How I’d Train a Brand New Dental Biller in 2026

Hiring someone with no dental experience can feel like a gamble, but it doesn’t have to. I walk through the same onboarding system I’ve used for years to turn true beginners into capable, confident front office team members without wrecking your schedule, your claims, or your cash flow. The punchline is simple: when you build the foundation first, everything else speeds up. 

We start where most offices should start but rarely do: the CDT book. I explain how to teach categories of service so a new hire can navigate quickly, then how to break down the anatomy of a CDT code (alphanumeric, nomenclature, descriptor) so they’re not memorising numbers, they’re learning a language. That one shift improves dental billing accuracy, treatment plan coding, and insurance claim outcomes because your team stops guessing and starts verifying. 

Then we make it practical for real-world dental practice management. I share how to pull your most commonly used codes, tab the CDT by category, and build simple worksheets that help a newbie connect clinical procedures to correct dental codes in a safe practice environment. We also talk about the mindset piece: hiring is a business decision, and onboarding needs a strategy plus a clear expectation of mutual investment. 

If you want fewer billing mistakes, faster ramp-up time, and a stronger dental front office system, hit play, then subscribe, share this with a practice owner friend, and leave a review with the training challenge you’re facing right now.

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 (D4341+D4342+D4346+D4355+D4910)/(D4341+D4342+D4346+D4355+D4910+D1110)

