Pros and cons to outsourcing your dental insurance billing

When making any decision, it’s important to weigh your options. There’s never a perfect option, especially when it comes to running your dental practice. 

As a dentist, you want to find a solution to your low insurance collections percentage and high aging report. You’ve heard a few of your colleagues suggest outsourcing your insurance billing, but you don’t know much about it and you want the raw truth. 

If you search “outsourced dental billing companies,” every website, (including our own at Dental ClaimSupport) is going to tell you all of the amazing benefits of outsourcing. And a lot of those things are true. Through the years we’ve helped a lot of dental practices collect more money from insurance and streamline their billing process. 

But what about the cons of outsourcing? There’s never a perfect solution, right? It might sound crazy coming from us, a dental billing company, but we believe you should have the facts. And outsourcing your dental billing is not always perfect.

In this article, you’ll learn the pros and cons of outsourcing your insurance billing. Sure, a billing company can help you collect more, but it is an extra person to regularly communicate with that won’t be in your office. It’s also a stranger to whom you are handing your insurance billing over to. 

After you read this article, you’ll have a better idea of the good and the bad of outsourcing your insurance billing so that you can make an informed decision when it comes to your practice’s revenue process.

Pros of outsourcing dental insurance billing

Let’s start positive! There are definitely a lot of amazing benefits to outsourcing your insurance billing. It can really help your practice financially, and relieve your administrative team of insurance strain.

Here are three big pros to outsourcing insurance billing:

1. You won’t have to deal with insurance companies

Let’s be real, sitting on the phone and trying to communicate with insurance is a huge pain. It’s easy to get frustrated with insurance because they make it so hard to get a claim appealed or paid. 

Remote billers, however, are incentivized to get your claims paid, so they don’t mind doing what it takes to get this done. 

They also have a pool of other billing experts around them that can give advice, tips, and tricks about getting claims paid. 

2. You will have more time to handle other tasks

If you outsource your insurance billing, your team will have hours back in their day to complete other tasks. Like we said, sitting on the phone with insurance companies is a pain, and it’s also time-consuming. Getting claims appealed? That’s time-consuming as well. 

It’s tedious work that is hard to keep up with if there are other tasks on your plate. Your dental team will be able to focus on checking in patients, patient billing, insurance verification and so much more. This will make for a more organized dental practice. 

Learn the 5 things your dental practice is still responsible for after outsourcing their insurance billing.

3. You’ll collect more from insurance companies

This is arguably the biggest pro of outsourcing your insurance billing. 

You’re going to collect more from insurance companies with a dedicated expert biller working on insurance billing for you. This person has the time and expertise to make sure every claim goes to insurance and is error-free. 

It’s easy for errors to be made by your in-house team if they have other tasks distracting them from submitting claims. Remote billers’ responsibility is to work hard to get your claims paid, so they don’t have to worry about distractions.

The biller spends their time following up on unpaid claims, appealing denied claims, and making sure your aging report is always cleaned up and regularly worked on. 

So you’re sure to see an increase in your insurance collections.

Cons of outsourcing dental insurance billing

Time to get honest. Like everything, outsourcing dental insurance billing isn’t perfect. You’re putting your insurance billing in the hands of someone you may have never met, and it’s an extra person to communicate with. 

So, let’s talk about three cons to choosing this option:

1. The remote biller won’t be in your office for easy access

Most outsourced dental billing companies have remote billers working on your office. This means they work from a different location than your practice and remote into your dental software to handle your insurance claims. 

Because of this, they aren’t in your office for easy access to questions and concerns. You can’t poke your head out of your office to ask a quick billing question. This is unappealing to some practices.

2. You are trusting an outsider to handle insurance billing 

Obviously, you should do your due diligence when researching billing companies to ensure they are legitimate. However, even if you know it’s a good company with reputable references, you’re still handing off your billing to a stranger, and that can be scary. 

A lot of practices struggle with this and feel territorial when letting a remote biller into their dental software. They will have access to see exactly how much money your practice is bringing in, and some practices feel intimidated by this. 

3. It is an extra person to communicate with 

Once you’re in the swing of things with your remote biller, it shouldn’t be a huge issue, but let’s be real: A remote biller is an extra person you have to take the time to communicate with. 

And if other billing companies are like us at Dental ClaimSupport, communication is a top priority with dental practices. This can feel like extra work to some admin teams. Especially if the team is unwilling to communicate effectively with the remote biller, the relationship is going to be more difficult. 

Decide what is right for your dental practice and make increasing revenue a priority

If you’re looking into outsourcing your billing, you are obviously curious about a change for your practice. 

Outsourcing certainly has its pros and cons. After reading this article though, you will notice that the cons have a lot to do with how your dental team handles their relationship with the remote billers, and how you as the dentist communicate this change with your team. 

Nevertheless, outsourcing is not for everyone. 

At Dental ClaimSupport, we always evaluate a practice’s current issues and problems before signing on with them to make sure outsourcing is the right step to help them overcome these issues.

There are 5 signs that point to a dental practice needing an outsourced dental billing company. Learning those in our Learning Center can help you evaluate if outsourcing is your next step.