Orthodontic Billing?

[jourdo]

I have been struggling with this in Open Dental (might be the same in other software choices too). I don't know how to efficiently bill out orthodontic services.

I tried the payment plan option, and it works great if it is a cash patient, but not so good when we need to create insurance claim forms. We were just filling out blank ones manually for a while before that game got old.

We are currently using the repeating charges feature, and it is working out ok, but stuff still has slipped through the cracks. We have started cloning all ortho patients so that the ortho ledger is somewhat separate from the general one.

Here is what I want to be able to do:
- Put some amount on the patient chart as we are going to charge you $X for the case. (Like the payment plan option)
- Enter payment terms $X down and $Y per month (or whatever). (Again, like payment plans or recurring charges)
- Have all of these future payments show in a ledger of some type (whether it is part of the main patient file or not). (I don't think this exists as I want to see it)
- Enter payments, create claims as normal. (Plain old ledger would be good here)

Ideally, I don't want to "produce" the full case amount right off the bat. I prefer to see the amounts produced on the monthly basis (it is a more true production number for me).

Is there a way to accomplish this? What are other offices that bill orthodontic services doing? Any help/advice would be appreciated.

Thanks!

[rambochambo]

Did you ever find a solution to your ortho billing problem? I'd love to know.

[jsalmon]

It kind of sounds like you want to use our patient clone feature to keep your general dental provider production separate from your orthodontic production?
http://www.opendental.com/manual/patientclone.html

As for showing the future payments in the ledger without applying the full case amount right off the bat seems odd to me. I'd say this would be a feature request but it would be strange because accounting wise you kind of have to do that. Therefore, under the covers everything would act as it does but then Open Dental would show "ghost" payments into the future and not "apply" them to the patients account until those dates passed? I don't know about all that, kind of sounds like a confusing nightmare to code. You'll have to really convince me that this is helpful.