Jennifer Schultz Blog

New Year, New Benefits

12/11/2015

With the New Year upon us, many of your patients’ insurance benefits will be changing. That means a significant time investment for your team to get the new insurance information and update your software.

Patients have come to expect that their dentist understand their insurance. By providing them with an estimate of their benefits in office, it helps them feel more comfortable moving forward with treatment. This is why is it is so important to have the most up-to-date benefits readily available.

This can be time consuming for the front desk team, but is a worthwhile investment. For practices that don’t have the capacity to take this on, you may want to consider outsourcing. When outsourcing, remember that the information is best utilized when it is entered back into your software.

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Don’t Leave Your Practice Open For Disaster

7/14/2015

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In this day and age most people are inundated with passwords. Email, banking, shopping, social media…everything we do online requires a password to keep our information private and safe. While many times it is a pain to keep track of all of them (especially when they insist it be a complex password with caps, numbers and symbols), without them we leave ourselves vulnerable to criminals.

A few years ago I had my cell phone stolen. I learned afterward that if I had a password on the phone, I would have been able to erase all of the information on it remotely and make it useless for the person who stole it. Unfortunately, I had to go into every account that I had an app for and change the password to protect my private information. After that incident I put a password on my new phone. So now every time I use it I have to put in a four-digit code. While it was very inconvenient at first, now it is just second nature and I don’t even think about it.

I think of this story every time I hear of a dental practice that doesn’t have a password on their practice management software. The difference is that if their practice gets broken into, there are much heavier consequences. Their dental patients’ personal information is at risk, including social security numbers in many instances. Not only is this a violation of the HIPAA security rule, but it’s also not a phone call that you want to make to ALL of your patients.

The moral of the story is make sure your dental practice software is password protected. It might be a difficult transition at first, but it won’t take long before it is second nature for the team. As a dental practice owner there really isn’t any other choice, protecting your patient’s private information should be top priority.

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Garbage In, Garbage Out

6/29/2015

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Your dental practice software has many capabilities that can make your practice run smoother and more efficiently, but only if you play by their rules. “Garbage in, garbage out” is a common phrase that means that even with a state-of-the-art computer/software system, if you aren’t mindful of what information you put in and where you put it, you’re not going to get the best information out of it.

I believe that one of the most helpful features of dental practice management software systems is the ability to manage insurance information. Insurance can be very complicated, but your practice software can make it less complicated by helping you organize the insurance plans of your patients.

Unfortunately, in many practices the insurance aspect of the software ends up being in complete disarray. Often every time a patient is entered into the software a new insurance plan is created. This creates a few issues.

More Time Consuming. There are a lot of details that need to be entered for each dental insurance policy, so retyping it every time can be time consuming and inefficient.

Information Overload. It creates a very large, unorganized database within your practice software, which makes it hard to find the information you are looking for.

Potential for Error. It increases the potential for data entry error. This can lead to unhappy patients, if they are provided the wrong information on what services their dental insurance covers.

When insurance information is entered correctly, you only need to input the details of a dental insurance plan once, then that plan will be applied to all of your patients under that group. When entering a new patient insurance plan, first start by searching the group number to see if it already exists in the system. If it is already there you can connect that patient with the existing plan. This will not only save time, but it will also help streamline the information.

Your practice software can be one of the best tools you have available to keep your office running in a smooth and efficient manner. Make sure your team is taking the time upfront to understand how to best utilize the software to get the best end result.

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New Year, New Benefits

Don’t Leave Your Practice Open For Disaster

Garbage In, Garbage Out

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