Dental Support Specialties Blog

A patient is dissatisfied with their treatment and decides to sue you, but you can breathe somewhat easily because you know your patient records and charts are thorough and accurate. You’ve had chart audits done and have learned to be meticulous in your record keeping.

No dentist wants to find themselves in this kind of scenario, but it can happen unfortunately. Chart auditing is a great way to ensure the quality of your records as well as have a clear picture of how your practice is doing financially. But how can you audit a patient chart and make the process as smooth as possible? Here are important, yet sometimes overlooked, steps to follow!

When you run your own business, you need to account for nearly every minute of the day. After all, the saying is time is money. You can’t waste time on tasks that aren’t worthwhile or aren’t going to help your dental practice thrive. And yet, you may have necessary tasks that require a decent amount of time and attention. For instance, dental chart auditing can be time consuming, but it serves an important purpose in your practice. How long does a chart audit take? Is there an easier way to get this done?

Can you believe it’s already April? Time can fly when you’re working hard and busy, but it’s important to keep up with necessary tasks, especially as a small business owner. At your dental practice, you need to make room in the schedule for chart auditing, but how often does it need to be done? Why is it important? Keep reading to learn the answers.

If you ask any front desk personnel at a dental office, they will likely say that dental insurance verification ranked low on their list of favorite tasks at work. It can be tedious, time consuming, and seemingly mindless, but it is vital to make sure your practice receives insurance payments. In other words, without it, you could face unnecessary delays in getting money you’re owed!

So how can you streamline this process? Here are four tips to keep your system as efficient as possible.

It doesn’t make sense. Your practice schedule is reasonably busy, and you have plenty of patients, but you still seem to be struggling financially. If you aren’t already verifying dental insurance, you should be! Mistakes in claims could be holding back payments you’ve earned, and taking care of verification beforehand can eliminate these costly mistakes. Don’t know how to do this process? Here are the basic steps!

Every job comes with challenges, but when it comes to dental insurance verification, there are quite a few that front desk personnel at a dental practice must deal with. What are these problems? What makes this necessary task so daunting? Here are just four challenges your front desk team faces every day with verifying dental insurance and what you can do to resolve these issues for the good of your entire practice.

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.

As a business owner, you have to know certain numbers. You need to know how many new patients you get a month, how much return you’re getting on your marketing budget, how much revenue you make, how many inactive patients you have, and more.

But sometimes quantifying the true value of a service can be tricky. For instance, when measuring the value of a dental answering service, you need to consider more than the cost—you must also think about the priceless intangible benefits! Here are just a few ways that it can help your practice.

In some fields, skills are easily transferrable. For example, someone who has experience in retail in one area of the market can usually switch to retail in another fairly smoothly. However, it doesn’t always work that way.

To the layperson, dental and medical insurance may seem identical and interchangeable, but they are actually quite different. When it comes to insurance, experience in medical claims doesn’t necessarily transfer to proficiency in the dental field. For your dental practice, you need someone who is familiar with filing dental insurance claims specifically according to HIPAA requirements.

A prime example of the difference between these fields and the need for respective expertise is represented in the distinction between CDT and CPT. Keep reading to learn more about these terms and how a professional in the dental field can benefit your practice’s bottom line.

When patients enter your dental practice, they are warmly greeted by the person sitting at the front desk. As they check in the patient and make sure all their information has already been gathered, they say with a genuine smile the amount that is due for the appointment.

Does this mention of money sabotage your patient’s experience? Why is it common practice to have a patient pay upfront, and how can you make it easier or better for them? Get answers to these questions right here.