A Tip Worth Remembering

As this week is Thanksgiving, it’s time to think about all the things in our lives that we are thankful for. One of the things I’m thankful for is you, my readers. Thank you for taking time each week to read my blog and I hope I’m able to provide you with tips that make your work-day a little easier.

This week, I am re-posting a reader favorite, 5 Tips for Efficient Patient Check Out. This post provides tips on how to use Dentrix for a smoother patient check out, as well as ways to use this time as an opportunity to remind patients to schedule their next appointment.

Happy Thanksgiving!


Charlotte Skaggs, Certified Dentrix Trainer

Charlotte Skaggs is the founder of Vector Dental Consulting LLC, a practice management firm focused on taking offices to the next level. Charlotte co-owned and managed a successful dental practice with her husband for 17 years. She has a unique approach to consulting based on the perspective of a practice owner. Charlotte has been using Dentrix for almost 20 years and is a certified Dentrix trainer. Contact Charlotte at vectordentalconsulting@gmail.com.

Utilizing Treatment Plan Reminder Letters

Last month, I wrote a blog about how to find patients with outstanding treatment that have remaining insurance benefits. It’s important to contact those patients to get them to schedule their outstanding treatment because not only can it increase your practice’s production, but it’s also a good service to your patients to help them track of and use their insurance benefits. Scheduling treatment helps your patients to get the quality dental care need they need while taking advantage of their outstanding insurance benefits.

The best tool to use in Dentrix to create a report of patients with outstanding treatment and remaining insurance is the Treatment Manager. I like to use the Treatment Manager to contact these patients by phone because you can easily log correspondence in the Office Journal directly from the Treatment Manager. However, if you are unable to reach patients by phone, you can send them a letter which includes remaining insurance benefit information. Sending a letter is another way to communicate important information about remaining insurance benefits to your patients.

When sending letters to groups of patients based on customized criteria, I recommend using Letters and Custom Lists in the Office Manager. Letters and Custom Lists allows you to create letters or lists of patients meeting a selected criterion. A good letter to use for patients who have outstanding treatment plans and remaining insurance benefits is the Treatment Plan Reminder letter which is a template in Letters and Custom Lists. To find this letter template, open the Office Manager, click the Letters & Custom Lists menu item and then click Misc. Highlight Treatment Plan Reminder from the list of letters, and click Edit.

From the Letter or Custom List Setup screen, you can set a filter to select a range of remaining insurance benefits. For example, you may want to set the Dental Ins. filter to include patients with remaining benefits of $500-$1500. You can set the Procedures filter to include a particular procedure code, a procedure code range, or to search for all procedure codes. Within the Procedures filter, you can also set a date range for the treatment planned procedures. I would recommend selecting a date range for this calendar year to send letters to all patients with treatment planned procedures in 2019.

Once you’ve set all the filters you need, click OK and create your letters. When generating the letters, I would recommend selecting the option for Dentrix to automatically create an Office Journal entry for these letters. This saves you from having to make manual entries in the Office Journal to say that you sent a letter to the patient.

Send these letters to your patients to prompt them to call for an appointment for their outstanding treatment plans. This can help your office to keep a consistently full schedule and meet your production goals. It’s also beneficial for patients as you are helping them to make the most of their dental insurance benefits.

If you have questions about this topic, please e-mail me vectordentalconsulting@gmail.com.


Charlotte Skaggs, Certified Dentrix Trainer

Charlotte Skaggs is the founder of Vector Dental Consulting LLC, a practice management firm focused on taking offices to the next level. Charlotte co-owned and managed a successful dental practice with her husband for 17 years. She has a unique approach to consulting based on the perspective of a practice owner. Charlotte has been using Dentrix for almost 20 years and is a certified Dentrix trainer. Contact Charlotte at vectordentalconsulting@gmail.com.

Dentrix Tools for Accurate Insurance Estimates

A few weeks ago, I wrote a blog about customizing coverage tables in Dentrix and how you can use them to more accurately estimate patient out-of-pocket expenses. Here are some additional tools in Dentrix you can use to provide your patients with the most accurate estimate of what their insurance is expected to pay.

Payment Table

The Payment Table in Dentrix allows you to enter a dollar amount that an insurance company will pay for a particular procedure code. This can be very beneficial in the case of an alternate benefit, like when an insurance company provides an alternate benefit for a posterior composite filling. 

When making changes to the Payment Table or the Coverage Table, it’s important to remember that changes made will affect all the patients covered under that insurance group plan. This can be a great tool because as you update the Payment Table for one patient, you can provide an even more accurate estimate for the next patient covered under that insurance plan that has the same procedure. 

