Open Dental is a practice management software that’s packed full of features, and as a result, we have a team packed full of experts. In this blog series, we’ll interview Open Dental Experts with various specialties. In this post, we are interviewing Amanda, a member of our Canada Escalation Team.

How long have you been with Open Dental and what’s your specialty?

I have been with Open Dental for almost three and a half years. I specialize in working with our offices in Canada and training offices. I also help our support team with more complex clinical or technical calls.

How does Open Dental differ in Canada?

Open Dental is CDAnet certified and ready for use in all Canadian offices. When you set your region as “Canada” in Open Dental, the software handles things differently in many areas. Here are some examples:

• When claims are sent, there is an immediate response from the carrier.
• The Open Dental Canada Claim tab allows same-day claim reversals for supported carriers.
• Carriers can be added or updated easily from the Insurance Carriers List
• There is a “Canada” tab for each procedure that has options that can be used when charting, such as entering lab fees.
• We make Canada fee guides available for import into the software. Offices can check our Fee Guides page for the available fee guides by Province, then use Fee Tools to import the appropriate fee guides.

The Canada page in our online manual outlines Canada-Specific features and setup.

What is your favorite Canada-Specific feature?

The ability to help offices update their Carrier lists and the supported transaction types, as long as they are on ITRANS 2.0 or Claimstream.

What is one piece of advice you have for new Canadian offices?

Make sure that you reach out to the CDA or the CDHA to make sure you have all of the needed steps and processes for registering each Provider to send claims to all carriers and registering to get paid by the carriers. See Register Canadian Providers for E-Claims for some information on how to register Canadian Providers for e-Claims.

Anything else you’d like to share with offices?

If you are going through a conversion, make sure to pay very close attention to the free test conversion results to ensure all vital data has been converted. Our friendly Canada Escalation Team is here to help, so please don’t hesitate to ask questions!