The following situations frequently occur when you are entering family information and family insurance information:
With divorced parents, an ex-spouse receives the bills but is not a patient, and the other ex-spouse has insurance that covers their children.
A child lives with one of his or her parents and a step-parent but is insured by his or her other parent.
A child is insured by one of his or her parents and his or her step-parent, and both the parent and the step-parent are patients.
A request that a married couple be entered as two separate families for separate statements, but one spouse has insurance for both spouses.
Dentrix Enterprise can handle these and similar situations if the following guidelines are understood:
The head of household for the family should be determined according to who is to get the billing statement for family members. In other words, the head of household is the person ultimately responsible for payment (usually the one who signed the consent form).
Each patient should be entered as a member of the family with the head of household who should be billed for the patient's treatment, whether or not the patient lives with that head of household.
The head of household does not have to be a patient; in which case, he or she would have a non-patient status.
A subscriber for an insurance plan can be anyone in the family; he or she does not need to be the head of household.
When a patient has insurance coverage, the subscriber must be entered as a member of the same family. If the subscriber does not live with the family (a step-parent or ex-spouse of the head of household), give the subscriber a non-patient status and an "other" marital status.
A Social Security Number can be entered as the subscriber ID number with the insurance information whenever the subscriber is entered. If a subscriber has more than one patient record because he or she is a subscriber for people in more than one family, enter his or her Social Security Number in the patient record with a Patient (active) status, and leave the box blank in the patient record with a Non-Patient status.
Remember that the Select Patient dialog box displays patients with a Non-Patient status and allows for searching by Social Security Number. If a patient's name is listed more than once, select the name that does not have a Non-Patient status if you are going to enter treatment for that patient. This will ensure that non-patients do not show up on anything sent to your patients, such as billing statements, so your patients will not be aware that a non-patient is entered as a part of their family.