You may encounter the following family relationships when entering family information and family insurance information:
· Divorced parents where one spouse receives the bills but is not a patient, and the other spouse has insurance that covers the children.
· Children who are insured by their mother but live with their father and step-mother.
· Children who are insured by both their father and step-father who are both patients.
· Married couples who ask to have separate family accounts in order to receive separate statements, but one spouse's insurance covers both spouses.
Dentrix can handle these and similar situations if you understand and follow the guidelines below:
· Determine who to make the head of household according to who receives the billing statement for family members. In other words, the head of household is the person ultimately responsible for payment and is usually the one who signs the consent form.
· Enter each patient as a member of a family in which you bill the head of household responsible for that patient’s financial support rather than the head of household the patient lives with when these heads of household are different.
· The head of household does not have to be a patient; in such cases, set the head of household's status to "Non-Patient."
· An insurance subscriber can be anyone in the family; the subscriber does not need to be the head of household.
· When a patient has insurance coverage, you must enter that patient as a member of the same family. If the insurance subscriber is a patient but does not live with the family (a step-parent or an ex-spouse of the head of household), give the patient a "Non-Patient" status and make the patient an "Other" family member.
· You cannot enter a Social Security number more than once since it is one of a patient's unique identifiers. However, you can enter a Social Security number as the subscriber ID number with the insurance information whenever you enter the subscriber. In cases where a subscriber is entered more than once because he or she is a subscriber for more than one family, enter the Social Security number where the subscriber is entered with a "Patient" status and leave the space blank where the subscriber is a "Non-Patient."
· The Select Patient dialog box shows the "Non-Patient" status and allows selection by Social Security number. If the Select Patient dialog box lists a patient’s name more than once, select the name that does not have "Non-Patient" when entering treatment. This will ensure that "Non-Patients" do not show up on anything sent to your patients, such as billing statements; your patients will not be aware that the "Non-Patient" is entered as a part of their family.