Jennifer Schultz Blog

Costly Errors Every Practice Should Be Aware Of

11/18/2015

Over the years working with multiple practices we have uncovered numerous processes regarding insurance payments that lead to confusion, inefficiencies and bookkeeping nightmares. Knowledge is key to making working with insurance companies easier. Listed below are common mistakes that my team at Virtual Dental Office have found when working with practices, that every practice should be aware of.

Insurance checks that have been cashed by the practice, but not posted to the appropriate patient’s ledger. This makes it appear to be an outstanding claim and the team ends up wasting time following up on claims that have actually already been paid.

Insurance company payments via credit card remit. This can create a bookkeeping mess because most software isn't equipped to enter these payments, which increases the amount of time the team needs to spend putting the payment in the system. In addition, the practice pays merchant fees and loses approximately 3% on all insurance payments, which can add up quickly.

Electronic Fund Transfer (EFT) payments that are deposited directly into the doctor’s account and not posted to the ledger. This form of payment can be convenient, but there needs to be communication between the doctor and the team so they know the date and amount of payment. In addition, it is best practice for team members to login to insurance company’s website weekly to check for these payments (if they do not receive an email from the insurance company).

Inaccurate insurance information that is entered into the practice management software. This leads to delayed claims and time wasted when following up on unpaid claims. It also doesn’t allow the practice to leverage the information among other patients.

Working at the front desk is a very challenging position. The constant interruptions are a part of the job but from a productivity standpoint, a nightmare. The multi-tasking that is needed is inefficient and causes more mistakes. That is why it is always good to have another set of eyes on your insurance processes.

It also illustrates the importance of training and education in regards to working with insurance. Our work through Virtual Dental Office has lead to the development of DentalInsuranceNavigator.com, because we have seen the need for more team knowledge on dental insurance.

Is Your Practice Losing With Insurance?

10/21/2015

In my over 20 years in the dental industry, I have seen practices lose money time and time again because of lack of knowledge and/or training in working with insurance. Many don’t even realize to what extent they are losing. Here are some of the most common ways practices lose money every day.

Writing off money when it is not necessary
Missing the timely filing deadline for insurance claims
Submitting PPO plan fee on the insurance claim form
Not charging the full practice fee when procedures are not covered by insurance (when applicable)
Not following up on unpaid insurance claims
Credentialing errors
Not leveraging benefit information in the practice management software
Not reading/understanding the PPO contract
Not asking for a fee schedule of the PPO plan before they sign
Not knowing which companies the practice is in network for

This is why I started Virtual Dental Office. I wanted to help dental practices better manage the insurance side of their business. Over the past few years I have had the pleasure of seeing how staying on top of insurance can make a huge impact on the bottom line.

As much I as I love being able to take these insurance tasks off the hands of dental practices, I know they need more. I believe that with the proper training and education dental professionals can stay educated in the ever-changing world of dental insurance, and make a significant impact on their dental practice’s bottom line.

This is why I have been working feverishly over the past few months to figure out how I can provide practices the tools to avoid costly insurance mistakes. Next week I will be launching an exciting new platform that has the power to change all of that.

Is your practice losing money on insurance? Stay tuned…

How to get Your Time Back

8/26/2015

Dental Professional Time

When you are serving patients and running a small business it makes for a busy day (and evening many times). While many dental professionals continue to take on more themselves, as a practice grows there will be a tipping point where they need to step away from some of the day-to-day duties and start delegating. Without having a team to delegate to, practice growth will inevitably stall.

Delegating can sometimes seem like too much work. You need to take the time out of your busy schedule to teach someone else how to do it. There will always be some up front time investment and a learning curve, but if you are assigning the right tasks to the right people it will help you, and your dental practice, in the long run.

How do you go about delegating?
Here are some tips on how to start delegating.

Write out a list of your daily/weekly/monthly tasks and ask yourself, am I the only one that can do this for each task? Who on my dental team is capable of taking this on?

Take some time to understand each of your team member’s current workload and strengths, so you are able to delegate it to someone who has the time and will be successful at it. If your team cannot take on another task, then you have two choices, hire and additional team member or delegate to someone outside the practice.

When delegating tasks make sure you explain your vision and the “why”, not just the “how”. Helping them understand why it is important to do it and do it a certain way will give them more of a vested role.

It can be hard to let go of things you have been doing for so long, but delegating is the only way to increase your time to ensure that essential tasks for growing your practice can be accomplished.

Three Keys to Happier Patients

8/13/2015

I had the opportunity to attend the Global Leadership Summit recently and one of the speakers was the CEO of Capella Hotel Group and former COO of the Ritz-Carlton Group, Horst Schulze. He has spent his career focusing on customer service and many of the things he discussed really resonated with me for the dental industry.

