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Dental Support Organizations (DSOs) are an important part of overall dental practice management and patient care. They also serve as an important connection between dental practices and payers. As a DSO, you already know how important it is to enable dental practices to provide high quality, efficient care.
The kinds of services Dental Support Organizations (DSOs) provide
As a dental support organization (DSO) you are providing non-clinical administrative support services to dental practices. These services can include:
- Human Resources: functions like recruiting, hiring, training, and managing staff for dental practices.
- Administrative Support: This includes tasks such as billing, scheduling, appointment reminders, insurance processing, and managing patient records.
- Financial Management: financial planning, budgeting, accounting, and financial reporting for dental practices.
- Technology and Infrastructure: technology and infrastructure improvements for dental practices, such as upgrading equipment, implementing electronic health records systems, and providing IT support.
- Compliance and Regulatory Support: help dental practices stay compliant with relevant regulations and industry standards, including HIPAA regulations, OSHA requirements, and dental licensing requirements.
- Professional Development: offer professional development opportunities for dentists and staff, including continuing education programs and training on best practices in dental care and practice management.
When dental practices outsource these non-clinical functions to your DSO, they can focus more on providing high-quality patient care while benefiting from the expertise and efficiency of a specialized management team.
You probably already know about all these functions that DSOs take care of. We’re preaching to the choir. But maybe you’re looking for ways to improve these services, increase operational efficiencies, and reduce costs. If that’s the case, let’s talk about how credentialing is a big factor in several of the services we’ve mentioned above.
Where credentialing efficiency and visibility helps
- Human Resources
Dental providers all need to be credentialed for patient safety, just like physicians. Providing a streamlined way to credential and monitor providers via your DSO is a great value-add to your services and software, especially if you can enable them to store provider data in a CRM they may already have - think, Salesforce.
- Administrative Support
Before dental practices can process insurance payments, they need to get their providers enrolled with payers. This requires them to get credentialed with payers, or have the payer delegate credentialing to the dental practice. If the latter is an option, offering more efficient credentialing services via your DSO will help to get providers into insurance networks faster, so they can serve patients and get paid.
- Compliance and Regulatory Support
Credentialing providers is necessary to remain compliant with governing bodies. Doing that credentialing using automated primary source verifications and ongoing monitoring means that you remove room for human error and accelerate the credentialing process, helping your customers grow their business while making compliance easy.
Delegated contracts for faster dental payer enrollment
You know that you can provide better administrative, HR, and compliance support to dental practices by incorporating credentialing services that are efficient and reliable. Another big change you could make to provide even more value is to facilitate delegated contracts with dental payers.
Often when a provider needs to be credentialed with a payer it can take between 60 and 120 days. That’s a long time to wait and it prevents providers from serving members of an insurance plan while they wait for the credentialing to be completed.
Dental practices can delegate the credentialing process to third-party organizations or individuals, including dental support organizations (DSOs) or credentialing services. These entities specialize in managing the credentialing process for healthcare providers, including dentists.
By delegating credentialing responsibilities, dental practices can streamline the process and ensure that their providers are enrolled with insurance companies in a timely and efficient manner. This allows dentists and practice staff to focus on patient care and other essential aspects of running the practice.
As the DSO being delegated to you need to ensure that the process is handled accurately and efficiently. You can make this easier by implementing credentialing technology and processes powered by automation, so what used to take 4 months, can happen in under a week. This brings big benefits to the dental practices you work with, as the faster they can get providers enrolled in payer networks, the faster they can generate revenue from claims.
If you’re interested in learning more about the benefits of delegated credentialing, Verifiable's director of credentialing wrote this interesting blog post on how delegated contracts with your payers can have massive implications for time to revenue & efficiency.
Automation of dental primary sources helps with speed and compliance
Verifiable's API integrates with hundreds of primary sources (NPI/DEA registries, board certifications, OIG S&E lists, CAQH, NPDB, etc), and returns results instantly for a majority of license types. We can also auto-import provider credentials from the ADA/CAQH to give you a leg up on provider onboarding.
This automation speeds up the credentialing process, but also helps with reliability of data and compliance by removing the human error element that commonly affects manual credentialing.
We support some of the largest and fastest-growing networks - like Humana Dental, Spring Health, and Empower Pharmacy - to centralize and automate provider credentialing and compliance. Want to see how your organization could benefit too? Book a demo.
