Common Dental Billing Errors that are Impacting Timely Payments

Is your dental practice prepared for the complexities of billing and coding? It is very important to ensure accuracy in coding and billing practices because errors can lead to costly fines and loss of revenue. Be it claims submission or follow-ups with insurance companies for payment, streamlined dental medical billing is vital if you want to stay in business and ensure timely payments.

If claim denials have increased and reimbursements have reduced for your dental practice, then here are some of the common billing errors that you will have to overcome:

• Not applying the right code for rendered services is one of the most common reasons why dental practices face revenue challenges.
• Due to lack of skilled staff, many practices fail at collecting full co-payments or deductibles routinely.
• Another common mistake that affects revenue is failing to show other insurance coverage and waiving off deductibles and co-payments.
• At times, billers submit claims for covered services even though a non-covered service was conducted. They also fail to mention the right treatment date in claims that leads to trouble in payments.

There are several areas that need to be streamlined in order to run a dental practice without revenue loss. From patient registration, eligibility verification and follow-ups to timely claim submission, denial management, patient scheduling and claim analysis, everything should be handled well.

How to recover lost revenue?

Recovering lost revenue is very important because when it comes to Medicare, ‘clerical errors’ are not accepted as a defence. There are several ways in which your dental practice can recover lost revenue. For instance, you need to start monitoring the billing process because if your billers are not doing their job properly, it will prove to an expensive challenge for your practice. You will have to review third party payer contracts along with the financial chart of patients to find out any inconsistencies.

Insurance ageing needs to be tracked and loopholes in documentation should also be identified because claims get denied even if there is a minor error in documentation. Patients also need to be educated about payments and for this, professional front desk staff should be hired.

Since there is a lot to handle as far as billing and timely revenue generation is concerned, many practices prefer to hire a billing partner. Outsourcing helps them eliminate the hassles of claim denials, increased paperwork, coding complexities and compliance to HIPAA and other reforms.