In this episode, the Dayna discusses the process of preparing treatment estimates for dental patients. She emphasizes the importance of being proactive and accurate in estimating out-of-pocket expenses. Dayna also introduces the concept of an AI bot that can handle insurance verification, making the process more efficient. She provides step-by-step instructions on how to generate treatment estimates and customize report styles. The episode concludes with a discussion on presenting treatment estimates to patients and scheduling their appointments.
Takeaways:
- Being proactive and accurate in preparing treatment estimates is crucial for patient satisfaction
- An AI bot can streamline the insurance verification process and improve efficiency
- Creating customized report styles can make generating treatment estimates easier and more consistent
- Presenting treatment estimates to patients and scheduling their appointments should be done before they leave the office.
Chapters:
00:00 Introduction and Background
00:31 Preparing Treatment Estimates
03:12 Benefits of AI Bot
04:12 Generating Treatment Estimates
05:42 Creating Report Styles
06:42 Customizing Report Styles
09:49 Presenting Treatment Estimates
11:36 Scheduling and Documenting Treatment
15:05 Conclusion and Call to Action
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Transcript provided by Riverside AI
Dayna (00:01.904)
Hey, my friends, welcome to the High Performing Dental Team. I’m Dayna Johnson, your host, and I’m also doing another solo episode today. And I am coming to you. You can see I am at Chicago Midwinter Dental Meeting inside of the podcast lounge here in Chicago. And they have a really nice setup here. So it’s been, I had to come in here and do at least one recording while I was in Chicago. And another reason,
why I wanted to dive into another solo episode was that from last week’s podcast, I had a ton of questions about, you know, how can we do it? How can we give us a little bit more detail about how we can prepare our patients better for what their out of pocket is? So I had a lot of offices really interested in how I
I got an office to prepare the treatment estimates in the clinical room and send the treatment estimate up to the front desk printer. They were like fascinated that that could even happen. And I think it was amazing that this practice was able to create a process like that. And so I was going to kind of dive into a little bit more detail about how we can make that happen. So if it’s okay with you guys, I’m going to
just dive a little bit deeper into that topic. So what we talked about was being a little bit more proactive about our preparation for the patients that are coming into our schedule for the next day or the next couple of days so that we can have the data that we need in order to create a treatment estimate that is more accurate.
and that we feel good about giving the patient on the day of, as they’re checking out of their hygiene visit, we are able to give the patient a treatment estimate before they walk out the door, because that’s really, really important. We have to be able to prepare the patient for what their out -of -pocket expenses are going to be when they schedule their next visit, their treatment. And so while I’m at here in Chicago,
Dayna (02:31.41)
I am super excited because I have a podcast guest coming up within the next couple of weeks. Who is building an AI bot that will actually take all of that insurance verification and insurance benefit Call phone calling away from all of you and have an AI bot and you could probably give this AI bot
bought a name because it’s going to just be like an extension of your practice and you know you could just call it Suzy the AI bot and she makes all of your insurance calls for you.
And so this AI bot is so amazing. I met the founders here while I’m in Chicago. I don’t want to give away all the details yet because we are going to have them as a special guest on our podcast in the next couple of weeks. So I’m going to let them talk about how amazing this is going to be. But you do want to be able to check insurance verification for your patients that are coming in for hygiene so that you can better
better prepare the patient and better prepare your team so that they can generate a treatment estimate when the patient is walking out, being checked out of their hygiene visit because you’re going to be scheduling them for treatment. Now, if you can’t prepare the patient with a treatment estimate as they are scheduling, they’re not going to schedule. And in fact, I don’t recommend that you schedule them. Okay, nobody should get on
the schedule without a treatment estimate. And so that’s really important. So I want to dive into that just a little bit more detail because a lot of people were asking me, you know, how in the world do you get the clinical team to generate a treatment estimate and send it up to the front desk computer? Well, what we did is the first thing is you do have to be a little bit more prepared. So because the clinical team is not there to review
Dayna (04:42.594)
the insurance estimate or review finances at all. That’s not what the clinical team does. The clinical team is the one that is entering in the treatment and they are just generating the estimate and sending it up to the front. And then the front desk team is the one, the team that is reviewing the cost estimate, the insurance estimate, the patient portion, and then maybe talking to the patient about,
financing options or if your office does accept payment plans, they might be talking about the payment plan. So the clinical team doesn’t talk about finances at all, but what we did do on all the clinical computers, and you can do this at your practice, is to create one or maybe two report styles in your treatment plan print. So what I want you to do is I want you to
you to do is open up your patient chart and when you go to the little printer icon to print the estimate in the upper left corner of that window when you’re printing the treat like if you do a print preview well not a print preview but if you go to that printer window and there’s in the upper left corner there’s the report style okay if you click in that drop down menu I want you to to give me how much
any report styles do you have in there that you could choose from? You probably have a few that are named like old office managers that probably aren’t in your practice anymore, or you might have used this one or updated, use this one number two or something like that. I see that list just filled with lots of craziness. And so what you can do in your office is create a report style that is one for cash
and one for insurance patients. That’s all you need. Insurance patients, cash patients. You only need two. That way you can customize and make the treatment estimate much more consistent across all treatment rooms. So if you click into, there’s a little button, there’s two buttons at the bottom. One I think says manage, manage styles or manage.
