#cloud based dental practice software

[carestack-blog]

100% paperless practice

Ever since getting into dental school, a big hassle has been managing paperwork. It is a mundane task and completing it only produces further tasks in the form of consolidating and managing large amounts of physical records. Though computers have made our lives much easier by simplifying billing and accounting and even patient records, we are still a long way to go before letting go of our paper habits. But, have you tried imagining how your office would be if it was 100% paperless? Is that even possible?

Dental practices deal with various instances where they are forced to use physical records. These include coordinating with suppliers, dental labs and other service vendors as well as maintaining patient records, schedules, reminders and calendars. Current practice management systems offer integrated solutions that streamline every bit of your practice from 3rd party coordination to internal data storage and ensure easy accessibility for all your data without the need for any paperwork.

There is then, the fear of data loss that makes practices stick to good old paper to back us up if technology fails. However, modern practice management systems store data on the cloud on dedicated servers with 24 hr protections and data redundancy systems. This means a 100% paperless practice is now possible and practical.

Efficient paperless practices with cloud based practice management systems

A modern cloud based dental practice management solution brings major changes in the following areas:

Front Office:

Patient intake forms and eligibility analysis can easily be made paperless, also removing the need for an additional step in entering the data onto the system. Even the scheduling calendar is so functional on modern practice management systems that it is as flexible as your hard calendar, while being substantially more functional. Several other smaller functions like rescheduling ques are also not necessary anymore. Even receipts can be emailed to your patients.

Clinical:

Charting, treatment planning, care notes, perio charting, imaging, patient records and even prescriptions can be done on the chair-side monitor in modern solutions. This makes the whole process considerably faster and more convenient. This also increases accuracy and prevents common errors in treatment code entry.

Financial:

Finance modules feature options for fee schedule management, e-claims, printing paper claims wherever needed without need for manual entry, claim tracking, ERA posting, statements or even regular financial reports. Having all these functionalities on a single system can help a practices achieve a paperless back-office.

Patient portals:

Going paperless should also benefits your patients. An integrated patient portal allows your patients to readily access all their documents and imaging files. This enables easier access to your patients and frees us time of your front office staff.

Benefits of a 100% paperless practice

Accuracy: Data is prone for manual error only at the point of entry. In some cases, even this does not happen, such as in the case of patient intake forms they fill up themselves using their mobile devices. This improves accuracy and increases efficiency of everything from record keeping to claims submission.

Compliance: HIPAA compliance is increasingly becoming exposed and paper documentation adds unnecessary risk to the process. Electronic documentation and databases can be customized with access controls so that only the relevant members of your team can access sensitive data.

Ownership: Now that every action can be traced back to the team member responsible, there will be greater ownership of tasks and lesser mistakes from the team.

Speed: The patient’s check-in to check out time reduces when the office is made paperless. This streamlines the patient-flow between various departments and the overall flow becomes more efficient.

Accessibility: One of the biggest challenges with paper records is accessibility. Electronic records are readily accessible, no matter the time, location or type of file.

Security: Data stored electronically, in cloud based systems have redundancy and security measures, making it safer than paper records.

[carestack-blog]

Business analytics for dental practices

We have re-imagined business over the past two decades. What used to be human-centric has now become data-driven. You will notice this difference when you walk into any bank. But, why has this change happened in every industry across the world? Data-driven decisions and analytics have produced results in increasing the efficiency of almost every industry it touched. Thus business analytics for dental practices comes into the picture.

Are Dental Practices an exception?

Dental practices are no exception, but the industry has been facing problems so far due to the lack of standardized systems and technology that are integrated enough to capture data from every point in the operating cycle. Most legacy systems are software installations at each workstation that work independently of each other.

Parameters like check-in to check-out times, claims-to-payment time, collection efficiency, and revenue from marketing campaigns help you improve gaps in practice efficiency, but analyzing this data becomes difficult with independent systems at each department. This is why practices who want these details need to make use of 3rd party analytics and data consolidation platforms.

There is vast room for improvement in the way data is handled in dental practices.

How can new generation practice management systems help?

New practice management systems are cloud-based and work with every device, whether it is a pc, tablet, or mobile device with the same functionality and convenience. This increases the number of points in your practice where the practice management system is implemented, exponentially increasing the amount of data collected and the inferences that can be drawn from them.

