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The Top 5 Medical Billing Errors Your Dental Practice Should Avoid

Your dental practice relies on your medical billing process to collect payments from patients and insurance companies. Still, common medical billing errors can frustrate your patients and interrupt your cash flow due to denied claims. Learn about five common medical billing errors and how to avoid them for a smooth and accurate billing process.

Dental Intelligence

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January 6, 2023

5 Common Medical Billing Errors to Avoid

As a dental practice owner, you must understand the typical pitfalls of medical billing to ensure that your cash flow remains steady and your patients receive fair dental bills. Consider whether each of these common billing errors may be negatively impacting your dental business: 

1. Coding Mistakes

Medical billing processes used at dental practices, doctor's offices, and other HIPAA-regulated facilities use codes to designate procedures on billing forms to protect patient confidentiality. The dental industry uses Current Dental Terminology (CDT) codes maintained by the American Dental Association (ADA). Many dental offices struggle with dental billing codes, resulting in errors and claims denials.

To protect your practice from costly coding mistakes, provide the training and resources your staff needs to understand and remain up-to-date on current CDT procedure codes. This will also help prevent your patients from paying unfairly high medical bills. 

2. Inaccurate or Missing Patient Information

Patient information inaccuracies and missing information on insurance claims can cause many problems for dental offices. Missing a field during data entry or including the wrong patient information often results in claims denials and more work for the practice's billing team as they investigate, correct, and appeal the claim.

These errors rank high among common medical billing errors, but you can reduce the instances of information inaccuracies by collecting patient information early in the treatment process by using digital forms.

3. Inaccurate Insurance Information

Some dental billing teams also struggle with insurance information errors, resulting in duplicate billing, claims denials, and other issues. Dental offices that fail to gather or input correct insurance information may need to rethink their current billing processes to eliminate weak points and start collecting information sooner. 

We recommend using digital forms to gather patients' insurance information to prevent mistakes while entering the data into your computer system. 

4. Missing Documentation

Dental insurance claims often include attachments that document the purpose of the procedure. Insurance companies want proof that the patient needed the provided treatment, so billing teams attach clinical notes, x-rays, and other forms of evidence to their claims. If you've ever forgotten to attach a file to an email before sending it, you understand how easy it can be to fail to attach the proper documentation. 

To avoid this common billing error, your practice can use a claims checklist that includes attaching all relevant evidence that the patient needed the procedure. If you can't decide what documentation to include, we recommend overdoing it. It's always better to send the insurance company too much evidence rather than too little. 

5. Late Claims Filing

Insurance companies give dental practices a limited amount of time to submit claims following patient procedures. The window depends on the company, but even a 12-month grace period can race by in a busy dental office, leaving billing staff members needing more time to submit claims. 

The best billing process for avoiding filing late is filing all insurance claims as quickly as possible. The later a claim becomes, the less likely your dental office will receive payment, so establishing a fast claims process can make a huge difference in your cash flow. Try to file every claim within 48 hours of the procedure to stay ahead of this standard billing error. 

Simplify Patient Financing Billing With Dental Intelligence

About half of your dental billing comes from insurance claims, but what about out-of-pocket payments? You can simplify your out-of-pocket billing process by offering dental patient financing along with online dental payments at your practice. 

Dental Intelligence has partnered with consumer financing company Wisetack to provide dental offices with simple, risk-free patient financing. With this fully integrated program, billing teams don't have to worry about chasing down patient payments to maintain cash flow. Dental practices receive fast payments within one to two days of the procedure, and Wisetack takes care of debt settlement.

Dental Intelligence can also help you avoid common medical billing errors by introducing digital patient forms to your dental office. Contact us today to learn more about our services.

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