When working in a busy dental practice, it’s helpful to find ways to carry out certain day-to-day processes in a more streamlined manner. Patients’ acceptance of proposed dental treatment plans is a very important aspect of running a dental practice. Having an efficient, smooth process will lead to an increased acceptance rate while eliminating any stress from the process for both patients and staff.

To help dental practices improve this day-to-day task, we interviewed several billing specialists and concluded that the best process to efficiently bill dental treatment plans consists of the following 5 steps.

1. Determine the patient’s treatment plan

The dental treatment plan is the starting point to streamlining the dental treatment plan billing process as it is used to determine insurance coverage for billing and to create appointments. Therefore, it is essential – as the provider, to be as accurate as possible when determining what will need to be done, and what materials will be used during the patient’s dental appointment/treatment.

2. Verify patients’ insurance

Once the dental treatment plan has been determined, we recommend you verify with the patient at the end of their appointment, that the insurance information you have on file is accurate and make any necessary adjustments to the insurance information if needed. This is a vital step as on the day of the appointment it ensures that the claim once submitted electronically will not be rejected and that there will be no delays, improving the patient experience.

3. Create and submit a predetermination

Once the patient’s insurance information has been verified, use your dental software solution to create and submit a predetermination for the proposed dental treatment a few days before. Doing this will give the dental practice insight into how much of the proposed treatment will be covered by insurance, and how much will need to be paid by the patient.

4. Notify the patient if they will have to pay for some of the treatment

Once the response (explanation of benefits) to the predetermination is received, inform the patient whether they are required to pay a portion of the dental treatment. Let them know how much the insurance is covering and how much they need to pay. This is will give the patient time to contact their insurance if they would like to know more about their coverage, and prepare them for the appointment day, eliminating any surprises, and increasing the chance of dental treatment plan acceptance.

5. Schedule the appointment

When scheduling the appointment, something we strongly suggest you do which will increase efficiency throughout the billing process, is to associate the appointment with the predetermination. In doing this, the appointment scheduling process will be streamlined as all the dental treatments will be automatically added to the appointment, eliminating the need for manual entry. Also, this step will transfer the predetermination to the treatment log once the dental treatment is completed allowing you with one click of a button to create the bill and submit the claim electronically to CDANet.

Implement a streamlined process for dental treatment plans billing by: verifying patients’ insurance; creating and submitting predeterminations; and notifying patients of their coverage. An efficient and smooth process will not only increase the dental treatment plan acceptance rate but, also, eliminate any stressors from the process for both patients and staff.