With your dental practice expanding by the day, you may feel like you need someone’s assistance in handling the bills in your office and diligently follow-up on the insurance claims.  The dimensions of the dental billing process, like in any other practice out there has changed, have become dynamic, and need special attention. Managing the entire dental billing process can way too often be an overwhelming task for your in-house full-time manager (who plausibly needs to attend more to your patients than their ledgers and insurance claims).

Two Options in Dental Billing

Faced with such a condition, you will have to consider any of the following two solutions—either you keep a full-time in-house coordinator for your insurance handling, or, reach out to a dental billing company. But you might have your qualms regarding the latter one as you might be wondering if you even need it or how much will have to pay the company in comparison to hiring an in-house individual for the same! In this article, we shall make an effort to compare the two types of dental billings and present before you some compelling insights regarding outsourcing your dental billing.

Calculating the Cost of Outsourced Dental Billing

The size of your practice and the amount of insurance you collect are important parameters that will decide the cost of outsourcing the dental billing process. According to a rough estimate, the median insurance collection for dental practices is around $40k monthly. On the other hand, outsourcing the dental billing process can cost you an average of $1.5k monthly.

What if You want to Hire an in-House Insurance Coordinator?

According to payscale.com, the median hourly rate of an in-house dental coordinator is around $18.37. Add the bonus, profit sharing, and commission to it. Wait it’s still not over! How can you ignore kinds of stuff like social security tax and workers’ medical expenses?  In total the gross pay would amount to anywhere in the range of $50-$52k annually and translates roughly to $4.2k a month.

Outsourcing vs in-House

Now that we have an idea about how much the two would cost you, let’s equate them against each other. The difference between the costs can obviously be greater or lesser depending upon the insurance you are receiving monthly.

• Dental insurance expert in-house: $4.2k/month
• Dental billing outsourcing: $1.5k/month
• Monthly difference= $2.7k a month or ~32.4k annually

Multiple in-House Staff

You might think of hiring a group of 2-5 members in-house to do the job for you depending upon the magnitude of the insurance amount you are receiving. It may or may not turn out to be economical but, the major drawback you would certainly be choosing to overlook is the level of expertise and technical know-how to get the job done that will eventually help you in focusing on expanding your practice.

Final Words

The decision between in-house billing and outsourcing is strongly contingent upon one factor–cost. In addition to it, there are crucial parameters such as expertise and your personal experience in practice. In all dental billing can be a challenging task which indubitably needs expert handling and you just can’t afford to take it lightly.