28 Mar Why is Updating Your Dental Fee Schedule So Important?
Your Dental Fee Schedule Is Your Price List
When you visit a barber shop or a beauty salon, the fees for each kind of service are usually clearly posted on the wall, so you know immediately what you have to pay. It’s the same with a dental practice like yours.
A dental fee schedule is a list of prices for specific treatments and services that insurers pay to dentists, providers, and suppliers. These fees are calculated at the insurers’ in-network rates. They set the maximum allowable fees that a patient can be billed for covered services and the maximum amount that their plan will pay.
In other words, a fee schedule is the complete list of insurance allowable fees for each dental procedure code that’s provided by a contracted insurance company. For some insurance carriers, these fees can vary by practice location or specialty.
Why Is It So Important to Keep Your Fee Schedule Up to Date?
It’s because payments are generally correlated with their respective procedure codes. As a result, if you want to submit clean claims that get paid and avoid resubmissions, it’s essential you keep your fee schedules up to date in a practice management system.
This isn’t easy, because fee schedules differ from carrier to carrier, and the cycles at which they’re updated are also irregular. It’s challenging enough to stay current with updating fee schedules for so many different insurance carriers’ cycles, but you must also update procedure codes on a monthly and annual basis.
The bottom line: if you don’t update your fee schedules and codes, you’ll suffer claim denials and time-consuming resubmissions, and your accounts receivables will start to age—and that will shrink your revenue and hurt your practice’s growth.
Harnessing the Data
PMS Reflects Current Fees
First, you must ensure your practice management system always reflects current fee schedules and procedure codes.
Maintain Patient Data
Next, your administrative staff must maintain up-to-date patient data regarding taxpayer identification number (TIN), provider, zip code, country, and state.
This is a challenging demand, and it can cause your overburdened staff to make costly errors.
How Medusind’s Expertise Can Help
It requires professional-grade expertise and experience to stay on top of constantly changing fee schedules, procedure codes, and patient data. Medusind is a national leader in dental billing. When you partner with us, you’ll get industry-leading software backed by hands-on support from dedicated fee schedule experts, who are available to answer your questions and help formulate solutions whenever you need them.
Medusind offers an easy, efficient, and cost-effective way to maintain the most up-to-date fee schedule information for current and new offices, and we integrate your data into any practice management system.
Medusind will:
Audit Current Fee Schedules
Audit the current fee schedules in your practice management software (PMS) system; and
Confirm Accuracy with Each Carrier
Confirm the accuracy of the current fee schedules for each carrier and location.
When your PMS system and fee schedules have been optimized, Medusind will:
Activate
Activate fee schedules on the effective date
Maintain
Maintain all fee schedules
Support
Provide ongoing support
By getting fee schedules right, you can significantly improve your practice’s financial health. Learn how Medusind can help your fee schedule remain current and maximize your profit picture.