Always choose a cloud-based practice management system that caters to all functions of your practice and has integrated customizable analytics, with features such as:

Data mining and extraction

Data is available at every point of your practice. It has always been there. However, it has never been utilized because of a lack of a system to collect, organize, and report this information. Newer cloud-based practice management systems running at every terminal in your office make this process simple. Regular tracking of data points and necessary feedback naturally brings efficiency.

Custom reporting

Not all information is relevant to everyone. Displaying the right information to the right person at the right time goes a long way in achieving meaningful results. Custom reporting allows users to decide the parameters for generating custom reports that cover all the different and complex aspects of the practice. Such statements can also be automatically generated on a weekly or daily basis.

Personalized dashboards

It is not only crucial that the right information is available to you and your team, but also equally important to ensure the information is presented simply that every member of your team can understand and track. With modern practice management systems, you can create personalized data-rich visual dashboards to keep users focused on their goals and metrics.

KPIs and drill-downs

So, what do you do when some metric you are following is not performing as expected? The first step, just like with a dental patient, is to understand the problem and its etiology. Drilling down into the components of these metrics allows you to understand the root cause of the problem and know where to look to find a solution. Practice management systems with advanced analytics capabilities allow users to drill down to multiple levels of granularity to enable them to understand their KPIs better.

Trends

If you follow the number of patients visiting your practice daily, it shows you how you are performing now. But, how will you know what to expect going ahead? To predict the potential gains and losses in the future, it is necessary to track how these metrics are changing over time. You should identify trends and patterns influencing patient behavior at multiple locations over a period and fine-tune practice workflows accordingly.

Goal setting and tracking

Finally, every operation in your practice is run by people and not numbers. Human beings need motivation and aim to work tirelessly. Create goals and accurately measure employee and provider performance against the set goals to improve actual performance and convert your number based predictions into real results.

Key insights

For strategic decisions on where to invest extra cash you have in hand, you may want to look at how improving one function will affect the bottom line or patient satisfaction. These high-level decisions require insight into how each metric is co-related and how they work together. Use advanced analytics integrated practice management systems to gain insight by understanding the correlation between the data related to financials, patient demographics, scheduling, and treatments.

Conclusion

Business Intelligence and data analytics are known to provide a boost to any business. The dental industry is no different. Research has indicated that business analytics for dental practices can increase their revenue significantly.

For more details visit - https://carestack.com/

[carestack-blog]

Improving revenue cycle management

Improving revenue cycle management is crucial to the financial well-being of a dental practice. If it seems like your practice takes longer than the needed time to receive payments, you are betting your profits on future collections. While this looks comfortable over time (as you receive payment every month), you are not in the best spot. If revenue takes a month longer to reach you, fixing that gives you immediate cash equivalent to the entire revenue of a month. Imagine how you can use the extra cash in hand to invest in future profits. Cash collected late or not collected at all has a huge opportunity cost, one that commonly goes unnoticed.

How can practice management systems help you reduce your collection time?

Irrespective of whether a practice is accepting insurance, keeping accounts receivable (A/R) low is fundamental to running any profitable business. The use of modern practice management systems can fix critical gaps in implementing an effective revenue cycle management strategy.

Eligibility checks to reduce late & rejected payments

It is better to stem a problem at the source. If your production time schedules with priority to patients who are more likely to pay on time, you would not be facing a revenue cycle issue, to begin with. The key here is to ensure that you can do this eligibility check fast and before the patient checks-in. A modern dental practice management system manages this process with simple one-click solutions.

Error-free claims submission with just a single click

The collected information can be compiled into an error-free claim, that is ready to be sent for processing. Automated workflows ensure due process and leave little margin for error. This saves valuable time and effort while processing claims, leading to a predictable revenue cycle. When executed well, this can eliminate the need for clearinghouses.

Make informed choices in treatment planning

Being able to choose the right plan for a patient, based on his insurance and payment capability, helps reduce confusion while billing. Furthermore, the choices made available for the patient will improve patient experience and ensure that the patient made the best available choice.

Automated ERA postings for faster and better accounting

ERA postings have always been a source of constant headaches for dental practices. The latest practice management systems enable you to completely automate this, making your accounting and collections more streamlined. Problems and discrepancies are detected early, and corrective measures can be taken pre-emptively.

Payment reminders to ensure faster collection

As a practice owner, you would have seen your collections increase when you actively follow up on receivables. Many times all it takes is a timely reminder to get a payment. These are the low hanging fruits in collection. Such follow-ups should be consistent and timely to be able to work. Automation features in modern practice management solutions ensure your collection effort is running consistently and efficiently.