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Transcript

Welcome And Shout Out

SPEAKER_00 1:24

Hey there, friends. Welcome back to another episode of the Dental Billing Podcast. I'm your host, Erica Aguilar, and I want to start this episode by giving a shout out to Dr. Walter Peavler out of Kentucky. Dr. Peavler is a fairly new practice owner, about four years in, and he recently reached out after going through dental coding and billing mastery. One of the things he said that really stood out to me, he said this would likely be one of the highest ROI investments he's made in his business. And not only that, but now it's becoming a core part of how he trains his front office team. And I want you to really sit with that for a second because this is not someone on the outside looking in. This is a dentist in it right now. He's in the thick of it. He's running his practice, managing overhead, dealing with staff, and watching the numbers. So, Dr. Peebler, I appreciate you and I appreciate that you appreciate the program. That means more than you know. Okay, friends. So before we dive into what I would do if I were new to dentistry in today's landscape, I want to start by giving you a little background. I didn't stumble into teaching dental billing and front office systems. Everything I taught, everything I learn and talk about is intentional. A lot of you who have been following me for quite some time, I've had a podcast since 2018. This is my second podcast. The first podcast was called Front Office on Fire, and I focused predominantly on front office challenges. And we sprinkled billing in. And then in 2020, I decided to revamp and solely focus on dental billing since that's what my business is. It's dental billing. So if you've been following my journey for a long time, you know that back in 2011, I started the country's first six-month dental front office administration college. And let me tell you, that was not something I just threw together. It took me about 18 months to build out that curriculum. 18 months of being obsessed with getting it right. I wanted structure, I wanted intention, which we most certainly got, and I'm gonna tell you why in a second. I wanted something that could actually take someone with zero background in dentistry and turn them into a dental front office rock star. So I built it out into six modules, and each module was four weeks long. And I didn't just sit in a room and think about what I should add to the curriculum. I stalked and talked to anybody and everybody in dentistry who would listen to me. I started with Fred Joyle. Fred Joyle is the co-founder of 1-800 Dentist, and he's also the author of Everything is Marketing. And this was the original reason why I reached out to Fred. It really had nothing to do with 1-800 Dentist. It had everything to do with his book. He was one of the first people really breaking down the difference between marketing and advertising in dentistry. And after reading his book, which I'm still obsessed with today, he's got many versions since the first version that I read. I remember thinking, my students need this. They need to understand how practices actually grow through patient acquisition and the difference between advertising and marketing, because I believe that everything we do, from answering the phone to how we greet the patient, everything is marketing. And everything should be in support of the advertisement. So if you say you're a dental spa and you don't sound like a dental spa when you answer the phone, you sound like a dental Walmart. That's not supporting the advertisement. And I'm gonna digress. Like that's not what that's not the point of this podcast episode. So I reached out to Fred and I wanted his book to be a part of my curriculum. I wanted every single student to have a copy. And after meeting Fred, we hit it off, we got along famously, and he was so generous. He allowed us to order as many books as we needed when we needed them so that every student could have one at no cost to my college. And it didn't stop there. He actually came out. When he did that, we brought all of our students together. We rented out a large classroom, like a stadium style room. And he did a full guest appearance for our students and a book signing for them. And I still have all of the pictures of that day. It was such a great day. I remember sitting there thinking, this is wild. My students are getting access to a dental celebrity and they don't even know it. So the next person I talked to that is very influential in dentistry was Linda Miles. And for those of you that are newer to dentistry, you probably don't know who Linda is, but Linda is a legend. And I was introduced to Linda through a mentor of mine at that time, Mary Ann Harper. Mary Ann is actually who taught me how to do medical billing for dental procedures. So when Mary Ann told me that her and Linda spoke about me starting a dental front office college and how I was developing the curriculum, she said, you need to talk to Linda. And I listened. I remember asking Linda if she thought that I should have people I speak to about the curriculum sign an NDA. An NDA stands for non-disclosure agreement. And it's something that you have people sign when you are showing them something proprietary and you don't want them to talk about it. You don't want them showing anybody else. So I was a little protective over the curriculum because nobody had ever done this before. Nobody had developed a bona fide curriculum. And Mary, um, not Mary Ann, Linda Miles, she laughed at me and it was like a real genuine chuckle because she said, honey, anything worth selling is gonna be stolen. It will be stolen. And then she went on to tell me how she was the very first practice management consultant in dentistry back in the 1970s. This is what makes Linda a legend. And since then, we now have thousands of consultants, myself included, in the dental space. So that moment really stuck with me because it shifted my thinking from trying to protect everything I was developing. You guys, I was over the top, to building something so solid that even if it's not a matter of if, it's a matter of when it gets copied, because my curriculum has been copied a few times. I actually found recently that there's a community college that teaches dental administration and they are using my curriculum. They are giving me the acknowledgement, but nobody informed me that that was happening. I