Difficulty with fee schedules...

[JLM]

We offer senior discounts. Amazingly, when I was younger, 55 was the senior citizen age. Now that I am 54, 65 seems much more appropriate

To do this I have a separate fee schedule with reduced fees.
If I put in a procedure and realize that they are not on the senior schedule, I double click the patient info box on the chart screen, change the fee schedule to senior and delete the procedure and re-enter it.

It still comes up with the old fee. If switch to another patient, come back and enter the procedure, it still comes up with the old fee. Some time in the future, it will work but I haven't been able to figure out when or how.

Ultimately, I have to edit the fees by hand.

Should I be doing this a different way?

James Margarit, DDS

[drtech]

are you clicking the "Update Fees" button in the tx plan after you add in the fee schedule? That should solve your problem.

Also, if you want to actually track how much you are giving in discounts, you should set up an insurance plan that is called "Senior Discount" and then set it as PPO, make the PPO fee sched box your intended senior discount plan and then make claims that you immediately set as received. That way it puts your discount as a tangible number for you to track and for your patients to see. (It would be good if OD had a separate "Discount Fee Schedule" setup what worked similar to as I described above and would just list the discount instead of doing it like ins, but I have found this to be the best way currently)

[JLM]

are you clicking the "Update Fees" button in the tx plan after you add in the fee schedule? That should solve your problem.

Nope, haven't used that button yet but I will try it.

Thanks.

I have had this issue over a dozen times since converting last summer. I kept meaning to post on it. Experienced it today with denture relines. But now that I try to reproduce it, I can't. Strange.

Jim

[tgriswold]

Look at the bottom of http://www.opendental.com/manual/feeschedules.html to see the order that OD looks at to see which fee schedule to use. My guess is that they have an insurance fee schedule set and it uses that before it gets to the fee schedule rarely used. If it is getting the right fee schedule, newly created procedures should be using the new fees. However, as drtech mentioned you will have to click "Update Fees" for it to update existing procedures.