This topic was updated for changes made in Dentrix 24.6 (April 2024).
Many patients have a secondary insurance plan, which helps to pay for their treatment when their primary insurance may not cover their treatment’s total costs. Patients with secondary insurance can be subscribers for their plan, or they can be a dependent on another family member who is the subscriber. How do you assign the coverage in each situation?
The following video demonstrates different assigning a patient secondary insurance when another family member is the subscriber for the plan. (Duration 0:47)
Additional Tips
- When a patient has secondary insurance, the subscriber may or may not be the same person for both the primary and secondary plans.
- The insurance subscriber and the head of household (guarantor) do not have to be the same person.
- If an insurance subscriber is not a patient, you must create a Family File record for them. To help designate that they are not a patient, set their status to Non-Patient. You can then assign insurance to the non-patient as the subscriber, and assign the same plan to a dependent patient.
- When the Head of Household is assigned as the subscriber of an insurance plan, for convenience, all family members added to their Family File thereafter will automatically be assigned as dependents under the subscriber’s insurance plan.
- To have the Signature on File options preselected for you, refer to the Mastery Tracks lesson topic, Setting Default Signature on File Options.
- To learn more about assigning secondary insurance to a patient, read Assigning Secondary Insurance to Subscribers with Dual Coverage and Assigning Secondary Insurance to Non-Subscribers in Dentrix Help.
Check Your Knowledge
If you have access to Dentrix, check your knowledge with this exercise.
- Switch to the Dentrix demo database.
(Skip this step if you are using the Dentrix Learning Edition software.) - Assign Gary Gleason’s primary insurance as Alice Gleason’s secondary insurance.