Dental Support Specialties Blog

When you go to a store, you pay the full amount at the cash register, and you leave with a product. It’s an easy, straightforward transaction. In dentistry, billing isn’t quite as simple. In fact, dental billing can be downright challenging! Keep reading to learn about the difficulties faced by administrative professionals and what you can do to benefit your practice the most.

You never know what someone is going through until you walk a mile in their shoes—so the saying goes. Even just imagining what a person does and experiences professionally can help you feel empathy and appreciation for them. As a dental practice owner, you could come to appreciate the workload of your employees and support staff by trying this exercise.

Although you may not necessarily have the opportunity to do what a dental biller does every day, you can get a glimpse into their world and appreciate how they can help your practice thrive.

When you started your dental practice, of course you needed to have education and qualifications for clinical treatment. However, there is something you may not have learned in the classroom or in the operatory that can greatly impact whether your practice is successful—dental billing.

You don’t have to become an expert yourself, but being familiar with this part of running your practice can help you reach your financial goals and have a lucrative business.

The word outsourcing has developed a negative connotation in the recent past, but it doesn’t always mean sending jobs and money out of the country. When it comes to a dental practice, outsourcing some tasks, namely dental billing, can actually be quite beneficial for the business and your employees. What are these benefits? Keep reading to learn just three of the many!

Part of running a successful business is cutting out unnecessary tasks wherever possible. You don’t need to dedicate time to tasks that don’t actually add value to your bottom line. At a dental practice, you may wonder how you can be more efficient, especially in your front office. Are there ways you can be more efficient here?

Dental insurance verification takes up quite a bit of this team’s time, but is it really necessary? Would it make more financial sense to cut this from the dental claims process? The answers may surprise you!

As a small business and dental practice owner, you bear a lot of responsibility. You have the largest financial stake, and you are in charge of whether it succeeds or fails, but that doesn’t mean you can take illegal shortcuts. In fact, if you make egregious, fraudulent mistakes in your insurance claims, you could face devastating consequences. To keep out of trouble, make sure you avoid these mistakes.

To get the right answers, you must ask the right questions—this may sound like a fortune cookie, but it’s true! And when it comes to making sure your dental practice gets paid on time, you definitely want to ask the right questions.

If one step of the claims process goes wrong, dental insurance won’t pay you, which can hurt your business. What exactly should you be asking when you verify dental insurance? Keep reading to find out just four of the basic questions you need answers to!

When you graduated from school, you may have thought your days of writing were behind you. Dentistry doesn’t seem like an industry that involves writing, but when it comes to dental insurance claims, you need to write a narrative or justification and context for treatment in a statement called a narrative.

While this narrative doesn’t have to start with “once upon a time,” it does need to tell a story—your patient’s dental story. To help you write a good narrative for each insurance claim, here are some tips to keep in mind.

When you decided to be in-network with dental insurance, you knew that it would attract more patients and help your business. However, working with these companies can get complicated. Case and point, a patient is covered by two insurance plans. You now have to do double the paperwork!

Coordination of benefits (COB) is essential if you want to be paid on time and correctly. Although there are more complex situations not discussed here, below are some rules that can help you get the basics of COB down.

You’re not a layperson, so the world of dental insurance isn’t a confusing mystery. However, if you have a patient with two insurance plans, verification and billing can get mirky, even for professionals as seasoned as your front desk team! Which plan is the primary and secondary? How do you process the claims for the same services? How can you receive payments smoothly? Understanding more about this situation can help you know what to do next.