Hi, my name is Lesa Phelps and I am a Dental Consultant and the President of Complete Dental Management LLC.   I have been in the dental industry for over 24 years.  Yes, I was there when we had the pegboard system and office’s used super bills and hand typed our insurance claims on old typewriters. 

 Although we have come a long way, I am continually amazed how behind the curve we in dentistry seem to be and it is my goal to improve that.

Do you realize that you have a specific culture in your dental practice that is working against your making money?  Why are we still making $400,000 to $500,000 a year in collections when a solo practitioner can easily be making $700,000 to $1,000,000 in collections a year with just a few fundamental changes?  You have a dental culture that works against your making money.  A dental culture by default actually repels money.  You may not realize it, but your office has a culture that you set up; you teach it, reinforce it and you promote it; most dentists do.  I want to teach you how to build an optimal culture of success.  You probably have a dental culture created by default and not by design.

 I believe we should be money attractors and this is done very much by Design and not by Default as is often the case.  I will be writing each month a Dental Principle that will help you in a dental office environment.

DENTAL PRINCIPAL NO. 1:  FUNDAMENTALS ARE THE FOUNDATION 

Every solution begins with a problem, so if you have any problems in your dental practice, than you are a candidate for a solution.  It is all about the details – proper training of your front desk is key!  It does not matter how great a dentist you are if you do not have the right foundation, it will cost you!

I began my dental career in 1985.  Back then the dental industry was trying to move from the pegboard system to computers.  Computers were thought to be the solution to unmanageable accounts receivables.  We were making copies of everyone’s ledger cards each month to send out statements.  Ledger cards were a nightmare!  Few front desk staff members knew how to apply a payment or an adjustment into the right accounting column on the ledger to get the balance to come out right!  After all, they weren’t trained accountants.  And today they still aren’t.  Front desk staff took their inability to properly “account” for the money on the ledgers and brought those same mistakes to the computer and wondered why when they put garbage into the computer garbage came out.  The addition of a computer may have made the math automatic, but the incorrect adjustment numbers and incorrect procedure codes going into the computer are still making money problems today.  Most front desk staff do not know how to properly apply insurance adjustments or courtesy discounts to a patient’s transaction screen.

Patients to this day, continue to call about their statements.  They know something is wrong with the balance, but most front desk staffs are unable to explain why.  Often the staff members hate the time of the month right after statements are sent, because they know they are going to get phone calls they cannot properly answer.  You have probably heard it murmured in your practice.  “Well statements just went out; we’re probably going to receive a lot of phone calls.”  If you have ever heard that in your office, then there is a problem. 

There was one office I was consulting at in Arkansas and when I ran their receivables report they had an outstanding receivables of over $100,000 all over 90 days and the dentist was only producing $38-40,000 per month!  So their total receivables should have been at $57-60,000 at the most.  They were 75% over the norm for outstanding accounts.  That’s huge.  So I began to check their outstanding insurance claims and discovered the front desk was not properly filing the insurance claims to the companies.  On top of improper filing, they did not know what questions to ask the insurance companies regarding the patient’s plan before the patient even stepped through their front door.  They were not “insurance educated” like they thought.  Each staff member had learned incorrectly from the another staff member or they were “self-trained” at another practice and came into this practice telling the dentist that “yes, they had filed insurance at the last practice they were in. 

Knowing how to file insurance is easy.  Knowing how to file insurance correctly is a matter of training and I find most front desk staff members are not properly trained.  The following are tips you need to use at your front desk:

• Train your staff on how to file claims that will get paid the first time they are submitted.

• Train your staff on how to preauthorize the big cases to gain faster and larger insurance payments and therefore larger patient acceptance rates on treatment plans.

• Train them on how to know what ADA codes to use and when!  For example, are you filing a 140 limited exam code with a narrative?  If not you are probably not getting paid.

• 92% of all offices I have walked into have about $30,000 in their receivables that should be in their banks; with proper filing it can be in your bank within a matter of weeks.

Come to this website every month to learn more.  Next month we will discuss Dental Principle #2