Don’t you just love this time of year . . . tax season!  Patients are calling in asking for a printout of

• Change the Beginning Balance Forward date to the beginning of the year reported and the Statement Date to the end of the report year
• Select the Guarantor family
• Set the Minimum Balance to Bill to 0
• Uncheck all options
• Clear out the Statement Message
• Uncheck Save as Default

Do you have a new associate in your practice and not quite sure how to make sure the provider settings are correct? Let me help.

• The first thing you will set up is the provider ID in the Practice Resource Setup. This is where you will enter the NPI, Tax ID, DEA and provider license number. The doctor’s personal (Type I NPI) number will go here and the office tax ID number.
• After you have the provider setup finished, then double check that the claim is set up the way you want it. The claim setup in located in the Practice Defaults, go to the Office Manager > Maintenance > Practice Setup > Practice Defaults. This is where you want to double check that the Billing/Pay To Provider and the Rendering/Treating Provider is set up the way you want it. The information here makes up the bottom two boxes on your insurance claim form and the insurance companies use this information to know who to send the check to and if the rendering provider is a contracted provider.
• Depending on how your associate is being paid may prompt you to double check your default payment allocation setup. Go to the Office Manager > Maintenance > Practice Setup > Preferences and look in the upper left corner of this window to see how it is set up now. There are four choices and you can read a blog I wrote recently about these options by CLICKING HERE. If your new associate is being paid on collections, this is going to be extremely important.

January is right around the corner and that means we are coming up on Year End.  I get asked a lot of questions about what the process is this time of year.  Is there a special report I should run?  Is there anything I need to know about running Year End?  The fact is there is nothing different to running Year End as there is to running Month End. 

• It will age your account balances.  This will move your current balance into 30 days, 30 days into 60 and so on.  On many reports, including the Provider A/R Totals report, it will move your ending accounts receivable balance into the beginning balance for the new month.
• Your ledger for that month will now be placed into history, which means that you cannot edit or delete anything on the patient’s ledger.  You will need to make an adjustment if you want to fix something on the ledger.
• The Month End will lock up any clinical notes that have not been signed so there can be no editing to your clinical documentation.  If you need to change a clinical note, you can do an addendum. 
• It will reset any insurance benefit used back to zero if the insurance plan is scheduled to renew.  This becomes very important for your December Month End because so many plans renew in January. 

1. Super Efficient with Templates - For all the Dentrix users, I want to give you some help when it comes to building templates, which can be a huge time-saver in your office. Here are some of my favorite template tips.
2. How to Read Your Clinical Notes - With more offices every day transitioning from paper charts to electronic charting, we need to find the most efficient ways to not only document in the clinical record and view the information without having to click all over the place.
3. Top Five Reports Every Doctor Should Read - I received an e-mail from a doctor the other day who had a situation that needed attention. Her clinical team had started posting procedures in the patient chart and had accidentally posted a root canal as “complete” rather than “existing.”

1. What is the Status of the Lab Case?  Do any of these lab-related scenarios ever happen in your office?
2. How to Chart a Supernumerary Tooth - Our patients walk in with some unusual situations, but one of the more common situations I see is an extra tooth or Supernumerary Tooth. 
3. Health History Update, being prepared for anything - If your patient had a medical emergency and your team had to call 911, how long would it take you to pull up his or her most current medical history? 

1. Oops, the wrong tooth was removed from the chart - Have you had a patient in your chair for his or her 6-month checkup and, while you are perio charting, you notice that the wrong tooth is missing. 
2. Hygienists, you are one of the primary educators in the practice - We all know that research shows the systemic links between oral health and the rest of the body, especially the relationship between periodontal disease, cardiovascular disease, diabetes and respiratory disease.
3. Where do I Make Notes - Do you ever find yourself searching endlessly for the patient’s most recent list of medications? What if the doctor wants to know if the patient has any allergies before the anesthetic is administered?

1. Can you write me an excuse note for school?
2. Get Creative with your ASAP List - I was working with an office recently and they have a program specifically for patients who do not pre-appoint. These patients are mostly retired and have very flexible schedules. 
3. Are you a Stickler for Accurate Numbers - How often does a patient call and ask, “What is my balance?” If it is a single patient ledger, the answer is relatively simple. But what if a mother of five calls and asks for each of her kid’s balances? 

• 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.

• Fig 1 shows how you can choose a Case Status. You can select all the cases you have marked as accepted and get a call list from this selection. If you have been reading my blog for a while, you know how much I love the Treatment Manager. However, it does not have this filter (which I think is a great tool).
• Fig 2 shows how you can select a Case Severity. If you are marking your cases as Immediate, Eventual or Optional, then you can filter your report by one of these choices.

