As you know, there are certain procedures for which the insurance carrier requires attachments, which could be X-rays, perio charting, EOBs, narratives, and so on. In these cases, adding narratives to claims may help improve your claim acceptance rates. Dentrix Ascend automatically converts clinical notes to .jpg files when you attach them to claims.
How to:
- Locate your patient and open a Claim Detail window, either through the Patient menu or the Ledger. Select the Attachments tab.
- To attach a clinical note, click Add Narrative to open a drop-down list of clinical notes.
- Select a clinical note to add it to the claim; or click Show details to open a preview of the clinical note to make sure you have the right one, and then click Add.
- The clinical note appears in the attachment list with the document name “Narrative – [date],” where the date is the date on which the provider wrote the clinical note. Dentrix Ascend assigns the Classification/Type of Narrative automatically, but you can change this to Report or Diagnosis from the Classification / Type dropdown list. Click Save to save your attachments.
IMPORTANT NOTE: Until you submit the claim, you can make changes or additions to the attached clinical note, and the provider can sign it. After you submit the claim, no further changes to the clinical note are allowed to maintain consistency between Dentrix Ascend and what was sent to the carrier.
Additional Information
- To see the narrative exactly as it appears to the insurance company, click the document name, which is a link. Notice that the attachment includes the patient’s name and date of birth; the provider; the note creation date; as well as the practice name, address, and phone number.
- The entire clinical note is included in an attachment; there is no way to attach only a portion of the clinical note.
- You may wish to examine your processes for creating clinical notes to make sure they are optimized for communicating with an insurance carrier.
- You may wish to build a list of common narratives into your clinical note templates for those few procedures which require a narrative.
- For more information about attachments, see Adding attachments to claims.