Importance of Outsourcing Dental Billing

Outsourcing dental billing can be stressful at first. You know you need to outsource dental billing, either because your practice is growing faster than your staff can handle, or simply because the staff that you do hire is not skilled nor experienced enough to do billing well.  But handing the reigns of your revenue cycle management to a third-party company can seem daunting.

Let’s begin by going over what outsourcing dental billing is.  It typically involves daily submission of primary and secondary claims, either electronically or by mail, and inputting of coding and fee schedules.  A good deal of the billing work is in the following up on claims, usually on a weekly basis if the biller is exceptional.  This includes keeping the dental practice up to date with an aging report of 30, 60, and 90 days past due claims.  The billing company should very rarely have any claims over 90 days.  The outsourced billing company will then appeal any denials and follow up weekly on said appeals until they are resolved.  Finally, the company should be posting insurance payments into the EHR system that has been linked between biller and practice. 

Also Read: What are Dental Claim Denials and how to avoid them?

So why go with an outsourced dental biller?  First, outsourcing dental billing can save a lot of money for the practice on not just the backend revenue stream, but also on the frontend for staff costs.  With in-house billers demanding upwards of $60,000 a year, coupled with rising minimum wage and the U.S. economy’s current inflation rates, outsourcing your billing is a smart strategy simply from a financial perspective.  Not to mention, you won’t have to worry about employee benefits, vacation time, sick days, turnover, dissatisfaction, burnout, and all the other variables that come with having to maintain an in-person staff.  Having a billing company to take this off your shoulders can be a huge relief.

Second, the in-house biller is typically just one person, or a few at the most.  Why delegate billing to a few when you can outsource it to sometimes a few dozen?  The best billing companies out there have a system in place, where a billing manager is assigned to the practice as the main point of contact, and that manager has a team of anywhere from 10 to 40 billers.

Third, the billers that make up the outsourced billing company only do billing—all day, every day, 52 weeks a year.  Whereas someone in-office may be doing multiple things at once, like taking calls, checking in patients, etc.  An expert billing company is expert at just that:  billing.  When hiring, always seek out the individual who has mastered the task you need done. 

Fourth, outsourced dental billers that know what they’re doing, have been doing it for a long time.  Seek out a billing company with individuals of at least five years’ experience in dental billing, not just medical billing.  Practices sometimes make the mistake of hiring just a medical biller, not knowing that medical billing and dental billing are completely different.

Finally, when you work with an outsourced billing company, you work with someone who has already created a systematic approach to billing that you don’t have to.  Instead of hiring one or two people to oversee and make sure they know what they’re doing, you can have a leader of a billing company do all the hiring and overseeing for you.  A good billing company is made up many billers, managed by specific billing supervisors, who are then led by a competent CEO.  Find a company with a CEO who has a vast knowledge not only how to lead a company, but who also understands the psychology of organizations, and knows how to optimize the environment internally and externally for maximum performance.