• This report only shows positive accounts receivable so if you are trying to compare it to an Aging Report or the Practice Analysis snapshot, you will not get the same numbers. The Aging Report can be filtered to show all balances, positive balances or credits, and, if you have a lot of credit balances, these two reports could show very different bottom line numbers.
• The Collection Manager can be filtered down a lot to give you a very specific report or a very broad report and, depending on how you are matching it up to another A/R report, if you don’t select the same parameters, you will get different numbers.

• This snapshot is affected by month end so, depending on if you are up to date with month end, will determine how accurate this number is and if it will match up to any other A/R report.
• This Analysis snapshot cannot be filtered by billing type … so if you have balances in billing types like “Sent to Collection,” this will affect this number.
• This report is only run by Entry Date (you cannot change this). If you are running any of the other A/R reports by Procedure Date, then you will get different numbers.

• Did you select the same providers?
• Did you select the same billing types?
• Did you choose Entry Date or Procedure Date?
• What aging category did you select?
• Are you selecting the same date range or ending date?
• Were there any other boxes that were checked that might have filtered out a particular patient from one report over another? In the first paragraph, I had an office questioning why a particular patient did not show up on the Collection Manager Report. It was because she had checked “If not billed since” on the filters so this particular patient had been excluded.

• ·        Provider
• Split by Provider will separate out the patient payment to pay off each producing provider. Your insurance claims already do this … so why not split the personal payments as well?
• To Patients Primary Provider will apply the entire personal payment to the patient’s primary provider (PROV1 on family file) regardless of who the producing provider is. This decision will give too much collections to one provider and, if you run a Provider A/R report, the payments and accounts receivable will be lopsided.
• ·        Patient
•  Family account will post the entire payment to the guarantor. The result of doing this will be an accurate family balance, but incorrect patient balances.
• Current patient will post the personal payment only to the patient ledger you are logged onto currently.
• Split by Family Members is a new feature with G6. It allows you to take one payment and distribute it out to multiple family members with one step. The result of doing this will be more accurate patient balances because it looks across the entire family account for patients with a balance. PLEASE NOTE: if you have archived a patient with a balance and you are using this new feature, it will pull that patient out of archive to apply a payment.
• ·Split Method
• Percentage Payments will equally distribute the patient payment between any providers who has a balance.
• FIFO (first in first out) will pay off the oldest provider balance first.
• Guarantor Estimate is always my first choice. What this allocation method will do is look at any current treatment with an insurance claim pending and allocate the patient payment depending on the insurance estimate. After it has allocated the payment to the estimated patient portion of the claim, it will revert to FIFO.
• Equal payments is very similar to the percentage payments method but will just split the payment into equal payments instead of a percentage.

The toolbars on the Patient Chart have a drop down menu where you can add and remove items by checking and unchecking. I would recommend setting all the toolbars exactly the same in every treatment room because when the doctor, assistant, or hygienist has to go work in a different room, you want it to look the same. Here are a few icons you could remove (not should, but could) from the toolbars on the Patient Chart. If you decide to remove more than what I have listed, be my guest.

•  DxWeb – In my last blog, you learned that this runs on only one computer (usually a front office computer) so there is no need for it in the back.
• DentriXlink – Unless you are bridging a piece of technology (imaging, CT scan, etc) with Dentrix, you will not use this icon in the back.
• QuickLetters – Most clinical room computers are not equipped with Microsoft Word so this will not work without Word.
• Send Message – Most clinical room computers are not equipped with Microsoft Outlook so this will not work without using Outlook. Also, you would want to send out any protected patient information using a secure email server.
• Treatment Manager – This icon will pull up a report on unscheduled treatment. Since this is a managerial report and will require a phone to be handy so you can call the patient, this icon will typically not be used in the clinical room.
• Marketplace – Even though the Marketplace has some awesome tools that work with your Dentrix software, I hope that the clinical team members are not shopping while they are seeing patients. This can be removed from the clinical room computers.

• If you are using Perfect Day Scheduling in your practice, then I would make sure that it is turned on the clinical room computers so you can see all the blocks but then remove this icon off the appointment book. I have seen Perfect Day Scheduling get accidentally turned off and then all the blocks disappear off the schedule.
• The DxWeb icon can be removed from the computers where it does not run every day.
• The DentriXlink can be removed from the administrative modules if you want.

• Change the Beginning Balance Forward date to the beginning of the year reported and the Statement Date to the end of the report year
• Select the Guarantor family
• Set the Minimum Balance to Bill to 0
• Uncheck all options
• Clear out the Statement Message
• Uncheck Save as Default

Every year the ADA updates codes, removes old codes and adds new codes to the CDT code set.  Watch this video put out by Henry Schein so you can successfully update your Dentrix software.

Three months left in 2015,  this is your year to become the best you can be in your career.  Show off your skills and brag about your accomplishments. 

Challenge yourself to become a Dentrix master.  Join me on the Wall of Fame as I post up your accomplishments on my blog all throughout 2015.   CLICK HERE to start your success.

Watch my video to hear all the details . . .