When you treat patients and restore their smiles, it should translate into reimbursements that drive profits and maximize payments.
But, here you are, watching your aging report grow longer while patients leave happy and dental payers sit on money that’s rightfully yours. Thousands of dental practices across the country struggle with exactly this problem every single month.
The good news? The fix isn’t complicated. It’s all about having the right AR follow-up protocols in place and actually sticking to them.
Want to know what these protocols are? This blog guides on how to use expert dental AR management services and follow proven strategies to recover revenue.
What Are AR Follow-Up Protocols?
AR follow-up protocols are the step-by-step processes that a dental billing team or an A/R department follows to track, chase, and collect unpaid insurance claims and patient balances.
Think of these protocols as your safety net. It’s a system that makes sure no claim gets forgotten, and no dollar slips through the cracks.
How to Recover Revenue Through AR Follow-Up Protocols: Step-By-Step Process
You need a structured process for good AR follow-up protocols and smooth recoveries to optimize your dental revenue cycle.
Submit Claims Immediately after Treatment
Claim submissions shouldn’t get delayed. When you complete a dental treatment, the clock starts ticking on the payer’s timely filing deadlines.
While most practices submit claims within 24 to 48 hours after the procedures, the best practice is to send accurate and properly coded claims to the payers immediately after the procedure. This makes recovery easier.
Most timely submitted claims are reimbursed faster, reducing your aging report, before the follow-up process even begins.
Set Up a Structured Follow-Up Timeline
The biggest mistake dental practices make is following up only when things go wrong. Proactive AR follow-up protocols are more effective in recovering outstanding payments from dental claims or patient balances.
Here is the ideal approach practices must use for follow-up:
- Day 14: Check claim status via the payer portal or by contacting the payer representative. If the claim is still unpaid, verify receipt and processing status with the payer.
- Day 30: Escalate to a phone call if there is no payment or response from the payer’s end. Document every interaction.
- Day 45-60: Resubmit the claim with corrected documentation or appeal a denied claim aggressively.
- Day 90+: Escalate the issue to an insurance supervisor or consider outsourcing to dental A/R specialists
When you set up this timeline for your dental practice, it becomes easy for your team to set reminders in the system and follow up on payments.
Break Down Your Aging Report Weekly
Your aging report is the single most important document in your practice’s AR management. Review it every week. Break it down by payer and aging bucket:
- 0-30 days
- 31-60 days
- 61-90 days
- 90+ days
It helps you find claims that are older or are close to getting older, so you can start the follow-up process on time.
Now, if you flag any dental claim that’s approaching 30 days, your follow-up starts early. The goal is to prevent balances from ever reaching the 60 or 90-day buckets in the first place. When you catch problems at 14-20 days after claim submission, resolution is almost always faster, cost-effective, and more successful.
Assign Clear Ownership for Every Balance
Assign responsibility of following up on specific payers or aging buckets to certain team members. You may assist your staff by preparing scripts to communicate with insurance companies and creating message templates for patient reminders, which can be customized for each patient and their payment requirements.
What are AR Follow-Up Protocols for Patient Balances?
While AR is mostly related to insurance claims, outstanding patient balances form a large share of these payments.
To effectively manage these balances and collect faster, send weekly statements to every patient with an outstanding balance, and include a clear due date. For accounts older than 30 days, contact the patient via a phone call.
If the patient can’t afford to pay in full, make it easier for them to pay in monthly installments. These installments should also be affordable for the patients, so these payments don’t impact their monthly expenses.
You can also maximize payment options by allowing patients to pay online via patient portals or using credit cards and other gateways. Flexibility makes it easier to recover payments from patients.
If nothing works, escalate it with a professional letter, where you may hire a third-party for the task, which may be a collection agency or a billing company. It’s the best practice if claims are aging beyond 90 days.
How Does Denial Management Help Reduce Accounts Receivable?
Denial management is a process through which dental practices can recover revenue from denied claims, but most practices simply write them off, resubmit without addressing the exact denial reason, and don’t follow up on denials.
A denial management system with weak AR follow-up protocols has a huge impact on a practice, as it costs thousands of dollars in annual revenue.
