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Improve Dental Insurance Verification With Online Scheduling

by | Sep 16, 2021 | Dental Appointment Scheduling

It’s Monday morning and you’re sitting at the front desk reviewing a list of new dental patients who booked appointments through your online scheduling software. Exciting! As you take a closer look, however, you realize that you have no idea if these patients have insurance, and if they do, whether your practice accepts their insurance. Looks like you’ll spend your morning calling new patients to get their information.  

Capturing and verifying dental insurance information can be time-consuming, yet it’s a very necessary part of running a dental practice. However, there are tools that can alleviate this burden: online scheduling software such as YAPI’s Smart Scheduling helps you streamline the insurance collection process by giving you the option to require insurance information as part of the online booking sequence. This way, your front office can easily and securely handoff insurance information to a third-party insurance verification vendor quickly with confidence. And YAPI allows you to offer appointment booking through an online scheduling widget on your website or via an embedded link on review sites such as Yelp. After all, if you’re investing the time and resources into an online scheduling platform it should do more for your business, right?

Did you know? A 2019 study in the Journal of Medical Systems found that when clinics used an online appointment scheduling system, their no-show rate significantly decreased from 25% to 11%. That means less time scrambling to fill last-minute cancellations!

Let’s explore three additional benefits of using an online booking system with a dental insurance verification feature.

 

Reduce Individual Patient Processing and Streamline Dental Insurance Collection

With YAPI Smart Scheduling, your front office doesn’t need to review every appointment request to see if dental insurance information is missing. Instead, you can make it a requirement for new patients to submit and confirm their insurance information prior to booking an appointment. Patients are also prompted to review and verify their personal information, including insurance, before selecting an appointment. Even better, all of this patient information auto-syncs in real-time with your practice management software like Dentrix, Eaglesoft, or Open Dental once the information is confirmed and the appointment is officially booked.

 

Prequalify New Patients by Listing Dental Insurance Options

Another benefit of having a multiphase online booking system is that your practice can prequalify patients. For practices that offer Smart Scheduling, new patients who want to book an appointment must first fill out their reason for seeking treatment, then their contact information before being prompted to choose how they will pay for their appointment. At this point, your practice can decide whether to provide “dental insurance” as an option for payment at which point the patient will be guided through the insurance verification process.

With this feature, you can provide an alphabetized list for patients to choose from, including preapproved insurances, or all plans, including in-network or out-of-network. Your office’s most popular dental insurances can even appear atop the list for extra convenience. Smart Scheduling can also require patients to include photos (front and back) of their insurance cards during the insurance collection process, or patients can enter these details themselves.

To be extra sure, you can even require both! If a patient’s dental insurance is not listed, then the system can optionally display a pop-up message that you accept any PPO insurance, or, when it comes to HMO plans, the prompt may be for the patient to please call you instead of booking online. It’s all up to you.

 

Avoid Negative Patient Experiences

Providing important information, such as dental insurance, in advance of an appointment ultimately makes the check-in process much smoother. This critical step reduces the risk of being put on the spot when the patient comes into the office by telling them that you don’t take their insurance—which could result in negative online reviews! You’ll also avoid any potential bottlenecks when communicating copayment and deductible amounts for new patients who are likely to require additional treatment or procedures since you’ll have ample time to prepare and verify their dental benefits ahead of time.

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Dental insurance verification and the ability for patients to upload photos of their insurance ID cards are just a few of YAPI’s Smart Scheduling features that help your practice effortlessly grow its patient base and provide a seamless, positive, patient experience. 

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