As I posted earlier, businesses offering Wi-Fi connections to their customers are becoming increasingly common and dental offices are no exception. 

As you look at doing this, keep in mind that you are not a coffee shop or hotel.  You are what HIPAA defines as a covered entity and that comes with rules and regulations that Starbucks and Hilton don’t need to observe.

Wi-Fi is a wonderful tool that can extend your Local Area Network (LAN) into unwired spaces of your office, such as the waiting room or break room.  With this extension comes ease of access, convenience and possibly increased productivity. 

It is modern technology that will reach through walls, floors, around dividers and even past locked doors. 

Your wireless network might easily extend into your parking lot or the neighboring office.  This will increase your exposure to network intrusion and the potential disclosure of Protected Health Information (PHI).  

There are some simple precautions that you can take when establishing your Wi-Fi network that can limit the possibility of nefarious activities.

Regence BlueCross BlueShield, an insurer in Oregon, Washington, Idaho and Utah, recently announced that they are no longer accepting paper claims or issuing paper checks, which have providers all over these four states scrambling to make sure they have the appropriate electronic processes in place to continue working with this major payer. 

As a vendor of practice management software, we have been working with our clients and helping them adapt to this announcement. 

In doing this we have been surprised at the number of dental practices who are still not using the electronic attachment services of NEA (National Electronic Attachment, Inc.).

As I work through our coding list for DAISY clients and incorporate the changes that the ADA has made to the CDT 2014 code set, I have to work at recalling how the office staff stays informed of the changes that are coming more rapidly to their everyday workflows.

Coding changes are no easy task for any organization, and the impact of the CDT codes impact ADA, HHS, HIPAA standard for use in electronic transactions, insurance companies, clearinghouses, and ultimately the dental practice. 

When you take a moment to reflect on the many hands that touch the CDT codes on a daily basis, it is immense. 

When you look at the whole picture, the dental practice seems like only a small part of the team. 

However, the dental practice is the one player that begins the entire transaction and can have the most impact on efficient and accurate procedure coding and billing. 

Thus, the accurate posting of the procedure code for that one patient seen this morning can be processed through numerous computers and human processes.  

Marketing the dental practice has come a long way since I first began working in the dental field. 

I recall the days that the only type of marketing we did was to ask our beloved patients to refer their friends and family, have an elegant sign outside of our door and to list in the phonebook a simple, informative advertisement. 

And yet, as much as we cherish those simpler days of ordering business cards to hand to our patients and renewing our agreement with the telephone directory, we continue to seek for more ways to market our dental practice in the modern world.  

Creative ways.  Marketing methods that work.  A piece of collateral that can break through the bombardment of advertising that our patients’ eyes see and their brains will need to process. 

It has been said that the average American adult will visually see over 20,000 advertisements per day, and yet only process a fraction of them.