Hassle-Free Insurance Claims. Are you Ready?

At Dentrix Ascend, we are committed to providing your practice with worry-free cloud-based dental software. And worry-free is exactly how patient insurance should be as well.

Checking patient eligibility, tracking and processing patient insurance claims and receiving insurance payments on time are time-consuming hassles for many dental practices—but they don’t have to be for yours. Dentrix Ascend insurance features can help make the claims process easier on your staff. Read on to get a few important tips.

Posting Insurance Payments

To enter a patient’s insurance payment, first select the desired patient in the ledger, click the payment button and then select the payment type. In this case, you should select one of the two insurance choices from the drop-down menu.

Next, enter the payment details, such as check number, bank or branch number and amount. Then, from the claim drop-down list, select the claim payment. Click the Partial Payment button to keep the claim open to receive the rest of the payment at a later date.

Dentrix Ascend applies the payment to each procedure on the claim—on a first-in, first-out basis—which you will see under the applied column on the right-hand side of your screen. If necessary, you can also manually change the applied amount.

Because the provider is attached to each of the patient’s procedures, the payment is also automatically applied to them, helping you more easily track provider production and collections.

Make sure you enter any deductibles applied to the patient’s claim. The four choices you can enter are: major, preventive, basic and ortho.

Once you’ve finished entering amounts and other information, double-check that everything is correct, then click Save on the bottom left to post the insurance payment.

Processing Insurance Claims

To create an insurance claim, after you’ve posted the procedures in the patient’s ledger, click the Patient Walkout button on the upper right side of the screen. A new screen will appear, and you’ll see the Create Claims tab. Click the Create Claims button on the bottom left-hand side.

A claim will be created automatically based on the service date, and any procedures completed on the same date will appear on the same insurance claim.

Based on your preference, you can create multiple claims at the same time. Click the Home button located in the upper left corner of your screen, and then click Create Claims. You’ll be taken to the Create Claims page, which displays any procedures not currently attached to a claim for patients with insurance coverage.

To create claims, click the Create Claims button. Side note—insurance claims aren’t automatically sent after being created. This gives you time to add any needed information to a claim before you send it, such as attaching an X-ray.

To find insurance claims that have been created but not sent yet, click the Home button and then Unsent Claims under the Insurance tab. To attach an item to a claim, click the claim, click the Attachments tab, click the Add from Document Manager button, check the items you wish to attach and then click Save. After you finish adding items to the claim, click Save again.

To send your claims, from the Unsent Claims page, click the checkbox for each claim you want to send and then click Send Selected Claims.

In some cases, insurance claims are rejected. To find any rejected claims, click the Home button and then click Sent Claims under the Insurance tab. To correct any errors, click on the rejected claim, fix the errors and then click Resubmit.

Attaching Insurance to Patients

In Dentrix Ascend, you can attach a patient’s dental and medical insurance information to their records.

To attach insurance information to a patient, you have two options. One way is going to the patient’s overview page and clicking the Add button in the insurance box. Another way is clicking the Add Plan button from the patient’s insurance information page.

The Add Plan window that appears after following either of the two options shows you the options for entering patient insurance information.

From this page, specify the subscriber’s name. Then you can fill in the rest of the information, such as the insurance plan, subscriber ID number, relation to subscriber, coverage type and coverage period.

Check the boxes next to Release of Information and Assignment of Benefits if you want your office to receive the payment from the insurance company. If the boxes are left unchecked, the patient will receive the insurance payment.

Lastly, double-check that all fields show the correct information and click Save.