Understanding the Current Dental Terminology (CDT) codes and ensuring proper coding is crucial to improve time management and make your practice succeed. It also prevents ethical and legal issues. In my previous 10-year experience as an office manager, I observed local dentists make coding errors, get audited or lose their license from insurance fraud. While most dentists are not knowingly billing incorrectly, they should know how to correct these mistakes.
The ADA’s CDT companion is like the encyclopedia of dental procedures and nomenclature. How many times have you looked for a procedure code in your clinic computer program and you couldn’t quite pick a code that met your procedure in particular? Patients situations, diagnosis and your treatments are often difficult to categorize into a set list of codes. However, what many of us don’t know are that there are so many codes out there that we are unaware of. In dental school, we aren’t always taught the importance of coding, and coding with accuracy. If you aren’t careful about what you are coding, there can be severe consequences. There have been reported cases of dentists coding inaccurately and therefore suffering legal consequences. Understanding what you are charging the patient for, and what you are filing through insurance is extremely important…
