As a practice owner, managing your dental billing is just as important as handling your practice’s day-to-day tasks, such as patient check-ups, administrative tasks, and daily expenses. It’s because billing ensures you recover dues from payors for dental services rendered.
Now, the question is: Whether you should outsource dental billing to a third-party provider or manage it in-house. To assist you with that decision, we’ll compare both in-house and outsourced billing. So, let’s get started.
Overview of In-House and Outsourced Billing
Let’s first explore both types of dental billing.
In-House Dental Billing?
In-house dental billing means that you manage your entire dental billing and coding. This includes all processes, such as verifying patient insurance eligibility, accurately using CDT codes, preparing documents, pre-authorization (if required), and submitting claims. You hire your own staff of dedicated dental billers.
Outsourced Dental Billing
When you outsource dental insurance billing to a top-tier dental billing company like TransDental, it reduces your dental practice’s cost and burden. Your staff is relieved of the responsibility, while a third-party company negotiates with insurers on your behalf and manages your entire dental billing.
Comparing Outsourced and In-House Billing
Cost
In-house dental claims billing costs dental practices a huge sum of the annual revenue, as you need to hire billers and pay them salaries. On average, a dental biller’s monthly salary is $4,000-5,000, which approximately amounts to an annual salary of $50,000-55,000.
But if you outsource your billing, you save on your costs. Third-party billing companies charge very little. Their fees are a fraction of the total amount recovered in claims. For example, if you recover $50,000 in claims, and a billing company charges you 5%, you pay a total of $2500, and you pay only when your claims are settled.
Control
In-house dental billing allows you more control, as you supervise every aspect and decide how to manage billing. If you opt for dental medical billing services from a third-party company, you outsource billing to them, and they manage every aspect according to the protocols. But, in that case, you have to trust the company and let them handle everything.
Communication
You can directly communicate with your in-house dental billers to monitor progress in the claims submission process. However, every third-party billing company may not offer you the same transparency. Some companies may generate reports with you to share progress and assign dedicated billers who keep you updated.
Expertise
In-house dental billers may be experts in the field, or they may require training. Training them consumes a great deal of time. On the contrary, availing dental billing solutions from a third-party company saves you time and costs incurred in training new staff. Companies are well-versed with the ins and outs of dental billing.
Staff Productivity
In case you want to save up your costs on hiring dental billers and assign dental billing tasks to existing staff, it affects your staff productivity. Staff may feel burnt out while handling billing and trying to manage administrative and clinical tasks. As a result of it, your patients may not get the care they deserve.
However, if you outsource dental insurance billing to a billing company, it reduces your staff’s workload. Billing companies manage everything, helping you and your practice staff provide better care and treatment to the dental patients.
Audit
Evaluating dental billing is essential to identify billing gaps and accuracy throughout the billing process. This helps you make corrections in your billing and maximize opportunities for revenue growth.
Auditing in-house billers requires time and effort, while third-party dental billing companies relieve you of the worries and perform different audits. These can be on a weekly, monthly, quarterly, and annual basis. Some companies offer even free billing audits, included in the entire dental billing plan.
Technology Setup
In-house dental billing requires you to invest in billing software and keep it up to date with the latest healthcare regulations and evolving CDT codes. Your own software offers greater control, but requires much effort on your part.
But if you partner with a dental billing company, you don’t need to allocate your budget to software. Billing experts operate their own software to manage your billing. They are also proficient with most dental EHRs like EagleSoft, Dentrix, eClinicalWorks, and Oryx. Some experts can also integrate with your existing EHRs, allowing them to easily extract patient data and manage billing.
Continuity
Your staff is always expected to go on vacations and avail sick leaves. This can disrupt dental billing. But when your billing is handled by a third-party company, it assumes complete responsibility for your revenue cycle management (RCM). Your billing is managed throughout the year, ensuring your claims are recovered and your practice’s finances run smoothly.
Coding Trends
CDT codes by the American Dental Association (ADA) are an essential part of your practice’s dental billing and coding. Using the appropriate codes for each dental procedure is essential to ensure accuracy, expedite the claims process, and prevent claim denials.
These codes usually change every year. Keeping up with code changes can be challenging for your dental billing staff. But third-party billing companies are actively following industry regulations and trends. They utilize their knowledge to make your dental coding error-free.
What’s The Right Choice for Your Dental Practice?
It all depends on your preferences and practice requirements, whether you want to hire in-house staff or outsource billing to a dental billing company. While you get full control and transparency in billing by hiring billers, you’ve to set up your own technological infrastructure, and you also need to compromise on staff productivity and quality of patient care.
But when you outsource your practice’s dental billing to a third-party company, you hand over control but get real-time reports. Outsourced billing is cost-effective, where you pay a reasonable amount with increased chances of maximizing profits. This frees up your staff to handle other tasks. So, make the right choice that aligns with your budget and requirements.
Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs)
How can I trust an outside company with sensitive patient and financial data?
Reputed dental billing companies are HIPAA-compliant, ensuring that patients’ sensitive information and financial data are secure and are used only for billing-related purposes.
Is our dental practice bound to a dental billing company by outsourcing billing?
Contracts vary per dental billing companies, but most companies offer flexible and short-term contracts so you can end the relationship if you’re not getting satisfactory results.
Does outsourcing impact our dental practice’s relationship with patients if they ask billing-related questions?
Outsourcing dental billing doesn’t impact your relationship with patients. Experienced billing companies work as extensions of your team and communicate with patient on your behalf to answer their billing-related queries.
How can we evaluate a dental billing company’s performance?
Dental billing companies provide frequent reports on claim progress, received payments, and accounts receivable (AR). They also audit your billing to evaluate strengths and weaknesses. It offers you real-time visibility into the process.
Do we need to train the dental billing company on our software and processes?
Initial training is required for a know-how on the processes, but billing companies assign expert billers, who are proficient in operating dental software and managing everything from patient information to insurance claim submissions with ease. These billers can train fast and operate your systems smoothly.
