Streamlining Administrative Tasks in Your Dental Practice

Your administrative staff have many duties throughout the typical day in the office. From scheduling and greeting patients to submitting dental billing claims, office managers and everyone in between has an important job to accomplish. Some of these duties are more tedious than others, and some require a dedicated approach to ensure your practice stays cash flow positive. What are some of these duties, and what are the best ways to streamline or automate them for peace of mind? Let’s find out.

Essential tips for dental office managers 

Whether you’re a practice owner or office manager yourself, you and your staff can all benefit from these essential tips for essential processes within your office. We’ll take a look at some of the top duties for office managers and administrative staff, including:

• Patient scheduling
• Dental billing and coding
• Insurance verification

Dental patient scheduling

Your office manager’s day starts with the patient schedule. Who’s coming in today and when? What types of treatment are on the docket for the day? Which dentists (if there are multiple) will be providing that treatment? These small steps set the stage for the day, as well as any changes or cancellations. Making sure that your schedule is full is crucial to a productive and profitable day, as well as:

• Creating a list of “VIPs” who rarely cancel and can come to last minute appointments if a cancellation occurs
• Setting patient reminders for their preferred communication method at least two weeks to a week in advance
• Offering patients who are committed to making their appointments coveted weekend times or weekday evenings to ensure they receive consistent treatment opportunities

Many issues with patient scheduling stem from the ability to “pivot” if a cancellation occurs, as well as making sure that your practice is getting new patients each month to cover any losses or drop offs. Ideally, you’re catering treatments to what patients are looking for as well as investing in professional relationships with long-time clients.

eAssist Dental Solutions can help with your practice calendar, whether it comes to scheduling returning patients to recare and recall appointment bookings with Full Schedule. Our service promises allow us to have accountability for your schedule as well as our work:

• Book 100% of appointments promised
• Communicate professionally and cordially to patients within normal local business hours
• ROI progress reports

Dental insurance verification

Of course, once a patient has been scheduled and the appointment time is booked, the preappointment readiness checklist doesn’t end there. How do you know that the patient has insurance, or even insurance that you’re able to cover for their treatment? What about copays or patient portion obligations? Without insurance verification, these finer details can get lost and lead to unhappy patients, further leading to cancellations.

How does dental insurance verification help my practice?

“No surprises” is the name of the game when it comes to insurance verification. No longer do your staff have to sit through a phone tree to find the right insurance representative or benefits manager to explain the details. You can know before the appointment and help your patient have a healthy expectation for their part as well as the ability to collect copayment at the time of service.

eAssist has a solution for insurance verification as well, and with the customization to “do it yourself” or automate the process entirely to help treatment accuracy before the appointment. Our IV process allows your practice to spend time with patients, not on the phone with insurance companies or in long benefit forms that don’t explain costs well.

Automate your dental billing processes

The last step in your dental office managers’ checklist is the dental billing process. From treatment to claim submission, your office’s SOP can benefit from looking at each step in a new way, or even completely automate this processes. Sending clean claims doesn’t need to be rocket science, but rather the part of your cash flow pipeline through automation. eAssist offers the nation’s leading solution for dental billing and claim processing from beginning to end, including follow up for outstanding claims and any denials or rejections:

• Gathering missing information and cross check patient information with PMS
• Primary and secondary claims submitted daily
• Electronic attachments send when able
• Focus on insurance aging report (and for patient AR too!)

Outsource administrative headaches and insource peace of mind

eAssist was created by dentists, for dentists. Understanding each step of the treatment process from scheduling to billing is essential for your practice to scale and retain profits. eAssist works to put the money on the books into your pocket by diligently managing outstanding AR and helping to eliminate the “nitty gritty” details of clean claim submission. Plus, you and your staff can rest easy with transparency in communication and workflow, with daily, weekly, and monthly reporting on top of open communication lines. Schedule a no-obligation consultation with the form below, and tell us where you’d like to see your practice in the coming months.