Use options in the Treatment Manager to filter by remaining insurance benefits to find and contact patients with outstanding benefits at the end of the year.
As the end of the year quickly approaches, it’s important to schedule your patients with outstanding treatment in order to maximize their annual insurance benefits. This helps your practice because you can increase your office production, and it also helps your patients because maximizing their dental insurance benefits is financially beneficial for them.
Dentrix has a great tool that you can use to generate a list of patients who have outstanding treatment plans and remaining insurance benefits: the Treatment Manager. You can open the Treatment Manager from either the Appointment Book or the Treatment Planner.
There are many options to choose from when generating the Treatment Manager that you can use to build a custom list of patients you want to focus on. You can use filters such as Billing Types, specific procedure codes or range of procedure codes, or limit your search to patients who have an appointment on the Unscheduled List.
When I’m generating the Treatment Manager to schedule patients at the end of the year to maximize their insurance benefits, I use the following options to filter my patient list:
- Treatment Plan Date – I like to focus on patients with procedures treatment planned within the last six months. If it has been longer than that since the treatment was diagnosed, the patient may have decided not to proceed, or the treatment plan may have changed, and the patient may require another exam with the doctor.
- Remaining Insurance Benefits – Select patients with a minimum amount of outstanding insurance benefits. I usually use the amount $500 because that is a significant amount of insurance benefits to use before the benefits expire.
- Benefit Renewal – Select January for the benefit renewal month in order to generate the Treatment Manager for patients whose insurance plan renews each calendar year.
Once you have selected these and other filters to generate your custom patient list, you can then choose what type of information displays for each patient on the list by selecting Show Columns.
I like to be sure and show the patient’s phone number because it makes it easy to contact the patient directly from the list. Select the other information you want from the Available Columns list and add them to the Show these columns in this order list.
The Treatment Manager may take some time to generate. Remember that Dentrix is filtering your database and searching for patients that meet the criteria you specified. Once the list has generated, use the Treatment Manager to contact patients and get them scheduled before their insurance benefits expire.
My favorite part of the Treatment Manager is that you can select a patient from the list and then select an icon from the toolbar to open another Dentrix module for the patient. For example, this can be very convenient when calling patients to schedule because you have direct access to the Office Journal where you can make notes regarding contacting the patient, or quickly access the Patient Chart to answer any clinical questions the patient may have about their treatment.
The Treatment Manager is a great tool to use to contact patients with outstanding treatment plans. And the options to filter by remaining insurance benefits make it an ideal tool to use to contact patients with outstanding benefits at the end of the year.
Learn More
For additional information, read the following :
- Mining for Gold: Three Reports for Searching Out Unscheduled Treatment
- How to Handle Patients with Unscheduled Treatment
- Helping Patients Own Their Insurance Benefits
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.
