October 07, 2020

In sports, success depends on the team staying strong all the way to the end of the season. The same is true for your practice. 2020 has been a challenging year—there’s no getting around it—for you and your patients. Unsurprisingly, the things you do to help your patients will help you as well.

Your office is likely doing everything it can to make treatment affordable. End-of-year insurance benefits are critical to providing affordable treatment. Here are a couple of ways you can help patients take full advantage of those benefits.

Recare
Patients may have missed out on their recare appointments earlier in the year while your office was only accepting emergency treatment. The Recare Management report is perfect for locating patients who are past due for recare. Use a custom date range going back to when patients started missing appointments—for example, March 1, 2020 to December 31, 2020—to view patients who were due earlier in the year or who are going to be due for a prophy or periodontal maintenance sometime before the year ends.

TIP: If a patient’s insurance allows for a prophy two times per calendar year—as opposed to every six months—you could schedule them to come in for another prophy in December, so they can maximize their insurance benefits. This may take a little work to research but would be worth it to get your patients their maximum benefit.

Outstanding Treatment Plans
The Unscheduled Treatment report in Dentrix Ascend Power Reporting is the go-to tool to find patients with outstanding treatment plans as the end of the year approaches. Filter the report to generate a list of patients whose insurance benefits renew in January and who have insurance benefits remaining.

This information is beneficial for patients, especially those with several treatment-planned procedures, because they can have part of their outstanding treatment done in 2020 and the remainder in 2021. This can result in both a higher insurance reimbursement for your practice and a lower out-of-pocket expense for the patient.

Help your patients maximize the insurance benefits they pay for, before those benefits renew in January! It’s not only a service to your patients, but can also help your practice keep a full schedule and consistent production during the final quarter of the year.

Additional Information

• To learn how to work with the Recare Management report, watch Contacting Patients Using the Recare Management Report in the Resource Center.
• To learn how to work with the Unscheduled Treatment report, watch Generating the Unscheduled Treatment Report in the Resource Center.