File claims accurately and completely to get them paid as quickly as possible and maintain healthy cash flow.
If your practice accepts the assignment of benefits from your patients’ dental insurance, it’s critical to file claims in a timely manner and maintain an efficient follow-up system for those claims in order to keep a healthy cash flow. There are several tools in Dentrix that you can use to help you file claims that contain all the necessary information. That way claims are paid the first time they are filed without the insurance company requesting additional information, which can cause costly delays in claim payments.
One helpful tool is Automatic eClaims Attachments. This useful feature automatically includes required eClaim attachments for certain procedures and warns you if the required attachments can’t be found. This helps to solve the problem of forgetting to attach necessary information that the insurance may require to pay a claim, for example an X-ray or a narrative.
To help you out, by default Dentrix comes loaded with several common requirements for procedure codes for each insurance company, but you can also add your own custom requirements for procedure codes as you learn which information insurance companies are asking for.
With Automatic eClaims Attachments, if an insurance company requires an X-ray and a narrative for a D2940 crown code, Dentrix will recognize that requirement based on the procedure code and, if available, automatically add the needed attachments to the claim for you. This ensures that claims will not be sent without the necessary documentation and therefore paid in a timely manner.
You can keep track of where claims are in the payment process by generating an Insurance Aging Report. The Insurance Aging Report allows you to view which claims are current and which are over 30 60, or 90 days. Information on the report is listed first by insurance carrier, and then by patient. You can also easily see the date that claims were sent. Ideally no claim should be over 60 days past due, so you can focus on those accounts first. The Insurance Aging Report should be generated and worked through on a regular basis, at least monthly or perhaps more frequently based on the number of outstanding claims you have in your office. Contact each carrier to follow up on what may be causing the delay in payment.
After generating the Insurance Aging Report and contacting the insurance company to follow up on claims, use the Claim Status Notes to record the status of each claim. For example, if a claim is pending or requires additional information, update the claims status note with relevant information so everyone in the office is aware of what’s happening with the claim and why it hasn’t been paid yet. Additionally, when you generate the Insurance Aging Report you have the option to view the claim status notes on the report. This is beneficial because you can easily see if you just checked on the status of an insurance claim and, if so, immediately move on to the next claim on the list.
Insurance payments make up a large portion of the accounts receivable for many dental practices, so it’s important to file claims accurately and completely to get them paid as quickly as possible and maintain healthy cash flow. Try using these features in Dentrix to file insurance claims with all the necessary attachments and follow up on outstanding claims regularly.
Learn More
For additional information, read the following :
- Add Required Attachments to Claims Automatically
- Find the Information You Need on the Insurance Aging Report
- Claim Status Notes
By Charlotte Skaggs
Certified Dentrix Trainer and The Dentrix Office Manager columnist
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 over 20 years and is a certified Dentrix trainer. Contact Charlotte at vectordentalconsulting@gmail.com.
