Improve Your Dental Hygiene CDT Code Accuracy

When did you last take a class on CDT procedure coding for dental hygiene services?  In the last year, did you know the descriptor for D4355 changed?   What about alternating the billing of D4910 and D1110?  What procedure code do you use for a 10-year-old with all their permanent teeth – it’s not D1120.  What about all the new “fluoride codes”?  What product goes with what code?  And implant procedure codes – what are they?  So many questions.

There are currently 7 distinct dental hygiene procedure codes to choose from – each with a very specific descriptor that clearly outlines its allowable services.  Are you selecting the correct one based on the dental hygiene diagnosis?  Or are you (or your business staff) picking the one that receives the best reimbursement from an insurance carrier? And finally, the big question:  How do you transition a patient to the necessary D4341/D4342 when they have always had a D1110?  

This overview of basic dental hygiene preventive and therapeutic services will help dental hygienists to understand the details of the services they provide and be able to accurately select and document those services. 
Objectives:

• Describe how to select and accurately report Dental Hygiene Procedures while understanding the descriptors for the 7 “cleaning” codes from the latest CDT Manual.  Scheduling and billing combinations of procedures will be presented, which are ethical and legal.
• Discuss implications of “creative billing” of dental procedures.  Through a sense of confusion and wanting to please patients, many dental offices unwittingly perform insurance fraud daily (sometimes prompted by the insurance carriers!)
• Describe how to transition a patient to necessary non-surgical periodontal therapy (SRP) when they have always had an adult prophylaxis.  Verbal strategies will be provided which hygienists and business staff can use to describe the rationale for recommended treatment. 

AGD Code: 550