Drugs And Money

Business Of Dentistry Podcast

We are abandoning our plan to deposit our insurance checks electronically. Find out why... We also discuss a way to save money on disposing of those wasted medications without having the corporate medical waste companies gouge you with their programs...this alone is worth the listen. Check it out on episode 31 of Business of Dentristy! More About This Show Today I'm updating you on a few practices we've been trying out in my office: electronic deposits of insurance checks (versus in-person deposits) and medical waste disposal. On a previous episode I received a question from a listener about whether or not I scanned checks electronically and deposited them. I explained on the show that I did electronic depsoits for over the counter personal checks but not insurance checks. I also explained I would look into doing so for insurance checks. I did, I received a referral to a service provider that could do electronic deposits for us in conjunction with the system we have that runs our debit and credit cards. After going over the details I decided we'd give it a try for a few weeks. On June 1st we had the systems in place and started to make electronic deposits of insurance checks. Two weeks later my office manager and I had to really dig into some issues that had cropped up. We had been getting letters saying the insurance checks weren't being honored. All the checks went through, showed up as deposits in our business account, but when the request would get through to the insurance company's bank they weren't honoring the check and were kicking it back. So at that point the money was being deducted from our business account, a frustrating experience to say the least. Even with some digging by my office manager, Paul, we couldn't find out what was going wrong exactly. We knew the money went to my account but the bank the insurance company sent the check from was rejecting the request for an electronic funds transfer. When that rejection occurred then the money was pulled out of my business account. It was happening with about 20% of these checks, so not all of them but enough. Fortunately we were holding on to the paper checks just in case something went wrong. My experience with this way of depositing insurance checks is that it isn't worth it. Granted it was a narrow window of 2 weeks, but the 20% return rate of the checks was just too high to continue this practice. Until we can dig into this more we've stopped electronic deposits of insurance checks. We will either take paper checks or sign up with direct deposits with insurance companies. If you have different information or have had a different experience, I'd love to hear from you. And if something has worked for you I'd love to know about it! Leave a comment below or email me with your experience. Also on today's show I weigh in with my thoughts on medical waste disposal (ie what to do with unused drugs from your practice). I think disposing of unused drugs is very important, and I explain some options I've explored. I'll also get into my personal history of owning a small medical waste company and some of the more unscrupulous practices that I think are happening in that industry. To hear about all of that and more listen in to episode 31 of Business of Dentistry. Tweetable: "We are all in this together." Episode Resources Business of Dentistry on Facebook Connect with me on Twitter Leave us a rating or review on iTunes!