Do you have patients with two sources of dental insurance — primary and secondary? For these patients, after you’ve received and posted a primary claim payment, you can create a secondary claim, which reduces the financial strain on your patients to pay you and increases the possibility that you’ll receive payment.
Watch the following video to learn how to create a secondary insurance claim. (Duration 1:26)
Additional Tips
- The following are two scenarios for creating a secondary insurance claim:
- Scenario One: Create a secondary claim for a patient with both primary and secondary insurance, both of which were set up before the primary claim was created. This method is often used after payment has been made on the primary claim, and the secondary insurance is used to pay for the balance owed.
- Scenario Two: Create a secondary claim when secondary insurance is added or updated after a primary claim was created. For example, you were unaware that the patient had secondary coverage or had an incorrect secondary plan assigned in their Family File. If a secondary claim was created with outdated secondary insurance information, delete the secondary claim, update the patient’s secondary insurance in the Family File, and use this method to submit a new secondary claim.
- After you click the OK/Post button, you’ll receive a message asking if you want to create a secondary claim immediately when you post a payment to the primary claim. Click Yes to create the secondary claim.
- You can also set Dentrix to automatically create a secondary claim whenever you post a primary claim’s payment. To do so, you must have Auto-Create Secondary Claim with Primary Payment selected in the Insurance Payment Setup window. To learn how to activate this feature, read Creating Secondary Claims Automatically in Dentrix Help.
- Once you’ve created a secondary claim, you can easily switch back and forth between the primary and secondary claim windows by clicking View Primary or View Secondary.
- In the Ledger, primary claims are identified in the Description column with “Pr” and secondary claims with “Sc”.
- Secondary claims can be deleted as long as they are not in history. To learn more, read Deleting Secondary Claims in Dentrix Help.
- To learn more about creating a secondary insurance claim, read Creating Secondary Claims 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.) - Select any patient and make sure that they have primary and secondary insurance set up in their Family File.
- In the Ledger, post a procedure(s) for the patient.
- Use the procedure(s) to create a primary insurance claim.
- Make a payment(s) for the primary claim
- Create a secondary insurance claim.