For the insurance bulldog in the office

Being a Financial Coordinator in a dental practice is a huge responsibility. It requires you to wear many hats including collection call expert, insurance bulldog, treatment plan closer, and bonus plan motivator. What I love about Dentrix is that you can manage all these responsibilities within your practice management software. However, the one task that I see get pushed to the side the most is managing the insurance money.  

Many offices reach out to me, asking me to help them use Dentrix to its fullest potential … and one of the reports I always check during my assessment is the Insurance Aging Report. This report is one of the best tools available for you to check on past due insurance claims and it should be part of your regular weekly management routine. The only unfortunate thing about this report is that you have to print it … and you know how I feel about paper reports (yuk!).

Here are some best practice tips for you to streamline the process of working this report:

• If the patient has dual insurance and the primary pays in full, make sure you create the secondary and then pay it off with a $0 payment immediately. This will ensure that the secondary claim doesn’t sit on your Insurance Aging Report as an open claim.
• When you need to check on a past due claim, make sure you are documenting all information or phone conversations in the claim status note box. These notes will print on your Insurance Aging Report for easy follow-up. (image here)
• If an insurance payment was sent to the patient, make sure you apply a $0 payment on the claim to close it out and make a note in the claim status notes box.
• If you are using the eCentral Insurance Eligibility feature, you also have access to electronic claim status and the archive of your transmission reports. When you have a DCN (Document Control Number) from the insurance company that they have received the claim, copy and paste this number in the claim status notes. This way, when you are calling on a past due claim, you have that DCN ready and this could prevent you from having to resubmit the claim.

Click below for more blog posts related to the Financial Coordinator’s job description:

Show Me the Money!
Holes in your doctors schedule?
Resubmitting a partial EOB . . . no problem!