The Dental Insurance Dilemma: Verify or Risk Rejections?

Dental insurance verification can pose a problem for many dental offices. One practice reported that their receptionists regularly spent well over half of the day simply checking eligibility for their patients. Those hours could be spent much more lucratively by scheduling appointments and catering to the needs of patients. Instead, the staff would tie up the phone lines by waiting on hold to confirm benefits for patients one at a time. 
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Meanwhile, another practice chose to forgo verifications and simply take patient’s insurance cards and ID numbers. This practice saw a huge increase in denied claims and unexpected patient bills. Patients hated getting high bills months after treatment and accused the office of cheating them. Sometimes patients took weeks or months to get back in contact about the balance and report their new, more accurate insurance information, further delaying payment while the office resubmitted claims. Often, the upset patients never responded to collection attempts, which cost the office a good deal in uncollectible revenue.  
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Yes, checking insurance makes a big difference financially. Verifying insurance helps dental practices ensure proper reimbursement and avoid unpaid patient balances. Seeing patients without verifying benefits runs the risk that insurance will deny claims due to an expired or ineligible plan. This frustrates patients and delays payment for completed dental work. On the other hand, verifying insurance for every patient takes time and effort. Practices that accept a wide variety of dental insurance plans will find that each insurer requires extensive information to set up an online account, and that online verification systems experience frequent bugs. If online systems aren’t an option, dental staff might spend hours of precious time on hold while trying to reach an insurer and verify benefits. Many practice management software options claim to offer automatic verifications, but they usually fail to deliver, either because they do not provide sufficient benefit details or because the system cannot communicate with the dental insurance companies at all. With all of these obstacles facing dental practices, how can dentists get the benefit information they need without wasting their staff’s time and resources? 
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SB Dental Solutions Dental Billing Company has the answer. With our comprehensive dental billing solution, we verify active insurance coverage for your patients and provide a breakdown of benefits as often as necessary. We can save your staff many hours of work by taking on the tedious task of interfacing with dental insurance companies. Give us a call to find out more, or sign up!