Dayna (07:10.768)
Types or something so you can go in there and delete all those other report styles to get rid of them all just get rid of them You don’t need them and then create and then save one so check all the boxes You know check all them all the parameters that you want in your treatment estimate my recommendation is that you have No pictures because most of the time you’re not sending it to a color print
anyway. Most of the time you are printing it in just plain pieces of paper. So make it use the simple style and then make sure that you check all the check boxes that you want. And then there’s a button that also says columns. Okay so click on the button that says columns and then you can check all the things that you want in the
estimate that might be the date and the procedure code and the description and the primary insurance, secondary insurance. Now my recommendation on the columns is the date is fine, the tooth number, the description, the fee.
and the patient portion. You don’t need the code and you don’t need the insurance estimate. Okay? So because patients are just going to get confused. If you put the insurance estimate in the saved report style and you show the patient the fee, the insurance estimate, and…
and the patient portion and you and the insurance is going to is estimating zero on something then the patient is just going to stir up questions. Patients don’t you know don’t want to confuse them make it super simple make it super clear so that they can read it every single time so it’s a lot easier to read. So that’s my recommendation and then so I would save that style that might be your cash because maybe your cash estimate you’re gonna hide.
Dayna (09:26.818)
all the insurance boxes and make sure you hide the Social Security number, birthdate, make sure you hide all that stuff. So save two report styles, cash patient and insurance estimate. This will make it so much easier for your clinical team to send a treatment estimate up to the front desk. Now…
I get it. If you’re not ready to for the clinical team to to generate the treatment estimate, you don’t have to. That’s totally fine. I know that this office that I was working at was much was very unique in that sense. So if you’re not ready to do that, that’s OK. But we do still want to make it easier for the admin team to then present the treatment estimate. And so we’re going to take a quick break. And then as soon as we come back from my quick break, I’ll talk to you.
about how the front office will then present the treatment to the patient.
Dayna (10:34.544)
Okay.
So now your admin team is ready to present this treatment plan to the patient because it’s really important that you do that before the patient walks out the door. So during the handoff, you know, the clinical team is going to come up and say, you know, hey, we talked about some treatment for Dana today in the lower right. It sounds like she’s ready to get started. If you could just please go over the treatment estimate with her and get her scheduled, she’ll be good to go.
Thank you.
Okay, so now it’s been handed off to me and now the patient has heard what we’re going to talk about. We’re going to talk about that treatment in the lower right. And now the admin team member, maybe it’s the treatment coordinator, maybe it’s the office manager, maybe it’s anyone on the admin team can do this. And now they’re going to present the treatment estimate to the patient and they’re going to talk about what the patient’s out of pocket is, how many appointments we’re going to schedule. And then.
the patient is going to You know agree, maybe they might ask some questions You know you you’ll want to let the patient know that their patient portion is due on the day of service So if they’re out of pocket is going to be you know $500 you know hey Dayna It looks like your patient portion of your next visit will be $500 how would you like to take care of that and? Then the patient might say well
Dayna (12:06.594)
Can I make payments? They might say, you know, I’ll use my credit card, you know, whatever their answer might be, you know, you can just let you can just say great, you know, I’m just going to make a note on your appointment that we’re going to collect the $500 at your at your next visit. And so let’s get you started. Let’s get you. Let’s get you scheduled. So now you have the opportunity to schedule the patient for their treatment. And so then when you
present the patient with the treatment, I also want you to put a copy of that treatment estimate in the document center. That is really important piece of the kind of the documentation process is putting a copy of that treatment estimate in the document center because it’s really important that you also have an exact copy of what that patient is walking out the door with. So if there’s ever any confusion,
when the patient comes in for treatment, or if they lose it, maybe they lose it and you need to generate another one, you just can email them one, a copy out of the document center. So that’s really important. Some people have asked me, Dana, is it necessary that we get a patient to sign the treatment plan? Is that critical step? I’m kind of on the fence with that. In my own office, we presented very large treatment plans, like,
you know, 10, 15, $20,000 cases and we never had patients sign treatment plans. We never had a patient sign a treatment plan for crown or for, you know, scaling or replaning. We just didn’t do it. We had a very trustworthy demographic. We never had patients that ever, you know, asked us questions. So, you know, we had a very trusting doctor -patient relationship and if you have that,
as well. You probably don’t need to have signed treatment plans, but if you’re in another demographic where patients are doing a lot of shopping, you have a lot of emergencies, maybe getting a signed treatment plan is really important for your patient demographic. So it’s really up to your practice or if you’re working with a consultant that is very strict on getting the signed treatment plan, that might be really important for your practice as well. So, but I am, I am
Dayna (14:35.934)
It is very important that you get a copy of the treatment plan in the document center, whether it’s signed or not. And then now you’re going to schedule the patient. So you’re going to schedule the patient for their next appointment, reminding the patient that their $500 copay. Patient portion will be due on the day of service. We take Visa, MasterCard checks, whatever kinds of payment that you accept in your practice. That way the patient is
prepared for their copay, their out of pocket when they come in for that visit. So I hope that it’s been helpful. I hope that this this podcast today has been helpful kind of answering some of your your specific questions that you had from the previous episode. People wanted me to dive in a little bit more deeper into some of the details and give you just a few more nuggets of knowledge. Get into the
weeds a little bit more with that topic that we did last week. So I hope this was helpful. If you found that this podcast was helpful for your practice, I wish that you would share it, rate it, review it, and share it with your colleagues. And I look forward to watching your journey of becoming a Dentrix superuser and a high performing dental team.
