Provider Production Split

The lab bill is the most argued line in an associate agreement

It comes off before the split, or it stays the practice’s own cost. Both are ordinary terms. Both appear in agreements signed this year.

And on a month with a heavy crown-and-bridge case load, they are thousands of dollars apart for one provider — the same production, the same percentage, the same agreement in every other respect.

Whichever way yours reads, it reads that way per provider, because these are negotiated one at a time. A practice with four associates can genuinely have four different answers, and the one thing that will not work is remembering which is which at the end of a busy month.

Production and collection are not the same month

Production is what was done. Collection is what arrived, and it mostly arrived against work from an earlier month.

Every practice system gives you both. Neither of them tells you what a provider is owed, because the thing that turns one into a payment is the agreement — the percentage, the basis, and what comes off first — and that lives in a folder rather than in the software.

This applies each provider’s own set to the month, and prints what the split rests on beside what it comes to. Two providers on the same percentage and different bases will show different figures, and you can see why on the line.

The ratio it refuses to print

It never divides collection by production and calls that a rate.

Over a single period, that number measures when the post arrived. A slow month at the insurers makes every provider look worse; a month where two big claims land together makes everyone look better. Neither has anything to do with how the practice is doing or how a provider performed.

It is a number that looks like a performance figure, gets read as one, and is actually a fact about the mail. So it does not appear.

It is not payroll and does not pretend to be

No tax is computed here. Not withholding, not the employer side, not anything.

What a provider is owed under an agreement and what lands in their account are two different numbers separated by a payroll process that knows their filing status, their year to date, and the rules where you are. This works out the first one. Handing it to somebody as though it were the second would be the kind of confident wrong number that causes a real problem in March.

What it replaces

The month-end spreadsheet with each associate’s terms typed into it, which is correct until somebody renegotiates. Or the version where the office manager knows all four agreements, which works perfectly right up until they are away in the week the month closes.

You enter each provider’s terms once. Every month after that is two figures out of the practice system.

Who it is for

Dental, medical and veterinary group practices — anywhere associates are paid on what they produce or collect, under agreements signed individually.

What it will not do

It suggests no percentage. What an associate is worth in your practice is a negotiation, and it depends on your patient flow, your equipment and what you are offering besides money.

It takes no view on which basis is fairer. Production or collection, lab in or lab out — this applies what the agreement says. It does not have an opinion about the agreement.

It computes no tax. See above. This is not payroll.

Nothing you type is sent anywhere. The arithmetic runs in your browser. Provider compensation is about as sensitive as practice data gets, and none of it leaves the machine you are working on. Close the tab and it is gone.