"Blue Book" feature - who's using it?

[Smilesbypayet]

We have been having problems with collecting from patients that small amount when their ins. plan's UCR is $5-20 less than what we estimate based on our fees. We had not been creating the "Carrier Allowed" Fee Schedules and inputting the Allowed fees, and now we are going to start doing that. However, we are still on 7.9, and it seems this is going to be a lot of work.

With the new "Blue Book" feature that we've read about, will it auto-populate those fee schedules based on past payments now? Is it much easier than the current method? The User Manual description of it is not really in-depth.

[jordansparks]

You've read this page, right?
http://www.opendental.com/manual/bluebook.html

It will auto-populate those fee schedules based on payments you make from now on, not history. I don't think we could ever use raw history because user input would be required to identify payments that were low due to a low allowed fee versus low due to going over annual max or some other limitation.

I would recommend using allowed fee schedules, but not the Blue Book feature. Just create a fee schedule that's $5-20 lower than what you currently estimate. Use it for all your allowed fee schedules. You could also create a couple more similar fee schedules so that you can have a tiered system to handle carriers with lower UCRs.

[Smilesbypayet]

So what does the Blue Book feature do, then, that the Allowed Carrier fees doesn't do? I thought that was basically the same thing?

[jordansparks]

It automatically adds allowed fee schedules. Not just fees, but entire fee schedules.