A few tips & tricks from your Open Dental experts

In this tips & tricks post, learn more about end-of-year letters, changing settings and adding options to various areas of Open Dental, dropping old insurance coverage, and dealing with roll-over benefits.

1. Sending end-of-year letters? Open Dental makes it quick & easy!

Check out this post for the 4-step process to check this task off your to-do list.

2. Want to change a color setting? Add an option like an adjustment, billing type, blockout type, payment type, etc.?

Your answer is likely one of the options in Setup > Definitions. You can add various options, change color settings, and much more.

In the software, click Help > Online Help – Contents, then click Search in the upper right corner to search the online manual. When you type in Definitions, all the various types of definition options will be displayed. Select the one you want more information on, and you’re off to the races!

3. Removing previous insurance info when a patient has new insurance

Use the Drop button in the upper left of the Edit Insurance Plan window to remove their previous coverage, then click on the “Pick From List” button to see if their insurance plan is already in your list and add it.

TECH TIP:  Make sure you’re not just changing the carrier info in this window, but rather, dropping and re-adding coverage. If you change carrier info in this view and “change plan for all subscribers” is selected, you’ll end up changing the insurance coverage (and claim history – yikes!) for all subscribers including this patient.

4. Does your patient’s insurance plan allow unused benefits (or a portion of them) to roll over? Here’s how to deal with that situation in Open Dental.

Go into the Family Module, then double-click on the insurance to open the Edit Insurance Plan window, in the upper right corner of the green-shaded area, click the Add button to add an adjustment to benefits. Enter a negative amount in the “Insurance Used” box to reflect the amount of benefit that are rolling over. Use a date that falls within that benefit year.

Example: If a patient has $200 rolling over into their 2019 calendar year benefit, enter a date of 1/1/2019, and -$200 in the “Insurance Used” box.

As always, if you need help troubleshooting anything in Open Dental, just get in touch with us!