What Profitable Practices Need to Know: Set Up a Fee Schedule

If you want to be a profitable dental practice, there are a few secrets you need to know. The first secret is setting up a fee schedule for your common dental procedures.

Your fee schedule should include your usual fees as well as the usual insurance coverage for your offered procedures. Setting up a fee schedule and including these prices allows you to do two major things for your patients:

• Quickly estimate what their portion of the bill will be.
• Set accurate expectations regarding the insurance portion of their bill.

This will not only allow you to provide more accurate treatment and insurance estimates for your patients but it will also benefit you by giving you a more precise accounting of your daily practice production. This also gives your front office employees the chance to collect fees closer to their exact amount each day.

When you can, group your patients by employer. By grouping them together it lets you update insurance information on a group basis rather than individually, which saves your staff hours of time. This will also allow you to make fee updates and apply them to the whole group instead of the time-consuming process of updating each individual patient record.

Assess your fee schedule every six months to make sure your fees are comparable with your dental peers. This will allow you to make effective practice decisions as you regularly examine your fees.

It is important that you revise your fee schedule just as often as insurance companies update their coverage tables to make sure you are reimbursed correctly. When you adjusting your fees more than once a year it lets you gradually raise your fees. This will make it easier for your patients to accept the price change. You may not want to adjust your fees, especially when that means raising them, but this allows you to compensate for the rising operating costs you face, such as lab fees, equipment costs and office utilities.

To learn more on how you can improve the processes in your dental office to help you manage your practice with confidence and achieve new levels of productivity join Easy Dental on an upcoming webinar. The Secrets of a Productive Practice – September 22, 2015, 11:00 AM MDT. Register now >>

Author: Cindy Day Hauk

Founder at CKD Practice Management