Financial Systems: Accounts Receivable

The patient receives a loan for dental treatment, the dental office is paid in full, and the patient makes payments to the lending agency. In dental practices that are not paperless, each patient will have a charge slip (or routing slip) that details certain information. Most slips will also have an area for noting any additional appointments. Technical Safeguards – This section includes using technology to protect and control access to EPHI. Electronic communications for patient-care purposes must meet the standards of HIPAA. Confidentiality remains a prime concern, and certain measures must be taken to ensure that patient information is neither shared nor accessible to unofficial parties.

Other practices wait a full thirty days before generating a statement. A statement will not generate if there is an insurance payment pending. The benefits of sending statements less than thirty days include a lesser amount of statements being generated on a given day. For patients that have not been in and have an outstanding balance, their statements are still generated monthly until the balance is zero.

American Dental Assistants Association

The parents’ rights to access their child’s PHI also may be restricted in situations when a legal entity, such as a court, intervenes and when a law does not require a parent’s consent. For a full list of patient rights provided by HIPAA, be sure to acquire a copy of the law and to understand it well. When a folder is removed from the file, place an outguide to mark its place. This makes it faster to return records to the file and easy to spot where records are missing (Fig. 62-7). If too little space is allowed for each file, papers become tightly wedged, which slows the process of filing, makes records more difficult to find, and may damage filed materials.

Active files Files of patients who have been seen within the past 2 to 3 years. • Identify three types of preventive recall systems and state the benefits of each. As mentioned in Chapter 8, maintaining all of the practice data on a computer’s hard drive without a backup is dangerous. Valuable information can be lost as the result of a power surge, a computer crash, or a misdirected Erase or Delete command. This can be done using a CD-ROM, a DVD, an external hard drive, a cloud-based system, or some other type of storage device.

Considerations For New And Established Dental Practices

HIPAA requires that the transactions of all patient healthcare information be designed in a standardized electronic style. Maintenance of adequate records is one of the business assistant’s most important responsibilities. Because so much information is maintained in a hard copy or electronic file, the office must decide what types of records and filing system best suit the needs of the practice. Maintenance of accurate and complete records is a sign of quality care.

Accounting has become more streamlined and organized with the accounting softwares that are there to make the job easier. Save time and gain efficiency by having the right balance of a modern accounting software and a bookkeeping team that knows the industry accounting needs of your business. One method is to have a separate folder for each business day of the year, and all EOB’s processed on that particular day would be found in that folder. At the end of the year, some practices will retain the previous year’s EOB’s for the first quarter in a convenient location until all claims have been received from the previous year. Most practices maintain three years’ worth of inactive EOB’s onsite. Many professional companies will come and collect sensitive documents and shred them onsite.

Pro Small Business Accounting Software by Intuit

Another factor the dentist should consider is the size of the patient database. The daily journal page is the practice record of all transactions for patients dental bookkeeping seen each day the practice is open for business. The journal page includes the patient’s name, any charges, payments and adjustments to the account.

As each patient concludes an appointment, postings are made into the system for each individual patient. If the office operates a computer, the column totals of the daily journal page are automatically figured and are used to generate other practice reports. Some patients will call on the due date with their credit card information, while others will authorize the dental practice to charge the specified amount on the monthly due date. You’ll want to be able to track accounts receivable (A/R) and slow-paying customers. Expense management, invoicing, inventory management, billing and purchasing may be part of your practice management software, and if so, you’ll want those features to integrate with your accounting software.

If not, you may want to look for those features in your accounting software. The business office, which is also referred to as the “front office,” is the core of the business side of the dental practice. Effective management is necessary to achieve organizational goals, team-oriented employee satisfaction, and financial success. This chapter introduces business operating systems that are vital to the day-to-day operations of a dental practice. Efficient and effective business systems can enhance productivity, decrease stress, and maximize patient confidence.

Coverage usually terminates when the child passes the designated age unless the child is still a full-time student or is permanently handicapped. In the case of a full-time student, the age limitation is usually 26 years. Medicaid policies for eligibility, services, and payment are intricate and vary considerably, even among states of similar size or geographic proximity.

All dental practices have financial needs that require attention by either internal or external accounting staff. A practice administrator or an administrative assistant can expect to perform many tasks in addition to the accounts receivable activities discussed in the previous section. These responsibilities may include receiving and organizing statements, paying for materials and supplies, processing payroll or tax forms, recording and analyzing expenses, to name a few. In a large group practice or institution, the practice administrator or assistant may collect the data for these activities and support accounting personnel in the preparation of financial documents.

• At a recent convention, a dentist walked into a QuickBooks® workshop and asked why he should use QuickBooks instead of Quicken®.
• The accounts receivable in a dental practice is all monies owed to the practice.
• Therefore, the administrative assistant must be able to file claims in an accurate and timely manner, and follow up on claims as needed.
• A practice administrator or an administrative assistant can expect to perform many tasks in addition to the accounts receivable activities discussed in the previous section.
• States may elect to provide dental services to their adult Medicaid-eligible population, or elect not to provide dental services at all, as part of its Medicaid program.
• From the Account screen (Figure 15-3), most systems are designed to allow the user to enter clinical data about treatment, for which he or she may insert appropriate codes.

Endodontic – endodontic procedures, sometimes listed under Major category. A variety of management reports can be prepared from most computerized software systems. The Security Rule defines highly detailed standards for the integrity, accessibility, and confidentiality of electronic protected health information (EPHI) and addresses both external and internal security issues. The HIPAA Privacy Rule determines that the parents of a minor have access to their child’s health information. This privilege may be overruled, for example, in cases where there is suspected child abuse or the parent consents to a term of confidentiality between the dentist and the minor.