Updated 10/3/2019

When multiple staff members enter patient information in Dentrix, there’s a chance that duplicate information will be entered. One area where this can easily happen is with insurance carriers, group plans, or employers. Here are some general rules to follow when entering an insurance carrier in Dentrix:

• Look to see if the plan already exists in Dentrix.
• Enter the carrier name, plan name and group number as they appear on a patient’s insurance card to avoid duplicate entries for the same plan with slightly different spellings.
• Because insurance carriers can be associated with different employers, be sure to enter employer information when applicable to help distinguish carriers with the same name.

If you find that you have multiple instances of the same insurance carrier in Dentrix, you’ll want to join the plans together. Joining carriers merges more than one carrier into one. And the Join Insurance Plans utility allows you to quickly move all subscribers from one insurance plan to another plan.

And by joining multiple instances of identical carriers in your database, you won’t have to update numerous plans. As a result, you can avoid problems like different coverage table data, inconsistent payment table overrides, estimates not calculating correctly, etc.

For example: You discover two identical carriers named Principal Financial Group in Dentrix. However, they have different group plan names: Solutions Group (the correct name) and Solutions Group Plan (the incorrect name). You want to combine the two plans into a single, correctly named plan.

For specific steps on how to join insurance plans, read the Joining Insurance Carriers topic in Dentrix Help, or the Maintaining Insurance Plan in Dentrix: 6 Things You Should Be Doing article in Dentrix Magazine.

Once you have joined the plans, you need to delete the now unused and “empty” plan so that it doesn’t get assigned to more patients, and doesn’t bog down your database. Take a look back at our previous post titled, Deleting Unused Insurance Plans in Dentrix for details.