3 things to monitor before ending your dental billing services

Is your team considering ending their dental billing services? Once you’ve spent a few months, or even a few years working with a dental billing service, you might think that you’re ready to move on from outsourced billing. Your numbers are looking better, and your team is less stressed than they were before. 

Dental ClaimSupport is a trusted dental billing partner that is committed to helping dental teams submit clear, accurate and compliant insurance claims. We have relationships with dental teams that have been with us since we started 10 years ago, and some that have only lasted months. We’ve even had some dental teams that let us go, and then came back to utilize our dental billing services. 

In this article, we are sharing 3 aspects of your practice you should monitor before you end your dental billing services. These parts of your practice that the dental billing services have helped with are directly affecting the accuracy of the claims you submit, and whether or not you are being paid by insurance. Once the dental billing services are gone - who is going to ensure the progress the billers have made isn’t lost?

Monitoring these things will help you make your decision about ending your dental billing services, and prepare your team for their next transition. It will help you, as the dentist, know how ready your team is to take over your billing process again.

1. Your dental practice’s numbers - are they in a good place?

Maybe you initially outsourced dental billing services because your insurance collections were low, and your insurance aging report was growing too much. The dental billing service team came in, cleaned up your insurance aging report, and helped streamline your insurance billing process in order to collect more on insurance claims. 

It’s important to make decisions based on data and facts. Go into your practice management software and run a report to see the increase in your collections percentage from when the dental billing service began to now. Is there a steady increase? If there is, take that percentage increase into consideration. 

What are your expectations for your numbers once your dental billing services are gone? The thing about dental billing services is that they aren’t really a band-aid. Its purpose isn’t technically to come in and heal your low insurance collections. It's an extension of your team, like hiring another team member.

A dental billing service is what you hire in lieu of an additional team member to handle insurance receivables - not as a temporary fix.

So, if you’re letting go of your dental billing services, have a plan in place to keep your insurance collections numbers high, and your insurance aging report down. 

2. Your team’s ability to handle the insurance billing without the dental billing company

This plan to make sure your numbers are maintained hinges on what your in-house team is able to handle. Another big reason you hired a dental billing service is that your team did not have the time or maybe the expertise to dedicate to the ever-challenging insurance billing process. 

Insurance billing is a drain on time for your team. And if they’re also busy handling patients, scheduling, and maintaining office productivity - adding insurance claims work to their plate is too much. Insurance billing often takes a back seat to all of the day-to-day practice and patient responsibilities.  Because it’s not happening in the office or in person (the way patient care is), insurance claims are just not the priority. We’re explaining this because it’s not your team’s fault that you wisely decided to outsource dental billing services. 

If your team’s responsibility includes patient scheduling, follow-up, answering calls, collecting patient payments, patient check-in, updating the patient’s demographics, contact information, new insurance information, and maintaining the growing daily responsibilities for the practice, that’s a lot! 

When the dental billing service came in, your team was able to focus solely on those tasks without working overtime and stressing about following up on unpaid claims. If you add that back to their plate with no relief of the other tasks - you're right back to where you started. 

Your claims will take a backseat. Being on hold for hours with the insurance companies and trying to navigate the phone menus will tie up your phone line. This is frustrating to anyone! The website portals and fax-back documents will only give so much information. 

The attention given to forming a relationship with the patient is completely lost when your team member is too busy running down insurance claim information.

So, before ending your dental billing services, make sure you have someone (or multiple people) on your team that can take over your insurance claims. This will need to be their main responsibility as it is a full-time job! You must hire a team member who is an experienced dental insurance biller with a proven track record and an effective system. They also need to be closely monitored by the owner or manager. 

3. Your team’s dental billing education

Once you have monitored your team’s task and responsibility loads, you can now evaluate their dental billing knowledge. 

Insurance rules and regulations are constantly changing and every year the ADA publishes the changes in the current CDT that includes, additions, deletions, revisions, and editorial changes. The person in charge of your dental billing needs to have the bandwidth to understand, retain and follow these changes. 

To keep insurance revenue healthy, they also need to be experienced with the best practices for creating, batching, and submitting insurance claims. And they need to have effective strategies for efficiently following up with and appealing claims, as well as posting insurance payments. 

If you see that your team’s dental billing education could use some attention, consider enrolling them in online courses, seminars, or support groups such as our own Dental Claims Academy so that they can learn more about the dental billing process and how to move through it successfully. This is something you can do in the last few weeks or months you work with a dental billing service, to prepare your team to take over immediately. 

This preparation will help maintain your numbers so that you don’t see a huge decrease in collections while your team learns. Insurance billing is not a learn-on-the-job type of responsibility as this may create a financial hiccup or disaster in a practice. Again, we highly recommend a formally trained, educated, and experienced biller handles your dental billing to prevent loss in revenue. 

Ready to make a decision about your dental billing services?

When considering the end of your dental billing services, there are things you need to consider and monitor. Abruptly ending your dental billing services can lead to a huge drop in collections and a stressed team. Monitor your numbers to make an informed decision, make sure your team has time to take over your dental billing, they are equipped with the right knowledge, and that you have the time to closely monitor their progress. 

Dental ClaimSupport is here to help you get the cash flow you can count on by delivering you a worry-free claims process. 

If you’re stuck on your decision to keep your dental billing company, consider comparing costs of outsourcing vs in-house billing. When you have a clear, accurate, and compliant billing process, running your practice is easy and profitable.