The Medical Billing Verification Process

As a dentist offering sleep medicine services, you may spend a lot of your time convincing potential patients that a trip to the dentist is what they need to improve their sleep apnea struggles. That means you want to do everything you can to make visiting your dental office convenient. For optimal convenience, you have to offer medical insurance billing and claims processing. It’s really not an optional aspect of successful sleep dentistry. Getting started with medical billing means learning the ins and outs of the benefit verification process. Depending on your patient’s medical insurance provider, this can be as simple as filling in an online form with their information and receiving approval. Other insurance providers set up more obstacles, and the intricacies of their verification process can be off-putting to say the least. If you want to learn more about the medical billing verification process or work with Brady Billing to make verification more convenient, give us a call today. We can help you and your team learn the ins and outs of the medical billing verification process, and we can handle these services for you to take the stress off of your shoulders. Keep reading to learn more about medical billing verification.

1 – Schedule Patient’s Appointment

Whether your new patient comes to you organically based on their own knowledge of dental sleep medicine or as a referral from a local clinic or sleep doctor, you should be prepared to ask for some basic medical billing information at the outset. We typically recommend making it a policy to collect as much of the patient’s insurance provider and policy information before their appointment. This will allow you to begin the verification process right away.

2 – Check the Insurance Card

When a patient comes in for their first appointment, you should check their insurance card against the information they provided to you when scheduling their appointment. Make sure there are no coverage changes, and that the patient doesn’t have any secondary coverage they want to use.

3 – Verify Coverage

Then, you will actually verify available coverage. Many providers allow you to complete the entire process online for faster approval, but others still require claims be submitted via phone call or by mailing in forms. Because dental sleep medicine is an emerging treatment area and dental offices can’t usually apply for traditional in-network benefits with insurers, getting patients approved for coverage can present additional obstacles. In many cases, it makes the most sense to apply for coverage preapproval before offering any treatment.

4 – Keep Billing Information Up-to-Date

Once you have verified your patient’s medical insurance coverage and ensured they will get the maximum benefit when visiting your office, you want to make sure this information is always up to date. If the patient is one of your regular dental clients, they will likely see you twice a year. When you update their dental insurance, make sure your team members know to update their medical insurance as well.

5 – Communicate with Patients

Possibly the most important thing is communicating clearly with patients throughout the process. You want to make sure they understand what’s going on and that they’re not unnecessarily stressed.

Simplify the Process by Work with Brady Billing

Even the simplest medical insurance billing process takes time. Most dentists and practice managers know that the last thing their team members want to do is spend more time working on insurance and billing. Dental insurance likely already takes up a good deal of their day, making it challenging to spend enough time focused on patients. When you work with Brady Billing, we offer flexible services to minimize the amount of time your team members have to spend dealing with the obstacles of medical insurance billing. We provide medical billing verification in 24 hours, so there’s no wasted time waiting to hear back from the insurer.