You can enter amounts into the Payment Table in the dental insurance portion of the Family File, but I find the most efficient way to enter these amounts is when posting an insurance payment, by clicking Enter Payment, and then selecting the Itemize by Procedure option.

Whether you post an insurance payment through an individual claim or if you use the Batch Dental Insurance Payment feature, you have the option to update the Payment Table. 

The majority of the time, I recommend you update the payment table so Dentrix estimates insurance payments more accurately in the future for all patients with this dental insurance group plan. Here are the instances in which I would not recommend updating the payment table:

• A procedure wasn't covered due to a patient's frequency limitations
• A procedure wasn't covered due to the patient needing to meet their deductible
• A procedure wasn't covered due to an age limitation
• A procedure was partially covered (or not covered) due to a patient meeting their annual insurance maximum

Deductibles

Dentrix gives you an option to enter the amount a patient has used of their annual maximum, if they have met their deductible outside of your office. I find this to be a great tool, especially as we approach the end of the year when many patients may have used a significant portion of their annual maximum. If a patient has used some of their maximum at a specialty office, for example if you referred them to an endodontist for a root canal, it is important for Dentrix to calculate the amount of insurance used at the specialist’s office in the treatment plans you create in your office.

You can the features in Dentrix to accurately calculate insurance and patient portions of procedures. Using the Payment Table, entering maximums and deductibles used, and customizing Coverage Tables can help you to provide your patients with the most accurate estimates. This can result in maintaining healthier accounts receivables by allowing you to collect accurately from patients at the time of service. 

If you have questions on this topic or others, please e-mail me at vectordentalconsulting@gmail.com.


Charlotte Skaggs, Certified Dentrix Trainer

Charlotte Skaggs is the founder of Vector Dental Consulting LLC, a practice management firm focused on taking offices to the next level. Charlotte co-owned and managed a successful dental practice with her husband for 17 years. She has a unique approach to consulting based on the perspective of a practice owner. Charlotte has been using Dentrix for almost 20 years and is a certified Dentrix trainer. Contact Charlotte at vectordentalconsulting@gmail.com.

Additional Practice Analysis Reports - What Information Do They Provide?

In last week’s blog post I wrote about the Production Summary report, one of the Practice Analysis reports in the Dentrix Office Manager. This week, I would like to talk about the other Practice Analysis reports, and how they can be beneficial.

Payment Summary

You can use the Payment Summary report to analyze what type of payments are being made to your office based on the Payment Types you have set up in Dentrix. This could be beneficial information for your practice’s accountant at the end of the year. It can also help you to determine what percentage of payments are being made by patients and what percentage are being paid by insurance.

To generate the Payment Summary, open the Office Manager > Analysis > Practice > Reports.
Include all providers and all billing types. Select a date range (for example 01/01/2019-11/05/2019) and check the Payment Summary box. The report will give a total amount for each payment type, the  average payment amount, and the percentage of your total office collections each payment type represents.

Adjustment Summary

The Adjustment Summary report can provide you with valuable information regarding adjustments to payments. You can evaluate what type of adjustments have been made for a selected date range. The report will give a total amount for each adjustment type, the average adjustment amount, and the percentage that each adjustment type contributes to of the practice’s total adjustments. 

To generate the Adjustment Summary, open the Office Manager > Analysis > Practice > Reports.

Include all providers and all billing types. Select a date range and check the Adjustment Summary box. You could use this information to evaluate adjustment types. For example, is the office giving too many professional courtesy adjustments? Being able to see the quantity of each adjustment type, and the collections dollars they represent can help you to make important decisions for your practice.

Patient Summary

The Patient Summary report provides you with a snapshot of your patient population. There are other reports in Dentrix that can provide more detailed information, but the Patient Summary is a nice at-a-glance summary. It provides you with the total of active patients, how many are male, female, insured, etc. as well as some family information. It’s important to note that on this report an active patient is dictated by their status in the Family File and not based on their last visit date. 

To generate the Patient Summary, open the Office Manager > Analysis > Practice > Reports and check the Patient Summary box.

The Analysis Reports in the Practice Analysis can provide you with valuable information regarding your practice. I encourage you to become familiar with them, as they may help you to make important decisions for your practice. If you have questions, please contact me at vectordentalconsulting@gmail.com.


Charlotte Skaggs, Certified Dentrix Trainer

Charlotte Skaggs is the founder of Vector Dental Consulting LLC, a practice management firm focused on taking offices to the next level. Charlotte co-owned and managed a successful dental practice with her husband for 17 years. She has a unique approach to consulting based on the perspective of a practice owner. Charlotte has been using Dentrix for almost 20 years and is a certified Dentrix trainer. Contact Charlotte at vectordentalconsulting@gmail.com.