The proper follow-up on a denial is when you:
- Find the denial reason in the dental explanation of benefits
- Correct the mistake related to coding errors, typos, and missing documents
- Resubmit the claim with a professional appeal letter to address the payer’s denial reason
And another important thing that protects your practice is to keep all the records of every denial by the payer, along with the denial code. The denial code is mentioned in the “Remark Code” section in most dental EOBs.
If a payer is denying claims for the same reason, it means that it’s a denial pattern, which needs to be fixed. There may be issues in your billing process that require improvement.
The best practice is to actively track your claims after submission and quickly address errors. It helps reduce payment delays and recover revenue fast.
You can make it more effective if you scrub claims before submission. It detects errors in claims and rejects them, saving you the time required in follow-ups and denial management.
How to Automate AR Follow-Up for Fast Processes?
Consider automating your accounts receivable management, so the follow-up is fast, timely, and rewarding.
Whether you use a billing software or invest in a technology like robotic process automation, AR follow-up makes it easy to collect balances.
With automation and technology:
- Claims are tracked in real-time
- Aging claims are automatically flagged
- Alerts are generated automatically for outstanding balances
- Appeal templates are prepared for each denial reason or underpayment
- Payment reminder notifications are sent to the patients via automated emails or texts
By using software, you can prepare custom denial management processes according to your practice needs.
Plus, automation helps process payments faster to the right patient accounts. With timely and complete payments against each balance, it’s easy to reduce accounts receivable and manage finances smoothly.
Is Outsourcing A/R Management the Right Choice for Dental Practices?
Accounts receivable is a detailed process, which must be done right, to recover due payments. And when your practice staff is occupied with multiple administrative and clinical tasks, regularly monitoring claims and patient balances isn’t an easy task.
The best way to overcome that is to outsource dental AR management services to an expert RCM company like TransDental, which is trusted by dentists across the country for reliable billing and a proven track record.
Using automation with supervision from billing experts, these billing partners precisely manage all the steps in AR management from claim submission to payment posting, making sure payments are accurate for each balance.
Plus, a complementary billing audit helps catch denial reasons, underpayments, and frequent billing errors to not just recover revenue, but also prevent future discrepancies, making your billing and claim submissions smooth.
And a proper follow-up process with payers and patients makes it easy to track the status of unpaid balances regularly. Outsourcing helps recover most of the stuck payments in just 21 days on average.
Protect What You’ve Already Earned
Each dental claim pays you for the treatment you’ve delivered and the value you’ve provided. When you don’t get paid fairly due to weak A/R follow-up protocols, it disrupts all the financial operations, whether it’s paying salaries or investing in practice equipment.
When you build strong AR follow-up protocols for your practice, you don’t just recover revenue, but protect it in the long term. So, implement a smart accounts receivable management by hiring in-house specialists, or working with a trusted and reliable third-party service provider.
How often should a dental practice follow up on unpaid insurance claims?
Every unpaid claim should be checked at least within 14 days of submission to confirm receipt and processing status. If there’s no response, escalate to a direct call by day 30 and consider a formal appeal or resubmission by day 45-60. Never let claims cross 90 days without aggressive follow-up.
When should a dental practice escalate unpaid patient balances to a collection agency?
If a patient balance remains unpaid after 90 days, despite consistent internal outreach, including statements, phone calls, and written notices, involving a licensed third-party collection agency can result in resolution. But, while doing so, consider the patient relationship, the balance amount, and potential reputational impact.
What are the most common reasons dental insurance claims get denied, and how can AR follow-up protocols reduce denials?
Common denial reasons include incorrect patient details, wrong CDT coding, missing documentation, coordination of benefits errors, and lack of pre-authorizations. Strong AR follow-up reduces denials through tracking payer denial trends, effectively managing denials, and following these patterns to prevent future denials.
Is outsourcing AR follow-up worth it for smaller dental practices?
Outsourcing AR follow-up is helpful for smaller practices when staff capacity is limited or when billing expertise is lacking. TransDental offers customized AR management for practices with large outstanding balances, without disrupting existing processes. One AR collection can recover tens of thousands of dollars in aged receivables at an affordable cost, which is barely 5% of the amount.
