On a day-to-day basis, your front desk team busily checks patients in and out, schedule appointments, collects payments, and answers phone calls, keeping your practice running smoothly. It may even seem to run like a well-oiled machine!
But what would happen if another task were tossed into the mix? A task like chart auditing can throw off your team’s routine, but it is imperative for your practice’s long-term success. In this post, explore the what, why, and how of chart auditing and find out the best way to handle it to maintain your team’s groove.
The What of Chart Auditing
As with a tax audit, a chart audit entails making sure that everything is accurate, current, and active with your patients’ files. The point is to find those who haven’t been in your office for more than 6 months or who have had a treatment plan created for a certain service without scheduling follow-up care.
The Why of Chart Auditing
Behind everything you do, you need to have your business’s success in mind. Chart auditing is important because it gives you a clearer picture of your patient base. With unfulfilled reports, you can have a skewed view of how many active patients you have, affecting your business decisions.
For instance, at first glance, it may seem like you have a large number of patients. With this information, you contemplate hiring an associate or buying new technology; however, a chart audit reveals that some are inactive or have moved away. Using this more accurate data, you realize that you don’t go through the expense of hiring an associate but instead focus on reactivating patients, acquiring new patients, and fulfilling unfinished treatment plans.
The How of Chart Auditing
Unfortunately, chart auditing can be a time-consuming process, and it needs to be done periodically to keep your records up to date. It involves trying to contact each patient who has canceled an appointment or who hasn’t yet completed their treatment plan. This necessary task requires someone who is patient and great at communicating, even if the patient is being difficult.
The easiest and best solution is to hire a service to conduct chart auditing for you. They can be impartial and let you know exactly which patients should be contacted to complete treatment and which are now inactive and not worth pursuing further. The service company may even be able to handle contacting them for you, saving you even more time!
Having this chart auditing process in the background with a service company allows you and your team to focus on everyday tasks and care, keeping your business running as smoothly as possible.
About Dental Support Specialties
Dental Support Specialties was started back in 2008, and many of the team members have at least that much experience in the dental field. In addition to chart auditing, our team can perform other administrative services, including answering phone calls, scheduling appointments, and insurance verification for billing. To learn more about our services, you can contact us online here.