Where’s My Money?

Does your practice manager know how to properly (yes, I said properly) run a patient billing cycle? You know that once a month nightmare second to following up with outstanding insurance?  Let me tell you that it does not have to be a nightmare or a headache.  There is a big difference between just printing everything out and hoping for the best and on the other end printing everything out to meticulously go through each and every bill that takes you hours and is very costly.  After all is said and done you still have to stuff the envelopes.  Running a billing cycle is much easier than you think.  Let me show you. We are going to go step by step to make your monthly billing easier, more efficient, and affordable.

Q1.  Who shows up in a patient billing cycle?
A: Only patients that have a patient portion balance. If you submit an insurance claim for preventative work and it is covered at 100%. If there is no other balance then this patient will not show up on your billing cycle.  The reason being is that once the insurance pays the patient will not owe you anything.  So why waste time and money printing and mailing a bill? You can use your Aging report to help you see the difference.

Q2: How do I filter and create my list of patients that owe a balance?
A: Depending on your practices billing preferences once you set your filters you can save it as default and that will save you time for the next cycle.
This filter determines which patients will receive a bill for this cycle based on the criteria you have selected.  If you think a patient is “missing” most likely they don’t fit into the criteria of your filters selected.

Q3: How do I create my bills?
A:  This is where it gets fun!  Once you click on the create list button, these are the people who you intend to send a billing statement to.

Once you have glanced through this list, based on insurance estimates and the last statement sent date, you can pick and choose who you want to send the bill to for this cycle. Clicking the send button allows you to print the lines highlighted in gray.  Would you like to save time and money during the billing process? BillConnect by DentalXChange will print and mail your bills for you. This will save you hundreds of dollars in time and stationary cost and, with that free time, your staff can do other tasks like patient care follow-up and scheduling recall appointments.  Click here for more information on BillConnect.

As you can see it is extremely simple to properly send patient statements.  There isn’t a troll in the computer that eats your patients’ balances.  No one just ends up “missing”.  All “complications” happen because of a misunderstanding of how the feature works.  If you would like to watch an online video tutorial on how to create a patient billing cycle, head to our YouTube tutorials. Of course, if you have any questions you can also call our tech support at 800-845-9379 opt.2 or connect with us online.

Happy Collecting 🙂