One of his main points was that if you want loyalty from a customer there are three things to focus on:

Provide a product/service that is defect free
In a dental practice, this refers to delivering great dentistry. Making sure the patient has a pleasant experience that is, ideally, pain and stress free.

Be timely
Time and time again, one of the reasons people say they don’t like going to the dentist is because they hate waiting. It is critical for dental practices to be respectful of their patient’s time and say on schedule, ideally within a 10-minute window.

Make them feel cared for
Treat every patient with respect and make him or her feel cared for. Greet them when they walk in the door. Ask them about their family, hobbies or work. Take a genuine interest in them.

If you are not receiving the number of referrals that you want, take a step back and look at your practice against the three points above. Better customer service can translate into better customer loyalty, which can translate into more referrals.

Adjusting for Better Profitability

6/11/2015

Dental practice software solutions

A common complaint that I receive from doctors is that they are writing off too much money! Unfortunately, many of these practices group their adjustments together in general categories, such as miscellaneous write-off. While this will track total adjustments, it does not allow the practice to identify where the write-offs are coming from, which makes it difficult to determine how to reduce the write-offs.

This is why it is critical for the dental practice to have a consistent naming system to help track the adjustments. This may seem like a small detail, but it is the one of the best ways to start understanding your write-offs, so you can make the necessary changes to increase profitability.

When you review your adjustments report you should be able to see what the adjustment was for just by looking at the name of the adjustment. If all of your insurance adjustments use the “insurance write-off” adjustment, it doesn’t give you enough information to understand the specific amount per insurance company.

Here are some naming suggestions for different types of adjustments.

Insurance Adjustments – These need to include the name of the insurance company, for example Delta MN Adjustment. This will help show you where the bulk of your insurance write-offs are coming from, and understand which insurance companies are the most profitable.

Marketing Promotion Adjustments – Each short-term marketing promotion should have it’s own unique name, for example Winter 2014 Whitening Promo. This will allow you to do analyze the effectiveness of your marketing promotions, and help you determine what is working and what isn’t.

Discount Adjustments – Many practices provide special discounts based on a specific circumstance, each of these should have their own specific name. For example, Friends and Family Discount.

Misc. Adjustments – It is best to use the generic “Misc. Adjustment” label in your dental practice software as little as possible. If you do need to use it, make sure to include a note as to why the adjustment was given. The note needs to be detailed enough so that anyone that reads it can understand the situation.

This is another one of those assumingly simple processes that goes a long way. Unfortunately, in a busy dental practice it is easy to skip this step. That is why it is critical that the team is not only trained in your specific process of naming adjustments, but that they also understand why it is important.

Don’t be afraid to have multiple adjustment types in your dental practice software. The more detail you have, the more information you will have to base decisions on to help the profitability of the practice.

Turning Intentions Into Actions

5/26/2015

Dental Office Task

Managing a dental team can get complicated. There are many moving parts and a lot that needs to get done. Often the best way to manage everything is going back to the basics. For example, having a to-do list can go a long way towards keeping things moving forward.

With a team, it is important to put protocols in place to make sure items are being checked off the to-do list. There are four things to keep in mind when implementing a system for better productivity and implementation.

Accessibility. The to-do list needs to be accessible to everyone. This could be accomplished by hanging a paper version in a central location, or keeping it in a network folder on the computer that everyone has access to. Alternatively using an online project management application, such as Redbooth or Asana, works great as well.
Manageable Tasks. All tasks should be listed by individual steps. It is easier to accomplish a larger project if it is broken down into bite size pieces.
Who and When. Each individual step needs to have a person assigned to it, and a due date. This will help avoid confusion and misunderstandings among the team and keep the project moving forward.
Check-Ins. It is critical to have daily, or at least weekly, check-ins by the dentist or office manager to ensure everyone is staying on track. This will allow them to address any challenges and identify solutions early on in the process.

It is important that the team understands not only how the systems work, but also why they are important. Often it is easy to discontinue a new protocol if the reason why it’s important is not clearly communicated.

Any dental practice can implement this type of productivity system. The return on investment can be tremendous when ideas are implemented and turned into actions.

Are You Losing Patients Before They Step a Foot in the Practice?

4/22/2015

Dental Office

I was recently in search of a new dentist for my family. I called one particular office on a Friday and left a message to schedule dental appointments for my family of four. I did not receive a call back. I was stunned that a dental practice would let four new patients slip through their fingers.

Unfortunately, I believe this likely happens more than practice owners think. All it takes is a busy front office team member and a lack of communication for these types of issues to happen. Fortunately, there are some proactive steps dental practice owners can take to make sure it isn’t happening in their practice.

It is critical that the doctor understands the front office workload. There are some front office teams that are so busy that they just physically can’t get everything done. Just because no one is complaining about having too much on their plate, doesn’t mean that patients and tasks are being handled as the owner expects them to be.

