Patient billing services: 3 tips to maximize results for your dental business

March 29th, 2023 | 5 min. read

In today's healthcare landscape, using patient billing services has become a popular option for many healthcare organizations, including dental practices and groups.

But to achieve financial success, you need to understand how to maximize patient revenue.

To ensure you’re getting the most from your patient services billing, it is essential to:

Establish best practices in your patient billing system
Establish clear expectations
Foster a collaborative relationship

DCS provides end-to-end revenue cycle management services, and a major component is our patient billing service. With this service, you use the latest automated patient billing technology, which makes paying for care simple and easy for every patient, and you get cash flow you can count on.

Here are three tips for maximizing collections from patient billing services to help you save time and money. It’s crucial to learn how to maximize collections from patient services billing to increase your income and provide a better patient experience.

First, let’s cover what patient billing services entail.

Tip #1: Establish best practice in your patient billing system

If you could automate best practices for patient billing, what would the system do? Patients want their choice of payment method–whether cash transfer, credit card, or payment plan–to be frictionless. That’s what you give them with DCS’ patient billing services:

Send payment links as soon as the balance is known (no manual processing)
Reach out on their preferred device instantly, with email and text messages
Accept payment from all major credit cards and wallet apps, from any device
Follow up automatically with friendly reminders
Set up your own payment plans with recurrent billing
Minimize the time and cost of issuing paper statements
Monitor direct deposits and outstanding balances instantly

DCS uses the latest automated patient billing technology to make your patient billing process easy for patients, and more profitable for you.

“Reputable automated A/R solutions, empower dental offices to do just that by removing complexity and turning your accounts receivable into an efficient operation that is easily scalable, better serves customers, and gets you paid faster.” -Dental Economics

One group of DCS customers saw an average ROI of 1,477% in a single month after using our patent billing service. So, how will you get the most from services like this?

How to maximize collections from patient services billing – choosing a service

To get the most from patient billing services, you need to choose a vendor that has reputable success. But how do you know if a service provider is right for you?

Look through their services on their website, and take note of:

Google reviews from former or current clients
Glassdoor reviews from former employees
How clear their services are to understand

Also note how easily they communicate with you when you schedule a call.

Quick tip: Ask the point of contact how their RCM experts are vetted and trained.

Taking note of each of these factors will indicate the quality of service you will receive. The goal is to decrease your patient AR while still providing an excellent patient billing experience.

Tip #2: Establish clear expectations and metrics

Clear expectations and metrics help ensure that your organization and the billing service are aligned and working towards the same goals.

By setting clear expectations and the metrics you will use to check performance, you’ll be able to monitor progress and make adjustments to ensure a high return on investment. Your dental practice and the billing service should have a shared understanding of the specific responsibilities and roles that each party will undertake.

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A good RCM company will establish roles and responsibilities during your orientation, or even during initial phone calls when discussing services with you.

You’ll also maximize your results from patient billing services by understanding your own metrics. Many dental teams aren’t aware just how high their patient AR is.

Patient collections typically account for around 50% of your practice’s overall revenue — too important to be undercut by a costly process.

When you are aware of your own financial metrics, you’re able to measure the ROI of the patient billing services.

Tip #3: Foster a collaborative relationship with the dental service provider

A collaborative relationship will lead to better communication, alignment of goals, and a more productive working relationship between your dental practice and the patient billing service.

When the two parties work together, you’ll overcome challenges and achieve better financial outcomes. The service team should clearly understand your unique requirements, policies, and procedures.

Your billing service team will also guide you with best practices. Adopting these further improves your documentation processes and operations. This will help the other parts of your revenue cycle to run more smoothly as well.

For example, when you work with DCS for insurance billing and patient billing, your service team member adds notes about insurance payments to explain the patient portion. This information supports your team in answering the patient’s questions.

This is an example of how collaboration works with DCS as your full-service RCM partner. Everything is streamlined, from insurance verification to insurance collections to patient billing.

Ready to get the most from patient billing services for your dental practice or group?

Partnering with patient billing services is becoming increasingly common in the dental healthcare industry, and for good reason.

By implementing these tips, your dental practice or group will benefit from the efficiency and cost savings that come with patient billing services — while still achieving the financial goals that are crucial to your success.

DCS offers patient billing services as part of its full-service revenue cycle management framework for dental practices and dental groups.

To learn more about working with the experts at DCS, schedule a call with us.

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