by Sponsored Content: Medusind
Strengthen your dental practice’s financial standing via enhanced revenue cycle management
By Jose Rivero, CEO, Medusind
If you want to ensure that your dental practice will be successful next year, you need to start planning today. For that reason, revenue cycle management (RCM) is crucial to dentists, because it ensures that your dental practice is paid accurately and on time for the services you provide. It allows your office to maintain a steady cash flow, which is essential for covering operational costs such as staff salaries, equipment, supplies, and overhead.
What exactly is dental revenue cycle management? It is the art of managing the financial transactions and interactions among a dental provider, patients, and payers throughout the entire patient care journey. It encompasses the entire lifespan of a patient account, from initial appointment scheduling to final payment collection.
Dental revenue cycle management can be broken up into three stages: front-end, mid-cycle, and back-end:
Front-End
Provider Contracts and Schedule
- Provider credentialing
- Provider network status check
- Generate a Patient Schedule Report for all daily scheduled visits
Eligibility and Patient Verification
- Eligibility checks
- Comprehensive benefit verification
- Attaching the patient to the plan
- Electronic funds transfer (EFT) setup
Mid-Cycle
Coding and Charge Capture
- Reviewing patient charts
- Ensuring dental records have been completed
- Attaching and billing correct codes
Claims Scrubbing and Submission
- Reviewing claims for accuracy
- Electronic claim and predetermination (Pre-D) submission
- Attaching correct documentation
Back-End
Claims Adjudication and Adjustments
- Posting payments to the correct patients
- Correct network adjustments
- Contract compliance
Accounts/Receivable (A/R) Tracking and Denial Resolution
- Claim rejection review
- Outsourcing A/R follow-up
- Denial resolution processes
Sometimes the process of dental RCM can be overwhelming for dental practices, in terms of complexity and internal resource consumption. As a result, a practice might consider obtaining outside expert help. In that case, how do you find your ideal RCM partner?
When seeking an RCM partner, here are some key questions to ask:
- Do you get a dedicated team?
- Is there an option to choose solutions based on your practice’s needs and preferences?
- Can they customize systems and processes to fit with your current operations?
- Are they HIPAA-compliant?
- Do they support your Practice Management Software (PMS)?
- Does their average first-pass rate and turnaround time (TaT) meet or exceed industry standards?
Ideally, your RCM partner will:
- Increase your revenue through accurate verifications, timely claims follow-up, and payment posting
- Decrease your costs with its global RCM expertise and transaction-based pricing
- Reduce the administrative burden on your office staff, increasing patient interaction
- Centralize your operations, with dedicated teams managing your billing functions
- Remove your internal attrition and training costs.
If you would be interested in learning more about your options with an RCM partner, consider contacting Medusind, a national leader in dental billing and collections. We would be happy to see how your dental practice could enjoy increased profitability and efficiency.
