CPA for Dentists: How Can Accountants Help with Dental Billing
Dealing with dental offices and organizations that check dental insurance often brings up difficulties related to dental billing. Dental clinics must submit their claims to be paid by insurance companies, who frequently deny claims that do not meet their predetermined standards.
Due to their intricacy, claims typically fall short of what insurance companies need. Additionally, the claim forms are exceedingly challenging, and the dentistry industry’s regulations require more frequent revisions. Most dental offices find it extremely challenging to create and submit the required claim forms, costing them about 9% of their annual revenue.
The actual figures themselves might be more significant than the 9%. The average dental office makes $1,500,000 a year as a result. You will incur a financial loss if you lose even close to $135,000 due to claim denials.
What is this? Over 30 years, this unclaimed revenue increased to a grand sum of roughly $4,050,000. Remember that you put a lot of effort into the practice and worked very hard to earn all this unpaid money. Do you want to decline getting paid in full as you are entitled to?
No sane company would desire that, right?
The worst aspect is further dental billing issues and a mounting amount of uncollectible revenue. This is why you need the help of dental CPAs.
The Billing Obstacles a Dentist Practitioner Must Face
Dealing with dental billing methods gives you, as a dentist, various difficulties every day. They consist of the following:
Cash Flow and Staff
The complexity of dental billing and insurance verification necessitates professional knowledge and skill. The staff is responsible for interacting with patients, keeping the office organized, confirming insurance, preparing and filing claims, and ensuring that payments are correctly collected.
This challenging undertaking frequently has a detrimental impact on cash flows for even the most seasoned office managers.
Dental offices usually handle claims in batches, which delays an influx of cases that could last for a week or even a month. Most of them are delayed or rejected due to a lack of information, making the reimbursement procedure much more challenging than it would have been if the claims had been submitted as soon as the treatment was complete.
The Patient Experience
Managing the dental billing procedure at your practice will pose some difficulties, one of which is giving patients the required level of care. The dentist’s first concern is the patient’s health, but most people are more concerned about the expense of the recommended treatments.
Although most of their dental operations are covered by insurance, the average patient lacks the knowledge to utilize these benefits effectively. As a dental professional, maximizing patients’ insurance benefits should be your top goal.
Undoubtedly, how well the patient experience goes greatly depends on proper financing free of unforeseen or unexpected copays. Managing your dental billing internally while maintaining the necessary level of patient service is tremendously difficult.
How Can Dental Billing Issues Be Repaired?
Due to the aforementioned dental billing concerns, do you feel overburdened?
Without question, they are overpowering, and they affect how your practice develops. Even if you have committed dental billing staff focused on their primary duties, their absence or resignation could result in a negative patient experience. A single dental billing specialist is insufficient, as well. It’s a large company that requires a variety of skills.
Either you employ a full crew of dental professionals and shoulder an excessive financial burden, or you entrust the billing for your dental services to a reliable dental CPA.
What Makes Dental Billing Outsourcing a Good Alternative?
You need a ton of knowledge, expertise, and skill sets appropriate for the field if you want to be successful with your dental billing operations, that is, to get to the point where you’re collecting everything you owe.
Given the ongoing complexity of dental regulations and policies, the difficulties of managing the staff daily, employee turnover, the intricate insurance ecosystem, and other factors, it is obvious why outsourcing the entire operation is a wise choice.
Due to the clinic’s primary operations, it is challenging to devote the consistent time and resources necessary for efficient data gathering, insurance verification, claim to file, and collection. To receive dental billing solutions, it is, therefore, realistically required to utilize a professional service or company.
You could say there is no justification for internally hiring a dental billing specialist. If you don’t account for onboarding and other overhead costs, an average employee will run you roughly $20 per hour. The price might increase by as much as $36,000 per year.
Taxes and other associated costs are excluded from that. It will be significantly less expensive to outsource your operations to a dental billing company because they don’t have overhead costs.
Conclusion
Many challenges come along with dental billing, but outsourcing to a CPA can help you ease the hassle. By working with a CPA for dentists, you can ensure that your dental practice gets the most accurate and up-to-date billing information. In addition, a CPA can help you save time and money by streamlining the billing process and providing you with the tools and resources you need to run your practice more competently.
Looking for a consultant for a dental office? Ash Dental CPA offers accounting services for dental and medical professionals and helps with purchasing, selling, and valuing dental practices. Contact us right now if you need a CPA for dentists!