Dealing with primary and secondary insurance can be confusing when the office is a participating provider for both plans. Errors are routinely made when entering insurance payments in this situation. Recently Christine Taxin, shared an easy to understand process that I'm confident will be helpful for many practices.

1. When filing Primary and Secondary insurance, you MUST bill your full fee on the patient's ledger.
   
   
2. Submit Primary claim and Secondary Claims.
   
   
3. The patient is responsible only for the fee up to the lower of the two insurances. 

• • For example, if the fee for a crown is $700 from one insurance company and $800 from the other, then the patient is responsible for his/her portion only up to the lower fee of $700. If the office receives $700 or more from both insurances, then the patient owes nothing.
    
    
  • The office is ALLOWED to collect up to their office fee.
    
    
  • If the office receives more than their office fee, they must refund to the insurance company.
    
    
  • The patient does not collect any portion of the fee received by the office.

If you find that your patients with secondary insurance often have a large credit balance, you need to make sure your team is properly trained on this topic. Dental Insurance Navigator is an online program provides team training in all areas of insurance.

How many times have you had that happen in your practice or even when you are at your own doctor appointment? No, not “the” finger, but the “wait one minute” finger when a patient walks in for their appointment and the front desk person is on phone. They are not meaning to be rude or disrespectful; they are simply trying to complete much needed tasks. Unfortunately, to a patient who is standing in front of them it sends a signal that they are not the first priority of the practice.
 
When I talk to people about using a virtual assistant for their dental practice, they think that the purpose is to contact the insurance company to make sure claims are paid and insurance benefit information is up-to-date. Although that is true, the real BENEFIT of using a virtual assistant to allow your team to focus on your patients and making them feel like they are always the first priority.
 
Does the dentist in your practice answer the phone? Of course not, because it is not the highest and best use of their time. The same principle applies to your front desk team member contacting insurance companies. The most valuable use of a front office team member’s time is spent greeting patients, answering patient phone calls, filling the schedule, presenting treatment and financial arrangements. They are the first and last person that your patients communicate with at every visit. Ensuring that from when the patient walks in the door until they walk out, they have an amazing experience.
 
Delegating your insurance tasks to a virtual assistant provides your team the support they need to focus their attention where it needs to be, on your patient, not on the insurance company.

In the dental industry there are many services available to help make the administrative side of running a dental practice easier. One of the services that I recommend all practices use is an automated eligibility service. 
 
This type of service can check the eligibility of patients, and sometimes provide a full breakdown of benefits, with click of a button. While not every insurance company participates, most of the big ones do. This will save your team a lot of time on the phone with insurance companies, and typically for just a low, flat monthly fee.
 
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When evaluating eligibility services, an important differentiating factor to look for is ease-of-use. The benefit of this type of service is efficiency, so make sure you have the ability to check an entire days’ worth of patients with the click of a button.  If you have to click on every patient each day it is not as efficient.
 
My recommendation is that you have the eligibility system check patients a week in advance of their appointment. This provides the dental team time to contact patients if needed before their appointment.
I strongly believe that the best thing that practices can do is put these type of automated systems in place. This allows the team to focus on more important tasks and most important, their patients.
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Virtual Dental Office is now providing an eligibility service for a low monthly fee of $29.95. To learn more about it contact Jennifer Schultz at jennifer@virtualdentaloffice.net or 563-582-4762.

It’s that time of year.  Kids are back in the school. The air is getting cooler (at least if you live in the Midwest like me).  That means the year will quickly be coming to a close, and most of your patients will have dental benefits that will be renewing on January 1.

Everyone is concerned about money, especially when it comes to dental treatments. Your patients are already paying for the benefits, and if they don’t use it they will lose it.  In addition, the most conservative treatment is to treat decay early and every year. So if a patient has work to be done, it is in their best interest to have a little done each year to stay on top of their oral health and take complete advantage of their benefits.

This provides dental practices the perfect opportunity to reach out to patients who have outstanding treatment. Best practice is for dental practices to run their outstanding treatment reports this time of the year and contact the patients to schedule their procedures before their benefits expire.

Another proactive way to finish the year strong is to review your patient’s remaining benefits for the year, as well as outstanding treatment prior to all dental hygiene appointments. Many times the patient doesn’t realize the benefits they still have available to them before their policy renews in January, and having this information can help treatment acceptance.

The best value for the patient is to utilize all of their insurance benefits every year.  As a dental professional you are obligated to inform your patients of the treatment needed to become or stay healthy. These last few months of the year provide the perfect opportunity for a win-win for your patients and your practice.