Open Dental Forum

Hello,
our office just converted to od on thursday and today is the first day we are trying to use it (luckily still running the old program at this time). We are far from computer savvy, so I'm afraid I'll be posting here quite often in the first few weeks.

my first question is regarding posting the insurance payments. when i follow the user manual, go to Accounts, I do not see any code that reads "claim". Instead, it seems that all the claims sent before the conversion, transfered in blue ink under the code "adjust" even though under the description for each I can see "claim sent".

we did send some claims to ins with od today already and for those patients when i go into accounts, i can see "claim" in red ink. this leads me to think, that the problem was in conversion, however, i have no idea how to correct it so that we can be posting payments even to claims sent before the transfer to od.

help anyone?

Every conversion has a specific conversion date. That date should be very very clear to everyone in the office. All procedures that were performed before that date should continue to be handled in the old system. All procedures performed on or after that date should be handled in Open Dental.

Any claim payments that come back in for procedures performed before the conversion date should be entered first into the old system. This allows you to track the statuses of your old claims. Otherwise, you will never know which ones have not been received. After entering the insurance payment into the old system, the starting balance for the patient will have changed. Enter a patient payment in Open Dental for the payment amount in order to correct the patient balance. The type can be "Insurance Payment" or something similar. If you do not have a type that makes sense, set it up in Definitions, payment types.

As another example, let's say a week after the conversion, you realize that you forgot to send a claim for some procedures that were performed last month. Whether or not the procedures themselves were part of a successful conversion, you would not want to send the claim from Open Dental. Instead, handle it the old way. If you previously filled out claims with a pen, then do that. If your old system printed claims for you, then enter the claim in the old system.

Thank you for the speedy reply that makes sense:)

Oh Boy, we have doing it wrong>>>>>>

For claim payments after the conversion date (claim sent out before the date) we 're-created' the claim then entered the payment (at least that is what we were told to do during training).....

No problem. There are lots of different ways to do things. What you have been doing is a little bit more work, but it is also probably a little more accurate.