With today’s ever-changing dental insurance industry, employers are moving benefits from one company to another all the time. As you may know from my previous blog posts, I am a huge fan of using fee schedules in Dentrix to help your team provide accurate treatment plan estimates, collect better at the time of service and send out billing statements in real time. If you are using fee schedules and your practice is contracted with several reduced fee dental plans, you will want to have a plan in place to making sure your patients’ treatment plan fees are as accurate as possible.

We all know that patients sometimes drag their feet about accepting treatment and go out and purchase that Coach handbag instead . . . because they had to have it! So when you are following up on the unscheduled treatment or the patient is coming in again for his or her 6-month recare visit, I would recommend updating the treatment plan fees so that you are always quoting the most up-to-date fees.

It is super simple and worth the two clicks it takes to do it. My new rule of thumb is that if the procedures were not treatment planned today, then update it. The quickest way to do it is from the appointment book (since you probably already have that open anyway). Single click on the patient appointment and click on the Treatment Planner icon or right click on the appointment and select Treatment Planner. Then click on the Update Fees icon and click on Update. That’s it.

Now you can move ahead with printing, signing, presenting, scanning and saving the patient treatment plan as you normally would and knowing you have prepared the most up-to-date treatment plan possible.