Spring Cleaning Your Dental Practice Revenue

The spring is synonymous with fresh starts – setting new dental practice revenue goals and priorities and moving away from unproductive habits – but have you considered a fresh start for your practice as well? This is an ideal time to reflect on the health and wellness of billing practices to improve productivity, compliance, and reimbursements and payments.

Here are a few areas to consider for bringing more efficiency and convenience to your practice.

Maximize billing and payment productivity by adopting technology designed to simplify processes and reduce manual tasks. Integrated clearinghouse solutions such as claims, eligibility, attachments and more help eliminate barriers to efficiency for staff and can increase the realization of revenue. These solutions enable more management of the claims lifecycle within a single system and normalize payer responses into a consistent, readable format. Integrated solutions also help consolidate claims, remittance, and payment data for easier reporting. Increased use of technology can help free up time to focus on other tasks

Stop manually checking patient benefits via payer websites and dedicated numbers! By utilizing eligibility solutions through DentalXChange, real-time eligibility responses can be obtained directly from the payer. Fully electronic benefits verification not only presents an upfront savings of between $2.73 and $7.32 per transaction according to the 2022 CAQH Index, but it also prevents downstream rejections and denials that can create a ripple effect across the practice.

Make first pass clean claim submission percentage a key performance indicator (KPI). A clean claim is one that contains all information required by the payer to process the claim without rejection.* Clearinghouses assist by running claim files through a series of edits to catch common problems before they reach the payer. Common clearinghouse rejection reasons include:

• Duplicate claim submission
• Eligibility
• Missing or invalid Payer ID
• Missing or invalid billing provider
• Diagnosis code invalid or not in effect on service date

A clean claim rate below 90% should be considered a red flag for billing practices. On average, DentalXChange clients realize a 98.22% clean claim rate.

*Note that a clean claim does not mean that a denial will not happen.

In addition to a top-notch clinical experience, patients increasingly expect a smooth billing and payment process. Consider offering flexible patient payment options including the ability to pay with credit or debit cards and online payments. Working with a dental merchant service partner enables easy payment collection while improving office efficiency. Offering more ways to pay increases patient and staff satisfaction while boosting the bottom line.

Increased billing practice efficiency and convenience can be achieved with process improvements and robust technology offerings. For best results, ensure your practice management solution and claims clearinghouse work well together.