The doctor needs to communicate with the team on a regular basis to find out if there are tasks that are being procrastinated due to a heavy workload. A team member’s first priority should always be serving their patients. If they do not have the time to focus their energy on the patient, it is time to think about reallocating some of their workload.

Is there another team member that is available to delegate some administrative tasks to?

Do you need to consider hiring a part-time person to assist the front office team?

Can you outsource tasks to a virtual team member who can help only when it is needed?

Helping the front office manage their workload will not only make for a better patient experience, but it will also help employee morale and increase job satisfaction. Dental practices spend a lot of money on marketing to get new patients, but the biggest marketing budgets in the world are not going to have any impact on your business if there is no one there to pick up the phone when they call.

Continuing Education for Continuing Improvement

4/2/2015

Continuing education provides information, systems and tactics to help your practice stay on top of the industry, run more efficiently, and give your team the opportunity to grow professionally. While these courses provide dental professionals with the knowledge, it is up to each practice to ensure that knowledge is applied to receive the full benefit.

Team members often walk away from continuing education classes inspired and excited about what they learned. Unfortunately, once they get back to work and their busy schedule takes over, typically most of what they learned is not implemented into the practice.

If you want your practice receive the maximum benefit from continuing education courses it is important to invest time beyond just attending the class. The information should be shared among the team, and there needs to be a concerted effort to determine what can be applied to your practice and how you are going to make it happen.

There are four key steps to help ensure your practice is taking full advantage of continuing education opportunities.

Share the Knowledge: Set-up a team meeting within one week of the continuing education course. This ensures that the person who attended the class can present their take-a-ways to the rest of the team while it is still fresh in their mind.
Team Collaboration: Based on what was presented, discuss as a group what should be implemented within the practice.
Make a Plan: Create an action plan with specific due dates for each step of the process.
Review: Once implemented, set a date in the near future to review the new protocols and collaborate as needed to ensure success.

There are many great continuing education courses available to dental professionals. By applying the knowledge gained from these courses to your practice, you will ensure continued growth into the future.

The Answer is Always Yes!

3/11/2015

The Answer is Yes

I was recently at one of my favorite restaurants for dinner and asked the waiter if I could substitute a seaweed salad for the ginger salad? He looked up from his notebook and replied “No.” I hesitated slightly as I waited for him to say something else but that was it. I looked around at other tables and noticed other people eating seaweed salads. I turned around to look at him and said, “Okay.” After he left our table I thought to myself, did he mean that I just couldn’t substitute one salad for the other? I wondered if I could have had a seaweed salad for an additional fee. I would have gladly paid more for a salad that I wanted. He didn’t offer me that option though.

This experience reminded me of how important it is for us, as dental team members, to try to answer patient questions with a "Yes". Instead of focusing on what we don’t offer, discuss what we can assist with. For example, when a patient asks to make $100 payments on a $2000 treatment plan, if you spoke your initial response it might be "No, I'm sorry we don't offer in office payment plans past 90 days." Instead respond with what you can do. "Yes, we use Care Credit to offer low monthly payments for our patients."

So the next time a patient asks you a question, before responding consider how you can answer them with a “Yes…”.

Creating a Team That Gets Things Done

1/27/2015

In our last blog we talked about goals and the importance of mapping out a plan to reach those goals. In a dental practice there are likely multiple team members who are involved in different aspects within that plan. It is vital that all team members are held accountable for their part. Once one task is missed it can have a domino effect and make it very hard to reach the end goal.

It isn’t enough to just give the team a to-do list and expect everything will get done. While the team typically has the best of intentions to follow the action plan, the realities of a busy practice set in. I have seen this happen with many of my dental clients. The practice puts a very thoughtful plan in place and there is initially a lot of momentum in making positive changes happen, but for one reason or another progress stalls. This leads to the attitude “We can talk all day long but nothing is going to change.” I hear it often from dental team members.

Having a very specific action plan is a critical step in instituting change, but there needs to be checks-and-balances put in place to help keep the team accountable and on track. There are a few things you can do to help your team and your practice be successful.

Keep practice goals and the action plan somewhere that can be seen on a daily basis to keep it top-of-mind.

Utilize weekly team meetings to have team members report on progress and talk through challenges they have having. The team can help brainstorm solutions to these challenges, so things can continue to move forward.

Be very thoughtful of what tasks are being assigned and the due dates. Focus on the important items and make sure due dates are realistic.

Utilize a web-based project management system that the full team can access. Once implemented the project management system will provide automated reminders, and can help organize the tasks each team member is responsible for.

A healthy team is a team where they can hold each other accountable and work together for a common goal. Provide your team the tools and support they need, so they can be the catalyst that makes positive changes happen and help the practice reach their goals.