Does your office have policies for how and when to add insurance carriers in Easy Dental? If you don’t, you may be increasing your chances for mistakes.
When you have multiple instances of the same carrier in your database, you run the risk of the following problems:
- You may assign the wrong insurance plan to your patients.
- When you update the insurance information for one plan, you may not update the other plans–leaving them outdated.
- You may send claims to the wrong carriers, or have inaccurate estimates, creating more work and headaches for your office!
But there’s one simple thing you can do to minimize mistakes and avoid having duplicate carriers in your Easy Dental database. First and foremost, make sure that the carrier you want to add is NOT already in your database! A simple search for the carrier can help you determine if the carrier is already in Easy Dental — before you add it.
To search for the carrier, click Settings > Maintenance > Insurance Maintenance. Select the Carrier Name radio button and enter the name in the Enter Carrier Name field.
From the screenshot below, you can see that the same carrier is listed with four different group plan names. It’s a pretty good bet that they are the same plans because they all have the same group number, payor ID, employer name, and are all in the same city.
If you’ve searched for the carrier and can’t find it, go ahead and add the new carrier to Easy Dental.
Bonus Tips:
- A good way to avoid duplicate entries is by entering the carrier’s information exactly as it’s printed on the patient’s benefit card.
- If you suspect that there may be duplicates in your database with different (or misspelled) names, you may want to use other parameters for your searches, such as searching by group plan and/or number or by employer. For instance, the same carrier might be entered as “Delta Dental of Arizona” and as “Arizona Delta Dental,” and a search by group number might display both of them.
To learn more, read Adding Insurance Carriers in Easy Dental Help.