happened to find out through a mutual friend, through a friend. So even if it gets copied, it doesn't matter because it's not being taught by yours truly. When it's your baby and it's your curriculum, you teach a different way, right? And then there was Dr. Howard Faran, who is a very good friend of mine now. He is the founder of Dental Town. And if you are not, you're not familiar with Dental Town and you are in dentistry, I encourage you to get out from under the rock that you're living in, under, and go sign up for a membership with Dentaltown. It's free. Get in there, read the message boards. There's some really cool conversations going on in there. I've been a member of Dentaltown for I don't even know how long. It is just something that changed dentistry, changed the game when Howard launched Dentaltown back in 1990, I believe it was. So go sign up for Dentaltown and encouraging. I'm I'm not even asking, I'm telling you to go do it. So Howard and I connected while I was building this curriculum out, and he immediately saw the need for what I was creating, so much so that he invited me out to Dental Town headquarters and I went. I recorded the entire course and it was uploaded to the Dental Town platform. This was the largest dental platform at the time. So think about that. I hadn't even officially launched yet, and I was already being brought into spaces like this. And on top of all of this, I personally called 300 dental offices, 300 friends. I spoke directly to dentists and told them what I was building. And I asked them one simple question. If there was one thing you wish for your front office person to master, what would that be? And interestingly enough, two answers came up over and over again, sometimes together, but it was definitely verbal skills. I heard things like, I wish that my front office knew how to handle new patient calls. I wish they knew how to answer insurance questions. I wish they knew how to answer the phone and sound like they like their job. So verbal skills came up a lot and billing. It was almost one or the other or both in every single phone call. So I knew those topics had to be a part of the core curriculum. So when I tell you I built this program, you guys, I built this program from the ground up, not even knowing what I was building. I just knew I was filling a gap where it was needed in dentistry. We have dental schools for dentists, we have dental hygiene schools for hygienists, we have dental assisting schools for dental assistants. But when I did my research, there was absolutely nothing out there to this day, even my curriculum included, there's nothing that is officially out there that is regulated. So I just did my very best to talk to the best and biggest influencers in dentistry. I interviewed 300 dentists. I spoke with I don't know how many office managers. I really put the work in so that I could put out a curriculum that really got granular on the topics that were important to dentists. I wanted to weird science the perfect front office person. And some of you may get that and some of you may not. Go look it up if you don't. With the real input from real dentists and with guidance from people who shaped this industry, I then went on and taught literally thousands of individuals who sat in my classroom. I had a brick and mortar location in Riverside, California. Most of these people did not have a background in dentistry, zero. And some even flew in and lived in Riverside for six months. I had dentists who would fly in, or they would send their spouse, or a family member would come. We ended up having, we ended up helping, I would say at least 20 individuals find an apartment so that they could live local to the school, to the college, and they can learn as much as they can and then go back to their practice and run the practice. And we've had a ton of individuals, like I said, thousands of individuals that had no background in dentistry. And the really cool thing is I watched what happened when they were taught dental administration the right way without fear of mistake, because when mistakes are made on the job, you are gonna lose money, right? So their confidence was grown in the classroom. And through that confidence, we were at a 92% job placement percentage. And for those of you that don't know, which most of you probably don't because you've never started a post-secondary college, 92% is unheard of in the certificate education world. Like usually an accredited post-secondary college, which my college was considered a post-secondary college, usually you're aiming for 78% to maintain your accreditation so that you don't lose your ability to accept financial aid. I was not equipped to accept financial aid. There's certain steps you have to go through. Like for me, I had to be in operation for two years and I had to operate like an accredited school and keep all my receipts, keep all, keep all my ducks in a row in order to apply to be eligible to accept financial aid. And that was like another three-year process. I was very far from the ability to accept financial aid. But one thing that I do know is that most post-secondary colleges, like these dental assisting schools, medical assisting schools, they struggle with job placement. And your job placement percentage is what allows you to keep your ability to be accredited. And if you're not, you lose your accreditation, you lose your ability to take financial aid. And that could be devastating to a school. I've seen many post-secondary colleges be taken out because they just were not able to place their students or help them get a job. And so how that's defined is my students would finish their six modules of classroom and hands-on work, and then they would go do an externship for two months. Our externships were two months long because I only wanted to put out the best student. And in order to be eligible to take to do your externship, you had to pass your final with a 90% or better. And my final was not easy, friends. I still get messages about the anxiety that the final gave. Now, I didn't do that to set them up for failure. I did that because I really wanted to produce the best students, the best front office individuals. And we really did. So job placement is defined by how soon your student gets a job in the industry they studied, right? Our students were getting hired right out of externship. It almost became like they became such an integral part of the team, and