such as your collection rate and insurance aging numbers before making the decision
Okay, so now you’re feeling more ready to replace your outsourced dental billing company with an expert in-house biller. Awesome! But before you nail down this decision, make sure to evaluate your numbers.
What kind of results were you seeing from your dental claims service?
If your dental billing service helps you maintain a high collections percentage, you need to take that into consideration when making your decision. This will also be the baseline for the performance of your new insurance biller.
Solution: Before you switch back to in-house billing - evaluate your numbers as a benchmark
We’re not here to make you stick with your outsource dental billing company. However, you do need to be able to answer the question: “What’s in the best interest of my practice?”
Knowing what your average insurance collections percentage or insurance AR report average was with your dental billing company is a key point of comparison to evaluate your future billing system.
If the system your new biller uses doesn’t create clean claims and collect what you’ve earned, that’s a big problem! It’s important to make sure you’re getting what you pay for. This is also why it’s so important to evaluate your new in-house biller’s skills before hiring them.
Ready to switch back to in-house billing successfully?
You now know what to avoid and how to have all the things that you need in place if you switch your billing from outsourced to in-house. Having a plan for your insurance billing tasks should always be a top priority, as insurance claims bring in about 50% of your overall revenue.
It’s not a role that can take a back seat and be divided up between whoever can make the time.
If you can’t find an experienced expert biller, or you’re not quite ready to hire a brand new full-time biller, Dental ClaimSupport offers training to team members hoping to take over insurance billing.
To learn more about training for your dental team members on insurance billing, visit our educational platform, Dental Claims Academy.
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