What to Look For in Dental Insurance Verification Companies

If you own a dental practice, working with a dental insurance verification service is essential. Insurance verification is an important step in medical billing, as it ensures that a patient is not caught off guard by an expensive dental bill and that your practice receives sufficient payment for services. Without this process, your dental office could develop a reputation for providing unnecessary procedures.

Instead of wasting your staff’s time by completing dental insurance verification in-house, you can outsource this process to a reputable company or use reliable software. Read on to learn more about insurance verification and what to look for in dental insurance verification services.

What Is Insurance Verification?

Insurance verification is the process of checking a patient’s insurance coverage and benefits before providing services. This process is essential to ensuring that a patient has the proper coverage for the dental service you plan to provide.

Patients need to understand how much a dental care service will cost them out of pocket before agreeing to it. Meanwhile, your practice needs to know the likelihood that you will receive payment for providing a dental service.

Whether you offer cosmetic dentistry, restorative dentistry, or something in between, pricing transparency is an important step in running a successful business. The first step in providing transparent pricing is ensuring that your patient has dental insurance that would cover the necessary services.

The two primary ways to complete insurance verification are manually and through an outsourced service. Your dental staff can call each insurance company directly to verify benefits and coverage. However, if you’d like to save time and ensure greater accuracy, outsourcing dental insurance verification is an excellent solution.

How to Identify the Best Dental Insurance Verification Companies or Software

You can outsource dental insurance verification to a company or utilize specific dental systems software. Whichever solution you choose, you should ensure that it uses the right processes to provide comprehensive, reliable dental insurance eligibility verification.

Here are a few things to look for in the best dental insurance verification services:

Ongoing Dental Insurance Verification Training

The best dental insurance verification services continually train their employees to enhance quality assurance and ensure the accuracy and reliability of their services.

Insurance benefits change constantly, and understanding all of the waiting periods, fees, copays, coverage limits, and additional factors in an insurance plan can be tricky. However, top-tier verification companies stay on top of changes and ensure that their employees do as well.

The best eligibility verification companies also provide training to protect patient information. Security breaches are a constant threat to these companies that keep detailed patient and insurance information on file. However, reliable companies provide ongoing training to help employees avoid scams and safeguard patient data.

Inclusive Coverage of Specialties

Not every insurance benefits verification service works with every industry. Not only do you need to find a service that includes medical billing, but you should also look for one with specific dental billing services.

The service you choose should understand the complexities of dental billing. It should know which services dental insurance companies typically cover and which services, such as root planing or periodontal scaling, have a higher rate of insurance claim denials.

Optimal Dental Insurance Verification Process

Dental insurance verification services must use comprehensive processes while prioritizing speed and patient experience. When you’re exploring practice management systems to find one that fits your needs, look for several key factors, like speed, good patient experience, accurate information, and affordable pricing.

Speed

Dental insurance verification services like Weave make verifying a patient’s dental insurance coverage quick and easy. The platforms provide insurance information with verification responses within ten seconds. As a result, your team can get back to your patients.

Patient Experience

Some insurance verification services allow you to prioritize the patient experience by ensuring accurate, quick insurance eligibility verification. For example, if the verification platform finds an issue with a patient’s insurance plan, you can quickly reach out to patients directly through the app for clarification.

Accurate, Up-to-Date Information

Insurance verification services must provide up-to-date, accurate information about a patient’s benefits with the click of a button. You can trust the platform to provide reliable patient eligibility verification.

Competitive Pricing

The insurance verification specialist you choose should provide competitive pricing that suits your dental practice budget. While you shouldn’t skimp on the cheapest option, you can find high-quality insurance verification services at reasonable prices.

What Methods Could Be Used to Verify Insurance Benefits?

While many dental offices outsource dental benefits verification, you can also complete the process in-house. However, you’ll need to follow a standardized process to ensure that every patient receives the verification necessary to feel confident in their insurance coverage.

Here is some more information about the dental verification process.

How to Verify Insurance in a Dental Office

If you decide to keep dental insurance benefit verification in-house, you must ensure that every team member responsible for this process knows the exact steps to take to verify patients’ coverage. Here are the steps to verify dental insurance coverage:

• Collect the patient’s insurance coverage information verbally or through an insurance verification form.
• Make a copy of the patient’s medical insurance card to keep on file.
• Contact the insurance company for eligibility verification.
• Record information about patient benefits in the patient’s file.
• Follow up with the patient with any questions or concerns.

Steps for Orthodontic Insurance Verification

Orthodontic offices can use the same steps above to verify insurance eligibility for patients. However, if you own an orthodontic office, you may want to advise your staff to be extra diligent during the verification process.

Many dental insurance plans do not provide full coverage for orthodontic services. For example, some companies include coverage for braces but will not cover every service involved in installing and maintaining braces.

Orthodontic patients are typically aware that they may need to pay for certain services out of pocket. However, providing detailed insurance coverage estimates can help them make more informed decisions and avoid stressful conversations with the medical billing company.

What Is the Difference Between an Insurance Authorization and an Insurance Verification?

Insurance verification and authorization are both important to the dental billing process. However, these processes are different.

Insurance verification is the process of confirming a patient’s insurance information and coverage before performing a dental service, whereas insurance authorization is the process of gaining approval that an insurance company will cover specific services.

Verification and authorization are essentially two steps in verifying a patient’s insurance eligibility. First, your dental practice must confirm that a patient has dental insurance and that your practice accepts that insurance plan. Next, you must seek approval that the insurance company will cover the service your patient needs.

Different insurance companies handle authorization differently. Some companies require pre-authorization for cosmetic dentistry services. However, even if a company does not require a patient to receive pre-authorization, completing this process can lower your rate of dental claim denials and improve patient satisfaction.

How Practices Can Make Dental Insurance Verification Process Easier

Verifying a patient’s insurance benefits can be time-consuming and tedious. While reviewing the information on a patient’s insurance card can provide some information about their benefits, you’ll likely also need to call the insurance company to verify coverage. This process can involve a lengthy phone call that takes you away from other dental practitioner tasks.

If your dental practice wants to keep eligibility verification in-house, you can take a few steps to simplify the process:

First, don’t wait until the last second to verify a patient’s insurance. By completing this process at least two days before the patient’s appointment, you have time to rectify any problems with the patient and the insurer.

Second, your dental team should ask patients whether their insurance information has changed. This question can be as simple as “Is your insurance company still Delta Dental?” when a patient signs in for an appointment.

Finally, if you operate a family dental practice, you probably have patients from the same family who all have the same insurance plan. Copying information from one family member’s insurance documentation into everyone else’s can save time.

Altogether, insurance verification is an essential process for your practice to prioritize and streamline. If you’re looking for a way to automate numerous functions in your dental practice, including insurance verification, request a free Weave demo today.

FAQ

What does a dental insurance verification job description entail?

A dental insurance verification specialist verifies patients’ insurance and resolves issues with the insurance company before or after the patient’s appointment. This job description entails:

• Recording patients’ basic insurance information
• Confirming specifics like policy limitations, copay amounts, and whether referrals are necessary
• Contacting insurance companies to confirm eligibility requirements

Many dental insurance verification companies provide easy-to-use software to streamline the verification process.

What is dental eligibility verification?

Dental eligibility verification is the first step in the insurance verification process. Your dental practice confirms that the patient’s insurance is valid and indicates that they are eligible to receive the treatment, surgery, or procedure.

Several pieces of information to verify eligibility include: The insured person’s name, start and end dates of the policy, whether the insurance company covers the procedure the patient needs, and more.