Collecting revenue that is due to you is what keeps your doors open, and your staff paid at the end of the day. That being said, the health and well-being of your dental practice is reliant on a healthy and effectively functioning billing system. It really is not worth running the risk of a shoddy billing system that jeopardizes your practice’s longevity.
Dental billing services from Fortis offer your practice a streamlined and efficient way to ensure financial stability and the certainty of growth in your practice moving forward. Optimizing this process is going to bring in more revenue from both your patients and your dental insurance claims.
In this article, we are going to stroll through the ins and outs of dental billing: what it is, the billing process, and how it can help you gain control over your revenue stream collection. After all, the main purpose of billing is to collect payment due to you in as timely a manner as possible. Simple.
The Importance of Having a Dental Billing Service?
For their financial stability and their growth, dental practices rely rather heavily on dental billing services. These services once outsourced and have proven themselves to be worth their weight in gold. Fortis dental billing company, for example, has assisted practices in optimizing their cash flow, simplifying their revenue management cycles, and increasing their profitability.
More than just a billing service, they assist with patient enrollment, optimize accounts receivable management, and ensure speedy receipt of insurance submission claims. These services play a critical role in servicing the healthcare industry overall.
Dental Billing and the Billing Process
In a nutshell, dental billing is the activity that involves the collection of payments due for dental services that have been rendered, and it may be broken down into the two main sources of income for your practice – patient billing and insurance claims processing.
The dental billing process involves a few steps that need to be moved through, and those are going to be discussed here.
- Collecting of Patient Information
This information includes a patient’s name, phone number, email and physical address, date of birth, contact preferences, name of employee, insurance details, carrier’s phone number, and the patient’s insurance ID number. All this information is collected during the initial appointment scheduling phone call.
- Verifying Insurance Coverage
Verification with a patient’s insurance company is a very necessary step in the process. This will further give a breakdown of the patient’s benefits, as well as the state of their coverage.
- Recording Dental Treatment and Code Data
This is a very important part of the process, as it captures and codes all the procedures that a patient underwent while in the chair. These notes are usually added electronically by one of the admin team members, and a sign-off on the day sheet is the best practice to have this verified.
- Submitting and Tracking Claims and Their Attachments
Through information inputted into your billing software, you will be able to create, batch, and submit all your insurance claims. This includes all the codes of procedures done, all a patient’s personal and insurance details, as well as any attachments (x-rays, narratives, etc.) that are needed.
- Resolving Problems Regarding Outstanding Claims
Once a claim has been denied or has been outstanding for more than 30 days, you are going to have to follow up. This is where the biller’s expertise really shines through. Once the outstanding claims have been received, your biller will contact the insurance company, do some inquiries, and then appeal for reimbursement.
- Billing Patients
Depending on your revenue/reimbursement model, patients will either be billed for the entire cost of the procedure or will be billed the balance after the relative insurance deductions have taken place.
This way, you choose to either send your patient a bill via mail or email, or they settle the balance before they leave your practice. However you choose to do it, keep in mind that fully collecting on a patient’s account receivable can bring in about half of your revenue.
- Posting Payments
This helps to keep all of your information correctly reported and documented, completing the life cycle of a claim you are now able to close out. Once your insurance claim has been deposited into your account, the payment information will be posted to your practice management software. Posting will need to be made in a timely manner so that patient bills and cash flow figures can be accurate.
- Running Key Reports
Once these payments have been posted and the claim closed out, you are then able to take a look at how well your collecting of payments has been for the services that you deliver. Through your dental billing software, you are able to run both net production and net collection reports. You can also run reports for insurance aging reports and for any outstanding accounts.
Outsourced Dental Billing for the Win
Now that you have a general and overall idea of what dental billing is and how it works, you should have a better idea of what you and your team are capable of, too. The monumental and admin-intensive billing cycle and procedures, for most dental practices, is a cumbersome and time consuming one, and one that does require a certain level of skill and administrative prowess.
By choosing to outsource this function of your practice, you are, apart from the already stated benefits, going to give your billing cycle and your practice the breathing room it needs to focus on what really matters – serving your client’s interests best.
The expert billers that are incorporated by these outsourced services deliver expert knowledge and attention to detail, which is the aim of them being there in the first place. They have the knowledge and expertise to successfully and cost-effectively navigate through complicated COB rules and the intricacies of medical billing.
Streamlining and smoothing your billing process is going to serve your practice very well as you continue to grow your practice, all the while, revenue that is yours is flowing towards you.