How to keep track of In House Discount Plan

[ryansmithdds]

I am setting up an in house discount plan and am wondering how a lot of you guys have entered that into your systems to keep track of things like, if they pay monthly/yearly, when their expiration/renewal date is, if they have used up their cleanings etc.

I have 2 plans with 2 different fee schedules of discounts. I was thinking of either setting up a co-pay insurance for it or creating display fields in their patient information to put it in there?

I am curious to see what you guys have done.....

Thanks!!!!!!

[BFDental]

bump

[MollySinger]

I can email you my SOP for our in Office membership plan if you like. Email me at ClintonvilleDentalGroup@gmail.com
Molly

[Zacky]

This has been tough for me as well. I have a new start up practice and I cant find a clean way to do it. I spent about an hour with OD tech support with one of their expert insurance guys and still isnt very clean. Also, to my surprise, no one has requested this formally as a feature request. We need to make some noise to get support for in house dental plans/memberhsip plans.

Here is all I came up with from my trying to figure this out for the past few months:

1. Open Dental has a section in their manual on ONE way to set it up, I didnt like it because it was not very clean when you print out treatment plans or statements. I want to be able to show patients my UCR fee as the FEE and the Discount as the difference between the membership plan and the UCR. So the "PAT" column is actually how much they owe. Here is a link to Open Dental's work around: http://www.opendental.com/manual/membershipplan.html

2. What I did in my practice was created a fee schedule and called it "Membership Plan." Then when someone signs up, I created a generic Code for the membership plan's annual fee (so this 'procedure code' would get completed annually so they would be charged their annual fee). Then for the respective patient I "Add Insurance" and add my membership plan as a mock insurance plan with a false address, false subscriber id etc, and assign the Membership Fee schedule to the insurance plan as if it was any other PPO. Then in the benefits section I set all the benefits to 0% - so the "insurance plan" doesnt cover anything. Now when I have someone on the membership plan, it creates nice-looking treatment plans. THe only problem is it requires a claim to be created and then received (which I do manually since I dont want it to generate a report showing unsent claims/procedures). The only problem is the claim bills my UCR fee, and calculates a writeoff, and essentially the ACCOUNT module on this patient is an absolute MESS to follow. The only way I can follow course of treatment is to SAVE any treatment plan before we start a course of treatment and refer back to that as my ledger. So I only use the Account tab to record payments received. Still playing around with claims to see if I can get it to show nicely. This isnt a long term fix either and im struggling to figure out a clean solution.

3. The other idea of just setting the fee schedule from the outset to your membership plan is that patients dont see the value of the membership plan, no where then does it show them the comparison of what it would have been like if they were charged the UCR had they not been a member.


So if you have two plans, maybe create two fee schedules and approach it that way. Anyone else have advice?

[jdub]

We do the same as Zacky, which is the same method we use for Dentemax and Cigna discount plans. Create a claim, say it is sent, say it is received while entering no payment. The write-offs are entered automatically as for real insurance claims.

You can keep track of the dates for when the plan expires as part of the fake insurance plan information. The hygienist keeps track of the frequency limitations by scheduling properly.