they were knowledgeable. They knew how to calculate treatment plans, they knew how to do billing, they knew how to do things that it would take five years to learn on the job. And they learned that in seven months. So six months in the classroom, seven, eight months, two more months in an office actually doing the work. So we had a 92%. So we were up there. So when I say I'm going to walk you through what I would do if I were brand new to dentistry in 2026, this is not theory. I'm going to tell you what I have seen works when you are onboarding an individual with no background in dentistry. And that seems to be the trend right now. We seem are seeing more and more offices hire people with no background because it's just so darn hard to find someone with experience that actually wants to work in an office. There's a lot of hybrid positions, but the days of finding individuals with experience that want to work in a dental office are gone. They're virtually gone. What does that mean? It means that we have to pivot, right? So in order to remain relevant in any industry, you have to pivot when the industry starts to evolve. And we are evolving. So now that this evolution is taking place where we are seeing more and more offices, hire individuals with no background in dentistry and then struggle with what to train them on. Where do we start? Right. I have your answer. You start with the CDT book. You make sure that your new hire owns their own CDT book. Okay. The very first thing a newbie needs to get their hands on is a CDT book. And it's not to have and just sit there and look pretty. So, side story, I studied Hindi back in 2004. I would go once a week to the Mundar, and I would sit in a room of five and six-year-olds. I was 28 at the time. And I learned the structure first of how we are going to break down Hindi. I learned how to read, write, and speak Hindi, but I had to start from the very basics, like understanding what a head stroke is and understanding, you know, which way we are going to position a symbol and how that symbol, if it's positioned incorrectly, changes the entire word. So I learned that. And there's nothing different about learning your codes because the code becomes your new language. Now, when I taught newbies, and I believe that when you onboard someone with no background, you have to give them that structure, right? So when I when I taught my newbies, I called them newbies because they were new to dentistry. We started very slow. And I believe you should do the same. And anybody that's new to dentistry that has worked with me knows that I'm going to start slow. And the very first order of business was memorizing the categories of service in order, not just knowing them, because if I say perio, you should know immediately where that category of service falls. Is it before or after restorative? You should be able to answer that right off the top of your head. You should be able to recite the categories of service in order and backwards so that now you know how to confidently navigate through this book. So once they memorized their categories of service, I then would move into understanding the anatomy of a CDT code. Because here's the problem most people in dentistry were never taught this. If you walked up to the average front office team member and said, show me the nomenclature in this code, most of them wouldn't even know what you're talking about. And that's not their fault. They were trained backwards, like most people who get started in dentistry. So I broke it down into three parts. Every CDT code has three sections. First is the alphanumeric section. Dental codes start with a D followed by four numbers. That is your new language. The alphanumeric portion of the CDT code is your new language. Everything we do in dentistry is communicated in code. We talk to insurance companies in code, we schedule in code, we communicate internally in code. So that alphanumeric portion, that's your new vocabulary. Next is the nomenclature, and that's right next to the alphanumeric portion. That is the English translation. So if you open your CDT book, the first code you're gonna see is D0120. That's your alphanumeric. That's the code, that's the new language. The nomenclature tells you exactly what that code means. Periodic, oral. Evaluation for an established patient. That's your translation. And then just below that is the descriptor. And that is the part that people skip. The descriptor helps you determine whether that code is actually appropriate for what happened between the provider and the patient. It helps you to determine how to code that interaction, right? It's your checkpoint. Now, codes, some of the alphanumeric codes don't have a descriptor because it's so obvious what that code is supposed to be used for, they don't. So once my students understood those three parts, now they weren't just looking at codes, they were reading them and interpreting them. And once you can read and interpret them, now you are going to be able to start using them correctly. So if I were to translate this process into a practice and say I had my own practice and I'm onboarding individuals with no background in dentistry, which I've done hundreds of times, you guys, I use this exact process. I give them a CDT book. We put tabs at the beginning of every single category of service. And then we go into each category of service and we highlight the most commonly used codes in each category of service. Now, taking it out of the classroom and customizing this for your practice is simple. You are going to run a report. And if you don't know how to get this report, just contact your practice management software and let them know that you want to run a report that tells you what your most commonly used codes are. It's usually 30 to 40 codes and highlight them in the CDT book and have your newbie study that. This is their study guide. This is their coding guide that is going to be with them from the time they clock in to the time they clock out and sometimes beyond that. Because once they understand A, how to navigate, that's why we have them memorize the categories of service and order. And then B, what they're reading, they understand the three sections of a dental code: the alphanumeric, the nomenclature, and the descriptor. Now we are ready to level up. Now, this is when in the classroom, this is what I did. And feel free to take my idea and implement it in your onboarding process. Now