As end of the year approaches, it’s time to start evaluating and updating your fees. If you can relate to one or more of these scenarios, I’m here to help!
- Staff hand writes insurance estimates/patient portions on treatment plans because the Eaglesoft estimation is incorrect.
- You are contracted with PPO plans and currently do not have these fees entered into Eaglesoft as ‘Fee Schedules’.
- You have not updated your fee schedules in over a year.
- You have not raised or updated your office standard fees in over a year.
- You currently have PPO fees higher than your standard office fees. (Tip: Process the Service Codes by Fee Schedule report and look at the % of standard fee. If any of these are 100% or more, it’s time to raise your fees!)
I recommend using Fee Schedules and always submitting your full, standard fee on insurance claims. If you are a PPO provider and have not yet started using Fee Schedules in Eaglesoft, I encourage you to start. If you need help getting started please read my previous post, Fee Schedules and Coverage Books.
Now let’s review how to update both your Standard Fees and Fee Schedules in Eaglesoft. The first thing I would suggest is a review of your service codes to ensure all of your CDT codes are up to date. You can print a report from Eaglesoft by going to Lists > Service Codes > Print Report. I encourage the offices to clean this list up. Make sure old inactivated codes are no longer part of your list and all newly added codes are. (Tip: Eaglesoft provides a utility to update your CDT codes, contact our support team for assistance.)
We recommend that Service Code fees (your standard fees) be updated through *Utilities > Change Service Fees. This option provides the opportunity to update the Service Code fees as well as update the fees for services already attached to appointments and treatment plans, at the same time!
If you are not interested in updating fees for all treatment plans or would like to honor fees on services already attached to appointments, simply leave those options unchecked (see screen shot above). I’ve worked with offices who like to honor current fees for so many days (i.e., 90 days) and for them, I would recommend they update their fees, leave those two boxes unchecked and then go back in after 90 days and check them, without setting a markup. This will simply update all outstanding treatment plans and existing appointments to the current fee.
If you choose not to update treatment plan fees, you still have the option to update fees on any outstanding treatment plan. To do so, simply open the patient’s treatment plan, select the ‘View All Items’ radio button and then check ‘Recalc Fees’ to update the services attached to this plan. It’s that easy!
The same rules apply for updating your Fee Schedules. Go to Lists > Fee Schedule List and edit the fee schedule you wish to update. Enter the updated allowable fees for that plan and decide if you want to update Treatment Plans and/or OnSchedule fees. You can always go in and update those later or update your treatment plans on the fly, the same way I described above.
Accurate and up to date fees will benefit the dentist, the staff and the patient. It’s a win-win and worth the effort!
Before updating your fees, please review the disclaimer below and if you have any questions or concerns, don’t hesitate to contact one of our support team members at 800.475.5036.
*Please Note: Running this utility (or any utility) will make changes to your existing data. The Eaglesoft support team highly recommends that before running any utility you are absolutely certain a complete backup of the Eaglesoft data has been completed.
Has Eaglesoft made plans to incorporate insurance ‘stop loss’ or ‘out of pocket maximums’ in the software? There is an increasing number of Essential Health Benefits plans that are being used by all insurance programs.
Thank you