Patti DiGangi, RDH, BS
Speaker.....Author.....Clinician

Challenging you beyond your routine

 

 

 

 

In Sickness and In Health: RX for Insurance Blues 

We are moving beyond the drill into the threshold of a golden age of molecular diagnosis and biotech-therapy. Sound like your practice? Maybe not yet, but very soon there will no choice. You or your practice might not be embracing this brave new world but the insurance industry will take us there whether we want to go or not. Without the connection to current research, practitioners can feel helpless, hopeless and a victim to changes made by others. The alliance between evidence-based (EB) decision making and the insurance industry is already being established. The heart of dental hygiene education is prevention and its value is shown by the evidence. Insurers and policy-makers are beginning to understand this. Dental hygiene clinicians need to understand this changing arena to prepare for the future.

• Review brief history of the dental coding process
• Define evidence based dentistry
• Discuss definitions for the Evaluation Codes, Dental Hygiene and Periodontal Codes
• Describe the AAP Classification System for Periodontal Diseases and how it impacts  treatment planning and narrative submissions to insurance carriers
• Identify “Do’s and Don’ts” for D1110, D4910 and D4355
• Explore the implications of Creative Billing
• Introduce new preventive modalities and codes for coverage