I started to give my students worksheets. And this is where it got interesting. On one side of the worksheet, we had codes that were way out of order, just random codes, completely out of order. And on the other side had their matching procedure. And their job was to connect them, to draw a line from the correct code to the correct procedure. It sounds simple, but it wasn't because now they had to think. They had to navigate their CDT book, they had to slow down and actually understand what they were looking at. And this is where it clicked because now they weren't memorizing anymore. They were connecting. They were learning how to codify interactions. And let me tell you why this matters to a newbie. Because in a real office, using the wrong code costs money. It affects claims. It affects reimbursement. It affects the entire practice. But in this safe classroom environment, they could mess up, they could get it wrong, and they could fix it without it costing anyone anything. However, I will tell you, we would always calculate what that mistake would have cost a live practice. If I ever had an opportunity to say, well, let's see how much money we lost with that mistake. My students knew I was going to point it out because I wanted them to understand mistakes cost money in dental front office when you are coding a treatment plan, when you are calculating a treatment plan, when you're presenting financials. There's so many areas where there are blind spots. And I have a curriculum that teaches newbies how to step into every layer of front office slowly. And it's done in layers. We don't learn insurance before we understand codes. We don't jump into codes before we understand the order of categories of service so that we can properly navigate through our coding book. And that is why this step is so powerful, because by the time my students got into a real office, they were no longer guessing. They knew how to connect what was done clinically to the correct code. And I believe that this played a huge role into why they had such a higher rate, straight out of externship. They had a high, higher rate. And through this curriculum, starting slowly helped them to develop the confidence to have success in their role, which the byproduct of that is the practice experiencing massive success as well, right? Because when you have somebody who has been taught right, they will have less errors. And less errors means less financial loss, right? So here's my final thought. My final thought is when you decide to hire a newbie, because that is a business call, that's a business decision. Behind every decision you make, there should be a strategy. And if this is a business call that you are making and you have no plan for your newbie, you're setting them up for failure. So when Dr. Peavler talked about the dental billing and coding mastery course becoming a part of his onboarding process, this is his plan. He purchased the course so that he had a tool. Because in that tool, in that course, we go through in detail the most commonly used codes in general dentistry. So if you don't have a plan for your newbie and you're not setting them up for success, don't get upset when they are making decisions that make you scratch your head. Because what makes sense to us, what is easy for us, because we've been in the game, me since 1995, and I've been doing billing since 1998. I have been there, done that, seen it evolve several times, and it's evolving again. And we're bringing new people on board. I know exactly the foundation they need. Get them their CDT book. Have them memorize their categories of service in order. Highlight the most commonly used codes in your practice in each of those categories of service and review those codes in detail with your newbie, with your new employee, your new team member that has no background. They have no reference point. So this CDT book becomes a reference point, a baseline for them to start building knowledge upon. And as you do that, maybe, and I have done this when I've onboarded individuals with no background, I've given them worksheets that have generic treatment plans. And then I have them codify those treatment plans to demonstrate their progress in knowledge. And when you decide to bring someone on board that has no background in dentistry, I don't care if it's the server that you met at your favorite restaurant, you finally convince them to come on board because culture fit is so obvious, right? Like, and I'm a huge fan of hiring for culture fit first before we start tapping into their experience because experience does not matter if we don't like this person or if they don't like us. So I am a huge fan of making sure that we give your new employee new to dentistry a baseline. And I'm also a huge fan of them reciprocating. I believe in an equal exchange of energy. So if you are going to provide these resources so that they can be set up for success in their new career, then they need to be willing to invest not just on the clock. It should never be that we give them a corner while they're on the clock and they're studying, you know, only on the clock. This should be a mutual, not a formal agreement, but it should be mutually understood that, hey, I'm gonna teach you a new career and I'm gonna set you up for success and I'm gonna get you some resources and some tools. But I want to know that you're also going to invest because you want to be the best version in your new career. And I think that it's safe to have that conversation and have that understanding that I'm gonna invest in you, but you're gonna reciprocate by studying, right? I can't wait six months for you to get up and running. I need this to happen sooner than later. And here is how we're gonna cut that learning curve. So, with that being said, friends, I hope that I have given you some direction. I hope that I have provided some ideas as to how you can onboard individuals in today's landscape with this new, I don't know what to call it, this new era of dentistry where we have never before been hiring individuals with no background in dentistry. But I would definitely start with that very slow learning process because once they have this foundation under their belt, everything else just kind of speeds up. Slow at the beginning, but very, very valuable in the long run. Okay, friends, thank you so much for spending your time with me. I appreciate all of you, and I will see you in the next episode.