Lost Revenue and Dental Offices
Many dentists lose money because insurance companies are difficult and sometimes patients lack funds. But as the owner of your practice, you must also take responsibility.
Here is a list of the most common reasons for your decreased cash flow
1. Inaccurate patient data
2. Unanswered information requests
3. Claims are not filed on time
Fortunately, all of these factors have solutions. Your billing team may be good, but there will always be a situation that overwhelms them and excuses are not going to help you when your revenue is on the line. To get paid, you need to pay attention to certain factors.
Staffing
A single person cannot handle your practice’s entire billing process. Even a team might fail if you do not assign tasks properly. You must assign certain people to fulfill certain roles in your billing process.
The following are roles you need to fill for your billing team:
1. Billers educated about benefits for claims filing.
2. One person to constantly check the status of your claims.
3. An eligibility checker to research what your patient’s plans cover.
4. A phone specialist to make and receive calls from patients and payers.
Hiring someone without experience or knowledge about billing and benefits will cost your practice. Even your experienced and knowledgeable billers will have their hands full with all the claims and payers, if you do not hire the proper amount of staff.
Equipment
Times have changed, and not upgrading to electronic claims will only slow you down. Electronic claims have faster turnaround times, which will give you an early warning of claim rejections.The early warning will help you fix the claims for resubmission quickly. Your employees will need training, but the programs are easy to learn. Call the company to help train your employees. Finally, the programs allow managers to view this data to help your practice make the necessary adjustments.
Your practice must also choose HIPAA compliant practice management software to protect your patient’s data. HIPAA dictates security infrastructures for your practice, or you’ll face heavy fines.
Tracking
Your manager’s job is to track all your receivables, such as patient receipts and dental benefits. The billers in your practice must also run reports on aging accounts twice a week for evaluation. Your manager must assign someone to work on the aging accounts to get payment. Identify your claim rejections to get paid.
Review denied claims quickly to find glitches in your clearinghouse or employees. This step will help you move in the right direction in increasing your revenue.
Updates
Medical and dental billing receive updates regularly. Your team will need to keep their ears to the ground to find and understand these updates. Claims filed by your office may be rejected for not following the updates. You also have to worry about training and implementation for your practice. The process has a learning curve, which can be difficult even for your experienced employees.
You can fix all of these problems and considerations by hiring Synapse. A trusted revenue cycle management firm that comes with a well-equipped infrastructure to take care of all your billing. Furthermore, it will cost your practice less than hiring the proper amount of staff in-house and you will not have to worry about staff calling in sick, which can put you way behind in billing.
Here is a list of tasks we can do for your practice:
1. Our billers are experts at navigating through the many rules of different payers.
2. We are staffed with many talented individuals specifically trained for their roles.
3. Our knowledge of information technology helps us keep up with the ever-changing billing landscape.
4. All our clients enjoy a review and resubmission process for their claims to ensure money is not wasted.
5. We will send you reports about your practice’s finances to help you make the necessary changes to improve your bottom line.
6. Our company also has departments that handle updates and training for the integration of the new rules to your practice.
In conclusion, keeping your billing in-house will have you face problems such as late claim filing, unresponsive payers, lack of information, staffing, equipment, tracking, and update issues. Hiring Synapse can solve all your billing problems because they have the infrastructure to get your billing done efficiently. You won’t not suffer from payment delays and unpaid claims when you hire Synapse.