Updating Treatment Plan Fees at the Beginning of a New Year

In November, I wrote a blog post about updating fee schedules at the end of the year. Updating office fees as well as insurance fee schedules is important so your office receives the highest fee for procedures, which will result in higher production.

Once you have updated your fee schedules in Dentrix, what happens to the patients who already had outstanding treatment plans? This question has come up recently in some of the offices I work with.

For patients who have outstanding treatment-planned procedures, those fees will need to be updated. You can update treatment fees on a patient-by-patient basis, or for all patients at once.

I would recommend that you update fees for outstanding treatment plans for all patients on an annual basis. The reason behind doing it annually is that you may have patients who with treatment plans that were created years ago. Those fees are outdated and need to be updated. Updating outstanding treatment fees can be done on an annual basis after you have updated your fee schedules in Dentrix.

Since some databases can be quite large, here’s some tips for you to update fees for all patients:

1. Update your fees on the server computer, not a workstation.
2. Perform this process outside of practice hours, when you're not seeing patients, so no other computers are logged in to Dentrix.
3. Be patient. Depending on the size of your database, it may take some time.

How To

Open the Treatment Planner and from the Edit menu, select Update Treatment Fees. Choose the option to Update Treatment Plan Fees For: All Patients.

You will notice in this window you can choose to update fees for one particular procedure code or a procedure code range. This could be beneficial if your office updates the fee for one procedure during the year. However, for my example, I would recommend leaving the procedure code range as <ALL> to <ALL>.  Then click Update to update the fees according to your current fee schedule.

Keeping fee schedules current and accurate, and updating fees for outstanding treatment plans annually, can help your office to charge the most accurate fees, therefore increasing production. If you have questions about this topic, please email me at vectordentalconsulting@gmail.com. Happy 2019!

Charlotte Skaggs, Certified Dentrix Trainer

Charlotte Skaggs is the founder of Vector Dental Consulting LLC, a practice management firm focused on taking offices to the next level. Charlotte co-owned and managed a successful dental practice with her husband for 17 years. She has a unique approach to consulting based on the perspective of a practice owner. Charlotte has been using Dentrix for almost 20 years and is a certified Dentrix trainer. Contact Charlotte at vectordentalconsulting@gmail.com.

from  The Dentrix Office Manager Blog http://bit.ly/2sjx9LS