Automation and process streamlining

Most of the financial processes currently utilized have a lot of redundancies that do not need active human participation. These systems once converted into automated workflows makes processing not just faster but also cheaper and more accurate. Therefore choose a practice management system that is serious about automation and continuously improves its capability in this space.

Conclusion

Billing, coding, and collections are sophisticated, yet crucial pieces for maximizing cash-flow and profitability. Therefore choose a system that ensures the optimal functioning of your revenue cycle with the least possible effort. Hence look for eligibility checks, treatment planner, billing, claims processing, ERA postings as necessary features when choosing your practice management system. Choose a system that allows and is keen to expand on its automation abilities and is built for improving revenue cycle management. Automation of such tasks is the future.

For mire details visit - https://carestack.com/

[carestack-blog]

7 steps to supercharge your dental insurance management

Insurance management and filing claims are some of the most tedious and monotonous workflows in dental practices, if not done right. Since it is a task that decides when a patient’s payment is completed and in extension the revenue cycle, it goes without saying that the workflow must be smooth, bug-free and efficient. Workflows may vary with how your dental practice is set up, but here we will look at a couple of ways in which you can improve how insurances and claims are managed and thus boost effective practice performance.

1. Collecting patient details and verifying eligibility before the patient comes in.

Getting things done beforehand is always an efficiency booster. It gives you more time to dedicate to other important things and peace of mind that you are ready for the task at hand. When setting an appointment with the patient, make sure to collect as much information about the person using forms or questionnaires. The insurance data, thus collected can be verified by contacting the insurance carrier. This will ensure that when the patient comes in for the treatment, you will be ready to split the costs and move on to filing claims without a hitch, undoubtedly reducing the time spent on paperwork and increase time spent on patient care at the dental practice.

2. Confirming the details with the patient on arrival.

Assuming that, all the dental insurance data collection and verification were done beforehand, it will be very helpful to re-confirm the details with the patient just before the treatment. This is to eliminate the chances of any errors or changes that took place since the previous contact with the patient. It is better to find out and rectify changes during the treatment than, at the time of payment.

3. Submitting the claims without errors or omissions.

There is nothing more satisfying than getting things done right on the first try itself. Done wrong, the claim filing process can prove to be very monotonous. Getting a claim properly filed without any issues the first time is a win! Here are some things which may go about unnoticed.

Omission of important procedure codes and license numbers.

Usage of deleted or expired procedure codes.

Typos in names, addresses, NPI, SSD etc.

Also, keep a note of codes and practices which are identified as fraudulent. An example is code bundling, where a multitude of codes are used to describe the treatment when just one is enough. For example, A dentist performs a one-surface occlusal amalgam. He sends in a claim for 09210-Local Anesthesia; 09430-Office Visit; 02140-Amalgam-One Surface; and 03120-Pulp Cap-Indirect, when Code 02140 Amalgam-One Surface is enough.

4. Developing a good rapport with the insurance provider.

If your practice contacts the carrier directly via email or calls, it is essential that there should be a good rapport between the carrier representative and your practice. Good communication means better reception of claims and in effect less waiting or complications. Consider referring patients without insurance to carriers who are closely connected with your dental practice.

5. Weekly follow-ups and claim revisions.

Claims do take time to be processed and it will help immensely to follow-up on pending claims on a regular basis, preferably on a weekly basis. This is yet another method to boost rapport with the carrier. Also, tracking claims those are rejected will give you some insight on how to prevent future rejections.

6. Staying up-to-date on industry standards.

Updated is always better than outdated. Staying up-to-date with changes in codes, procedures, claim details, carrier plans, etc. is crucial, for both time management and avoiding complications. Consider adding a session to discuss changes along with your weekly or bi-weekly team meetings. This helps keep everyone working on the same page.

7. Using a proper dental practice management system.

So, by now we can understand that there are a lot of places where things can get messy. The best way to overcome all these issues is by using a practice management system which has all these features in-built. It will demand all details for the claim to be submitted, thus avoiding omissions and typos. It is always updated on the latest changes in the industry and will almost always run off the latest industry standards. Why go through the hassle of doing all of these by hand when it can be automated and simplified. This saves a lot of time for you and your staff.

For more details visit - https://carestack.com/