By Luffy Jin
Bleeding cash flow and stuck claims are huge barriers for dental providers. Due to that, you cannot keep the doors open to hire new staff, expand your company, buy itinerary, and balance your revenue.
For major dental providers, inconsistent cash flows are the major hindrance in their workload. Claims sit in limbo for months, denials pile up, and reimbursement trickles in slowly. With such a huge mess up and imbalance in cash flow, you will find it challenging to pay salaries or bills, and buy procurement.
The best approach to maintain a healthy cash flow is to outsource dental billing services. Want to know how? In this blog, we’ll understand how outsourcing optimizes your bleeding cash flows, converts your denials into acceptance, and increases your practice revenue.
Before discussing the benefits of outsourcing billing services, let’s explore the factors that keep draining your cash flows.
When your staff struggles to meet and treat the patients, the billing responsibility is often neglected. The claims that are not managed on time come up as a huge financial strain, leading to write-offs and subsequent revenue losses.
To err is human. But, still, it’s best to avoid repeating mistakes like coding errors, missing documentation, and credentialing issues, which are the primary reasons for high denial rates. This won’t just hit the revenue, but also damage your business.
Each denial means spending time on correction and resubmission. Due to that, payment gets delayed, and your staff is occupied with starting the process all over again.
The providers should collect each dollar ($) of its service on time, otherwise, it might go down the stream when payer claims are not properly followed up. Your staff is busy looking after patients and other practice tasks. As a result, late follow ups can hurt your revenue and you lose the amount that actually belongs to you.
Every service has a dedicated cost. If your staff is less experienced or new in dental billing, they require time to master things. Due to this, they are prone to committing frequent billing errors that will cost you more time and money.
All above mentioned issues create a vicious cycle: slow submission will delay the process that comes under high denial rates, ends up with inadequate follow-ups and ultimately hurts the revenue.
Think of a dental billing company who has an expert staff, which handles all the billing headaches and consolidates all the tasks within time. Does this sound more promising? Outsourcing your billing will provide you with some of the following benefits:
Dental billing companies are only bound to handle and manage the cash flow. They only worry about making claims to payers faster; they do not have to worry about your administrative tasks, the HR issues, or the patient's health. Once the claim goes faster, reimbursements come your way sooner.
One of the best things about billing experts is that they know everything regarding the nuances of CDT codes, ICD-10 requirements, and payer-specific rules. Billing experts make sure that there are fewer denials, less errors, and clean claims that get paid on time.
The strong follow-up is always the best. That is why an outsourcing dental billing company prioritizes timely follow-up. They do not wait for the right time. The main task is to bring each ($) into your account you owed. They follow up with insurers, appeal for every denial on time and avoid letting go even a tiny amount from the cracks.
Credentialing lapses are always painful and the main reason for denials. Let this task be handled by the experts. They make sure to keep you within the insurer’s network, so you won’t experience any denial or rejection, at the time of insurance claim submission.
The world is going paperless, and so are outsourced dental billers. They use the most advanced and sophisticated automated softwares to catch an error. In billing claims, time is everything. If you delay, the claim might be written off.
Let’s talk about the financial impact an outsource biller provides you. It is obvious that when you outsource your dental billing to a partner you will see a rise in your revenue. It could be in 6 months or so. The jump is vivid. Now, let me quote an example for you.
Example: Let’s assume you are making $100,000 per month, and the credit history is showing deposits of only $70,000. It means you are bleeding or losing $30,000 per month, which equals$360,000 per annum. It’s an alarming situation!
Outsourced dental billing services provide solutions with a proactive approach, strategic planning, and billing process customized to your requirements, claim payments are faster and denials are fewer. They use professional and smart working to add at least somewhere between $180,000 and $240,000 in your annual revenue. The providers only focus on the patient's health and don’t need to worry about recovering revenue.
A healthy organisation has no loop holes for leaking money. Besides, after outsourcing your billing, you can also focus on other important aspects of your practice. Your staff is more focused on patient care and other practice operations instead of managing billing and insurance claims. You will see a drastic drop in your overall overhead.
As your practice grows, your billing partner scales with you, which eliminates the need to hire new staff or to buy new software. A trustworthy billing partner offers transparency into the billing process, so you can track claim progress in real-time.
Furthermore, while the above explanation resonates with your practice needs, the most important thing is the peace of mind that you get when you earn each dollar for services provided.
There is a myth that outsourcing is only for larger dental treatment centers. But that’s not correct! No matter whether your practice is small-scale or medium-level, if your revenue is decreasing, you need a professional billing partner to handle all your payments, and payer issues.
Consider outsourcing if:
Your denial rate is more than 10%
Submissions are fewer and more unpaid claims
Struggling cash flow despite providing quality service
Your billing staff is stuck with complex claims or not properly trained
You want to expand your service but don’t want to hire new staff
It does not matter if you have an in-house billing team, outsourcing keeps the momentum of your cash flow steady. It will smooth the complexity in documentation, resolve the issues, and act as a helping hand. Billing companies like TransDental work with small, medium, and large providers, managing the revenue cycle smoothly and sustaining cash flow the right way.
In dental billing services, not every company is equal. There are some major USPs that make each company more acceptable towards different providers. In simple words, dental billing companies are not aware of all the challenges, so there should be transparency in everything.
The fee structure should be vivid, so you can check and monitor your cash flows without any hesitation or request. Furthermore, your outsourcing partners should provide you with weekly or monthly reports, so you get updates on how they’re managing claims. The denial rate should be low and you should be getting paid your hard-earned dollars smoothly.
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