Dental Support Specialties Blog

At dental practices, sometimes, discussions about efficiency center around clinical procedures or trying to see more patients. However, one area that can make or break your business is your revenue cycle management (RCM). If you are unable to collect payment efficiently, you won’t be able to keep the lights on—much less keep your staff happy and paid while enabling your business to thrive year after year.

No matter how long you’ve been in the dentistry business, everyone can improve and give their practice a boost in the right direction. Keep reading to learn about ways you can be more efficient in your revenue cycle management.

Running a dental practice is challenging enough without the added stress of unpaid claims or frustrated patients. Failing to verify insurance benefits before treatment can lead to denied claims, uncollectible bills, and even negative reviews that hurt your reputation. At Dental Support Specialties (DSS), we’ve helped countless practices avoid these pitfalls with our expert verification services. Here’s why verification matters—and how DSS can protect your bottom line.

Losing a key employee to burnout can cost your practice thousands—and it’s more common than you think.  Burnout employees switch jobs. Before you know it, you’re being handed a resignation letter from an employee & you never even knew they were unhappy.  

Besides the immediate loss of manpower, there are a number of downstream challenges created after losing a team member. 

As a small business owner, you wear a lot of hats: you manage the overall finances of the dental practice, lead your staff, continue your training as a dental expert, and perform outstanding care on patients, of course. However, you don’t have to get down into the weeds of each transaction with insurance companies or try constantly to find someone to do it for you in-house. In fact, for the reasons detailed below, you can outsource dental billing to an American company that specializes in this area of dentistry and maintaining the business you’ve worked so hard to build.

Two dental offices can offer similar services and be located in the same area but have completely different practices in terms of culture and success. A business strategy that works for one may not benefit the other. Outsourcing dental billing is an effective, smart idea for many dental practices but not all. Who might not need this service? Keep reading to find out!

Back when you decided to become a dentist, you probably felt proud and excited about building your own practice, but the pressures of opening and running a small business are extremely real. In fact, according to the Chamber of Commerce, 595,000 businesses close every year in the United States, and about 65 percent of businesses fail even 10 years after opening! Obviously, every penny matters to stay afloat.

Although outsourcing your dental billing may not be at the top of your list of methods to improve your practice’s efficiency, perhaps it should be! Worries about the cost may make you hesitate, but rates usually depend on how much revenue you collect from insurance monthly. With the following benefits of outsourcing dental billing, you’re bound to find it’s well worth the cost!

When you have a new patient come into your dental practice, they may find it annoying to have to sign a stack of paperwork, but this step of the process actually benefits both parties. One of those important documents is the dental consent form, which states that the patient gives your practice permission to treat them. This consent may seem implied and obvious, but addressing every detail in writing can protect you from being sued, fined, or worse and can make sure the patient knows what they need to know about treatment they are going to receive.

Overall, digital technology has greatly elevated modern life, helped reduce impact on the environment, and assisted in business efficiency. Simply put, it makes everything easier! When it comes to dental insurance verification, digital technology can also be useful to eliminate human error, both when criminally intentional and when innocently accidental, in many billing situations. Before learning how digital technology can improve dental insurance verification, you’ll need to know why verification matters and how it works.

Let’s face it—very few people like or even understand insurance. It can be complicated, have odd phrasing, and include many exceptions to coverage. However, if you own and operate a dental practice, working with insurance companies probably has a significant impact on your business’s revenue stream. However, sometimes, even though you do not represent the insurance company, you have to act as a resource for your patients regarding their benefits through dental insurance verification and billing.

For instance, many insurance plans include a missing tooth clause, which can affect your patient’s out-of-pocket costs and their attitude toward your practice. Keep reading to learn what this clause is and how it can impact your business if you don’t handle it gracefully.

You know a scam when you see one. You don’t fall for get-rich-quick schemes, and you certainly didn’t cheat your way through dental school to get where you are! However, perhaps after an appointment with a rude patient, it may sometimes be tempting to fudge the billing paperwork a bit, so you get a little extra money from the insurance company and the patient for their treatment.

However, this choice, called upcoding, is a huge mistake in dental billing! In this post, you’ll learn about upcoding, why you should take it seriously, and how to avoid it in your dental practice.