Open Dental Forum

I discovered a fairly major issue with the billing today when going over the subject with my staff: It seems to generate email statements for all pts even if they do NOT have an email address. Then when you send the statements the pts without email addresses go no where instead of printing. I can't figure out how to fix it so that those automatically print?

The way it is working now, the pt gets nothing and your staff thinks the pt gets an statement if they don't pay close attention. This can be manually overcome by opening each individual one, seeing if they have an email and printing the ones that don't but that is not an acceptable step. Am I missing something here? The only way I see to set it one way or another is to manually change the billing type and set each type to email or not? I must not be doing something right as this can't be the way it is supposed to work? It should be as you would expect and pts without emails would just get printed statements instead. I am almost 100% it used to work as I am expecting and the pts w/o emails would be printed in one step....

Also, the "exclude statements for pt with ins pending" needs to have an option filter for "exclude statements with ins pending less than 30 days old" or 45 days, or some amt you can specify so accounts with older, problem claims still get sent a statement and not just kicked down the road and the pt is not kept up to date on the situation.

HI drtech-

If there isn't a setting somewhere in OD 'Print statement if email address is blank', a temporary workaround would be to setup an email account, something on the order of noemail@drtech.com and have your staff enter that as default when they check patients in if the patient has no email address. Then when it's statement printing time, all those statements will get emailed to that address, and your staff would just have to check that email inbox to see who needs a paper statement. Kludgy for sure, but it might streamline things just a little for your front desk if there's not a way to do it in OD right now.

If you have patients with an email billing type but no email address, the billing list should, after it has run, tell you that there were some statements that were skipped due to a "missing or bad email address."
The patients that did not get a statement should then remain in the billing list so that you can double check them and print them out or send them a different way. (You can even edit them all en masse by selecting them all and click "Edit Selected").
If this isn't how it's behaving, could you please tell me your version #? Some more specific steps as to how to duplicate the problem may be helpful as well.
Thanks!