How to Use an In-House Benefits Plan with Dentrix Ascend

It is becoming more and more popular for dental practices to offer an alternative to PPO insurance by creating an “in house dental benefits plan” to patients. Often, these plans allow patients to pay an annual membership fee that includes two free cleaning/exams per year plus annual bitewing xrays and offers a 15% discount on restorative procedures.

Dental practices offering this program need to know how to best set up this program in Dentrix Ascend.

Here are the steps:

• Determine the types of membership you will offer
  • Adult membership $150
  • Family membership $600
• Create a procedure code for each type of membership and set the fee to match

• Create a new recare named in house plan and set it to 12 months – attach each of these procedure codes for membership (this will allow you to identify when patients are due to renew their membership)

• Create a fee schedule named In house benefit plan – if cleanings/exams are included, set these fees to $0 and if you offer a 15% discount on the rest of the codes, then enter these reduced fees as well. (In cases where patients must pay for a third prophy – you can create an alias code such as D1110.1 with a full fee and use this code as needed.)

• As patients decide to join this plan, train your team:
  • To charge out the membership into the ledger and then collect – decide which provider should receive credit for this procedure code (often this is the owner of the practice or a house account)
  • To go to Patient Information and select Discount plan – to make sure the correct fee schedule applies

• Finally, at month end – you may want to run a report to see how many patients joined your in house dental benefits plan. To find this, go to Power Reporting and choose Financial, Analysis builder – then add Procedure code filtered only for your membership types, and include the criteria you want to see, perhaps patient name, dates for the month and $ amounts.

(Article inspired by J. Lowery, P. Allen & authored by J. Nesbitt, 2018)