The product update released June 09, 2022, introduces sorting capability to the Unsent Claims page. There are insurance enhancements to Patient Letters and several updates to Power Reporting. Additionally, several pages now reflect name changes to insurance claim status.

Insurance

Claim Status Name Changes

This release includes name changes that appear on the Claim Detail window and related claim reports. Column headers and claim statuses with the name NEA have been changed to Attachment. These name changes are to increase clarity and do not change any functionality.

The column header name in the Attachments tab of the Claim Detail has changed from NEA # to Attachment ID.

Additionally, the status name NEA Hold has changed to Attachment Hold and the status name NEA Error has changed to Attachment Error on the following pages:

• Sent Claims
• Unresolved Claims
• Insurance Claims
• Predetermination Requests

Sorting Capability on the Unsent Claims Page

This release introduces sorting capability for the Unsent Claims page accessed from the Home menu.

By default, the Unsent Claims page is now sorted by Service Date from oldest to newest. Click any column heading to re-sort the list by that heading.

If you choose to sort the list by Patient Name or Subscriber, the list will be sorted alphabetically by the patients’ or subscribers’ last names.

Note: Unsent Claims can be managed from two places in Ascend: 1) Overview > Unsent Claims widget and 2) Home > Unsent Claims. This release introduces sorting capability only on the Unsent Claims page accessed from the Home menu.

Patient Information

Update to Insurance Plan Information in Letter Templates

Ascend comes with a set of letter templates that you can use to generate letters for your patients. These templates are made up of text—which stays the same for all patients—and placeholders—which display patient-specific information when the letter is generated for a patient. This release introduces an enhancement to one of the placeholders for insurance information.

In the past, Dentrix Ascend could only show a primary insurance plan in the Year End Treatment (With Insurance) letter template. This caused issues when you tried to generate a letter for a patient who did not have an active primary insurance plan.

This has been corrected so that this placeholder will now show a patient's active insurance plan—whether that plan is primary, secondary, or tertiary.

The following examples outline how the Insurance_Plan_Name placeholder behaves in different situations:

• Example 1: If the patient has an active primary insurance plan and an active secondary insurance plan, the placeholder will show only the primary insurance information.
• Example 2: If the patient has an inactive primary insurance plan and an active secondary insurance plan, the placeholder will show only the secondary insurance information.
• Example 3: If the patient has no active insurance plans, the insurance information will be blank, and you will see an error message: “The selected patient is missing one or more pieces of information that are included in this letter. The missing information will not be included in the letter.”

Power Reporting

Automated Custom Report Update Process

In previous releases when we notified you of field changes, we advised that you might need to revisit your custom reports and update them to remove obsolete fields or make use of new field versions. Going forward, Dentrix Ascend will automatically make those field updates for you.

New Patient Follow-Up Appointment Scheduled KPI

Two of the Daily Huddle (DH) New Patients Seen reports now have added measures which allow you to see, at a high level, how many of your new patients left with a follow-up appointment scheduled. If this is an important KPI for your practice, you will find these useful.

The enhanced reports are DH New Patients Seen – Yesterday and DH New Patients Seen – MTD. The new columns are Patients Scheduled and % Scheduled.

Enhanced Scheduled Production Reports

The Daily Huddle and Scheduled Production reports have been enhanced to provide more realistic estimates of scheduled production. The enhancement is the addition of an appointment status filter. The filter excludes broken or cancelled appointments, so they do not incorrectly contribute to the sum.

Current Insurance Estimates Added to the Analysis Ledger Report Builder

Every time you post a procedure for a patient, Dentrix Ascend attempts to calculate the primary and secondary insurance estimates, the write-off amount, and the guarantor estimate for that procedure. You can see these values in the expanded transaction history of the Ledger.

New estimate fields have been added to the Analysis Ledger Report builder to help you capture the values calculated on the ledger, to the effect that you could see the estimates for all your ledgers in one report.

IMPORTANT: You cannot use these fields to see historical information. They are only a snapshot of the current state of the Ledger and always reflect the most recent modifications.

User Rights

No new user rights were introduced in this release.

New and Updated Learning Content

The Education Team continuously adds or updates content to the Dentrix Ascend Resource Center. Below are a couple of the latest videos. Click a title to get more information about these topics.

Acquiring Images in Offline Mode

When the Internet is down but you need to acquire images, the Dentrix Ascend Imaging module includes an offline mode for you acquire images and then synchronize the offline image with your online database when your internet connection has been restored. Watch this video to learn how to acquire offline images in offline mode.

Adding a New Patient Record

One of the most fundamental tasks you do is adding a new patient record, and Dentrix Ascend makes the process easy. When adding a patient record, Dentrix Ascend automatically searches existing patients to help prevent you from adding a duplicate record for a patient that is already in your database.