Did you know that insurance eligibility verifications cost you an astonishing amount of money every year? Most dental practices spend a lot of money on insurance verifications without even realizing it. Having a front office assistant doing verifications can cost you an average of $108,000 a year and that’s just for an average of 60 verifications a day. The goal for any business is to save costs without compromising on quality and production – we’re here to tell you that’s possible.
We know all too well how costs add up. We spent some time looking at the numbers and really focused on breaking down how much it really costs your practice to do carry out insurance verifications – the results were mind-blowing.
The Numbers
Wages differ from state to state and practice to practice. For our calculations, we decided to go with the average rate per hour for a front desk assistant which amounts to about $30/hour when you factor in extra 10% in taxes, $10,000 for insurance plus the cost for an office space, training, onboarding, and employee benefits and you’re looking at a large hole in your overhead. So far so good? Let’s get into the nitty-gritty.
Most dental practices have front office staff working on insurance verifications as part of their day-to-day duties and on average, it usually takes a front office assistant anywhere from a few minutes to an hour – depending on call lengths and hold times. The problem arises when your front office has to get on calls with insurance agencies that put them on hold. An estimated 10%-20% of time is wasted just being on hold. Moreover, why would you want your employee to be on call holds when they really should be with patients or calling patients?
For this blog, we’ll focus on the cost of your employee doing 60 verifications a day.
With the $30/hour pay we calculated, you can determine how much it really costs for one verification. It usually takes an average of 15 minutes for verifications done over the phone due to long hold times. If you divide the $30 you pay your front office assistant per hour, it gives you the amount you pay them per minute. Simply multiplying the per-minute cost into 15 minutes (the amount of time it takes them to do one verification) you get approximately $7.5. You pay $7.5 for one insurance verification.
Now that number might not seem so bad if you take it at face value, but on average, a dental practice does up to 60 verifications a day. This means that you’re looking at a value of $450 in a single day, $2,250 in a single week, $9,000 in a four-week month, and a whopping $108,000 in a single year on verifications alone. Plus, who’s to say that 60 verifications a day are a hard stop? Or if your front office assistant won’t take longer than 15 minutes if they’re on longer hold times? If this is the case, they won’t even get past 30 verifications per day
It doesn’t have to be this way though and luckily we also did the math for a solution – one that we’re willing to share with you free of cost!
The Solution
Now that we’ve gone over the bad, let’s go over the good. You don’t have to spend that much on verifications. What if we told you that you can have three employees for about the same amount of money you pay one front office assistant? What if all three of those employees focused on insurance verifications alone? Maybe you don’t need three people to focus on verifications but you can still have one who can drastically bring down your cost per verification and still produce more than a front office assistant can in a single day. You probably know where we’re going with this but the numbers speak for themself.
If you divide $30/hour by 3, that’s approximately what you pay to have three Edge Health Ambassadors – remote, talented, and pre-trained employees ready to take your practice to the next level. Following the same math from earlier, it costs you approximately $3 per Ambassador – already a stark difference. 60 verifications a day was once costing you $450, and likely two full-time employees, now costs you $180 which saves you $270 per day. Again, take those numbers on a large scale for a higher number of insurance verifications on a daily basis and you’re saving thousands of dollars!
Who wouldn’t want that? Not to mention you’re saving on a ton of other overhead expenses with an Edge Health Ambassador such as training costs, employee insurance costs, benefits, and onboarding costs because we take care of that for you. Your front office staff can focus on assisting patients more swiftly which ensures that your business is being run productively.
When we say we help dental practices work smarter, we mean it. Your success is our success – even when it comes to your pocket.
The Result
With numbers like that, the results are clear – you’re spending way more than you need to on insurance verifications every single year. Providing dental practices with smart solutions is what we offer through our Edge Health Ambassadors. Partnering with us means you open up a pandora’s box of resources to help bring your overhead down while boosting productivity to a whole new level. It’s a win-win solution.
