Sliding Fee

[atd]

Has anyone setup sliding fee schedules in Open Dental? We need to be able to track the writeoffs, so I need to have the full fee, the writeoff and reduced fee. My first thought was to have it work like the PPO insurance plans, but that would probably require entering zero payments manually to close the claims that will never be sent. Thought I'd ask if anyone has already done this before I start experimenting.

Thanks

[jordansparks]

I'm aware of an office that did it extensively. Since they did not need to track the "writeoff", it was very easy for them to simply set up fee schedules and assign them to patients. To do it right, you would have to attach adjustments to individual procedures. You can do that, although there's nothing that would automated the adjustments to pull from fee schedules.

[atd]

This is the solution I came up with, let me know if you foresee any problems with it.
- Create a PPO insurance plan called "Sliding Fee X%"
- Add a fee schedule with reduced fees (X% of normal fee schedule)
- Set the fee schedule of the PPO plan to the reduced fees
- Set all of the insurance percentages for the plan to 0%.

I think this will work best for us because the writeoff is automatically calculated as the difference between the standard fees and the reduced fees. And the treament plan shows $0 expected from "insurance", correct discount and patient responsibility. When creating a "claim", I can click "By Procedure" before closing the claim and enter a zero payment. Writeoff is automatically calculated and patient balance is the reduced fee.

[nathansparks]

That is the solution that I would use, I forsee no difficulty. Cheers,
Nathan