 Hello everybody Andrea here. I'm going to talk about today things that can really save you so much time in your new dental hygiene business that you might not have thought of even if you've worked in dental offices before. You might be thinking about things that the dental receptionist did and you want to follow suit. I'm going to talk about insurance claims. I'm going to talk about how you can know your patients coverage because these days. Patients might not book an appointment with you unless they know their insurance coverage and you can talk about pricing with them, kind of all of that. So a little tip for you is when you're talking to a new patient or a potential patient, what I suggest doing truthfully is just letting them know if you want to do this that you direct bill to the insurance for them so they would only owe the difference at the time of their appointment. That's it. Not a lot of offices do that nowadays, including dental offices because it's a lot of paperwork, a lot of staff work involved. But that's what I do in my business. I direct bill, meaning I send their full treatment to the insurance company for them, either by electronic transmission, super easy, or I do the old way where I do have to send it through the mail because some insurance companies will only accept mail in claim forms it takes me some more time, but not too much time because I now have a dental software that I just have to plug in the codes prices it prints out for me I sign it they sign it easy peasy I, I was going to say, email I mail it off you know stamp envelope the whole works. There you go. How would you know coverage. What you could do that takes you more time is you would print out you would send the estimate to the insurance company so you can either call the insurance company, you have to know your patients policy number group number insurance company the whole works, you can call on their behalf let them know you are their dental hygienist, and you're calling on their behalf to find out coverage, or you can send off what's called an estimate or predetermination. You would print off that same insurance claim form that you would use to send in treatment, you would print that off for the proposed treatment and write estimate and really big letters at the top so they know you're not submitting treatment this is an estimate to see how much is covered. You do that in some insurance companies electronically but not many. Most of them you do have to mail in the estimate, you're going to have to wait two to three weeks to hear back. So most dental hygienists and dental offices like to call the insurance company on the patient's behalf, you might be on hold for 45 minutes but you'll have the answer. I don't do that, what I do is I tell patients again I tell patients I make it easy for you guys I direct bill right to your insurance, you only owe the difference at the time of your appointment but I tell the patient, but it is your responsibility to call your insurance company on your behalf or on your behalf. Call your insurance company to ask what your coverage is every patient would have received a booklet of their insurance coverage. So it's not your responsibility if they didn't pay attention to that booklet that's not your problem. If your patients don't right or they can log in online and look at all of their insurance coverage. Let them know they want to look for how many scale units polishing fluoride exam. You can also charge for your mobile visits the mobile code those are the codes they want to look for because quite often if they are logging in, they will log in and go I don't even know what I'm looking for because it doesn't just say teeth cleaning on their file. There are different names for it so exam polish scale. As I said, those are preventative services, even when they call. If they call they cannot call and say am I covered for a teeth cleaning. Most insurance companies play stupid they're like what do you mean what codes do you need. They simply tell them ask them for a scale polish and dental hygiene exam and fluoride is that covered yes or no, and new patient exam. Some insurance companies will still ask your poor patients for that code. So if you want to give them the code go ahead, but I do find if you give them those terms scale polish fluoride exam new patient exam that's usually enough, but they can log in online as well they probably logged in at some point. If they haven't, this is a good lesson for them to learn how to do that. I do not send estimates because that's paperwork for me. That's an hour of extra work, if not more that I have to do and then you have to wait for the estimate so I put it in my patients hands to look for that I hope that helps you guys. I do have the estimate forms for you for Canadian inside the course if you need it. For American they won't release those forms to me because I'm not American but you guys will have that anyway if you're in the States. So please let me know of any questions good luck and let me know of any questions. Okay guys, thank you.