Provider Payment Distribution

[drschulman]

Ok. We have 3 providers in our office. One general dentist, owner of the practice, and 2 associates. When we were with our former software and i entered a payment, whether it be by the patient or the insurance, the software would distribute the money accordingly. We have been on Open Dental since 10-09, and I have just noticed/realized in my provider summary reports for my associates, that NO patient payments have been allocated properly!! I spoke to our consultant, who help set OD up for us and he said there is no way for the payment to know to attach to the correct provider unless you change their primary provider in their patient info screen??? I find this hard to believe as our general dentist is their primary provider and the other provider is just providing a specialty service.....I feel like Im just missing a button somewhere in the provider set up or something, there must be a way for payment to go to the providers that are owed....Help!! I dont want to have to sift thru 12 pages of patients from the last 9 months!!! Thanks!

[jordansparks]

That topic is covered in detail at the bottom of this page
http://www.opendental.com/manual/payments.html
It is possible for it to be accurate, but it would have required diligence and attention to detail on a daily basis for 9 months. At this point, I'm really not sure what to tell you about cleaning it up.

[V Suite]

Of course I assume the procedures are attached to the correct providers. In my office each provider is assigned an operatory in OpenDental, so once the patient is listed in that op, when the appointment is set complete, the production goes to the correct provider.

However, the problem may arise in payment that if you enter a payment amount and press enter, OpenDental defaults to using the primary provider, which in my case starts as Doc1. So at the end of the day, if any NEW patients were not properly assigned to a provider in the patient settings, the payment goes to Doc1.

Solution:
When each payment is being entered, as long as the correct provider is entered for the treatment, and as long as each payment is made in full, all you have to do is click the Pay button with the left arrow. ie. In Account, Click Payment, then the Pay button. It creates a paysplit for the entire current patient balance - procedure cost and provider. No need to enter the payment amount.

Solution for 12 pages of patients. Go through one by one and correct the account figures. {How do you pay your associates, by production or income?}

[drschulman]

All of the patients appointments were created under the correct provider column and all the procedures were given the doctors correct provider numbers for each of their treatments.....We pay the associates a % on collection of copay and insurance payment....When we were trained on OD it was never explained to us that if we enter a payment that we have to do the pay split/arrow over to give the copayment to the doctor as long as it was put in under correct Dr....the insurance checks do post to the correct provider...the issue now lies in the last 9/10 months of patient copays defaulting to doc1...my primary provider....In our last software, it knew to split any payment to the correct provider of whatever service...So unfortunatly we assumed (and were never told any different) that it would do the same here..I have now printed out all daily production and income reports from the conversion date and will go through each patient and assign the correct payments....I would think that it would be a great addition to the software to have it automatically assign any monies paid to the correct provider, as it would save any mistakes in collection income for our providers...The software would know after entering insurance check payments, what a patients copay for date of service is after write off and insurance payment. We just assumed it would know to automatically split any payment made before or after to the correct provider of service....Ahhh! On to my reports!!

[drschulman]

Was just thinking as i am going through all my reports....Would they be any way to implement a prompt, just like the one that asks if you would like to split payments between family members, that would ask if you would like to to spit payment to providers that are owed???? I just feel like the pay split box, if not understood for what it means, may get overlooked, and payments not entered properly...I know the girls I have entering my personal checks and copays may not fully understand what provider is owed for what, as they do not enter insurance checks or really "get" the breakdown of things...Now that this has been brought to my attention I understand the pay split box, but what im running in to is this....Say a patient comes in for a $100 procedure with a specialist....She has a $30 credit on the account...Pays a $20 copay and then ins pays less than thought and owes $35 dollars....And we never see her again to collect copay and account goes to collection...That would mean I have to go back to the payment that created a credit (could be 10 years old) and split it between my Doc 1 and my specialist, make sure the $20 copay is entered under Specialist name....It just seems like alot of work and going back, possibly years to make correct splits if credits are involved....Any suggestions????

[jordansparks]

Let's say that the payments for a family were not allocated to the proper providers, and now it's all a confusing mess. Go to the guarantor and create a payment. At the right, you will see the Family Balances grid. Click the Pay button above the grid. Fiddle with the splits until they all add up to zero. Then click OK to save the payment "transfer". This transfer will generally fix most accounts.

Back to your question. Should you really be editing any old entry? No. Instead you should use tranfer entries similar to the one described above. Now if you don't care about preserving your history (many offices don't), then it can be cleaner to edit old entries to correct them. But the further back you have to go, the less this makes sense.

[drschulman]

Hey, just another quick ? regarding my "fixes"....So now that i am doing the payment split for each payment recieved...the software is of course fixing things from 10 years ago (production) that doesnt really matter (like from 1990, production between the Dr and the Hyg., we give the hyg a # also to run prod. reports once in a while, but dont pay her on it)....So it is fixing all these production snafu's from the other software and now showing up on our daily payment reports...It shows all the provider splits and makes the report very unclear on what was actually paid on that account for that day....the balance at the end is correct for personal checks, credit cards and such but it shows every production transfer...Any way to run a daily payment report without these, as Dr S does not need this at the end of every day???? Thanks!!