Secondary pre-authorizations are claims that you send to a patient’s secondary insurance company before performing the treatment. When you send a secondary pre-authorization, the insurance carrier will send back a coverage estimate that you can use to estimate your patient’s out-of-pocket expenses. As with regular claims, you create a secondary pre-authorization estimate claim after you’ve received and entered the response from the primary insurance company.
Watch this video to learn how to create a pre-authorization estimate for secondary insurance. (Duration 0:36)
Additional Tips
- To create a secondary pre-authorization, you must first create a primary pre-authorization and post the primary pre-authorization estimate to the Ledger.
- Pre-authorization estimate claims appear in the Treatment Plan view of the Ledger.
- If you made changes to the patient’s secondary insurance plan since creating the primary pre-authorization estimate, the Create Secondary menu option isn’t available. Therefore, you’ll need to update the patient’s secondary insurance before you can create the secondary pre-authorization.
- To learn more about creating a secondary pre-authorization, read Creating Secondary Dental Pre-Authorization Estimates 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.) - To complete this exercise, you may need to create a primary pre-authorization for Dean Little.
- Create a secondary pre-authorization estimate for Dean Little’s treatment-planned procedure.