Consultation, treatment planning, submission of pre-estimate with narrative, waiting for insurance response, reaching a patient live on the phone often as long as a month after their consultation all takes time and the results (sales) are abysmal. Patients are more apt to begin treatment and schedule an appointment to have work commence right after a consultation while they remember why they need the work. They have just seen their radiographs, intraoral photos and dental educational videos pertaining to their needs. After a few weeks, they are called by our receptionist to schedule an appointment and most of the time they are not interested in scheduling. They have forgotten all the things they learned and have lost their motivation. It is much too time consuming to enter each individual's insurance coverage into the computer every time their insurance changes. Most of our patients seem to have new insurance every year. Instead of trying to keep up with reentering numbers into the coverage table, it would be great to have a default coverage, sort of a worst case scenario that could be used with the treatment planner. For instance, basic services such as extractions, fillings, SRP, endodontics could be set at 80 % insurance and 20% patient copay. Major services such as crowns at 50% and so on. We could provide a patient an estimate immediately which may be a somewhat higher than actual dollar amount but more treatment would be performed by dentists, less time expended for treatment plans which never produce appointments. More dentistry equates to more supplies sold to dentists.
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