Dental insurance benefits are the thorn in our side every day. Checking benefits, eligibility and maximums for our patients is a great benefit … and it also sucks the life out of us to the point where we don’t have time for other things during
the day. There needs to be a balance between it being a customer service task and a hand-holding task. The insurance benefits belong to the patient. They do not belong to the practice and we need to put the verbal skills in place to help our patients understand this.One thing I have been doing with my practices is teaching them to transfer that ownership back to the patient in a way that is beneficial to the patient and not too time-consuming for the practice. The easiest, most efficient way I have found is using the eCentral Insurance Eligibility feature inside of your Dentrix software. Have you seen the “E” all over inside of your Dentrix software and wondered what it does? CLICK HERE to learn how eCentral Insurance Manager works. Let me share with you some of my tips in using this amazing tool.
What has worked really well for many offices is to print a copy of the electronic benefits for the patient and then send a copy to the patient’s Document Center for your reference. Now, how you hand off the information to the patient makes a big impact on how much you will be babysitting in the future. So here are some of my best tips . . .
- When you print out the eligibility benefits from eCentral for the patient, I would highlight a few key pieces of information (insurance company phone number, maximum and coverage percentages).
- Hand the patient the printed copy of his or her benefits and say something like, “I took the liberty of checking on your dental benefits for you and here is what we received from your plan. Notice I have highlighted some of the important things about your plan. One thing I want to point out is that if there is a procedure you need that is not on this print out, then we don’t know how much your insurance company will pay so we estimate zero.”
- Let patients know if they would like more details about their plan, you highlighted the insurance company’s phone number for them.
Using eCentral Insurance Eligibility not only as a tool for your practice efficiency but also using it as a resource for your patient will help you to strengthen your relationships with your patients and they will trust you more. Trust will help build your practice and grow your referrals.
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Checking insurance benefits will suck the life out of you unless you change your system
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