Appointment & Financial Policies

Working together to foster a lifelong oral healthcare partnership.

We hope that your experience at Crabtree Dental will be positive both clinically and administratively. We know that patient satisfaction begins with your first dental appointment and doesn’t end when you leave the treatment chair. We strive for successful communication throughout the entire process. To guide us in providing quality services with consistency, we have established policies as a framework for our practice administration. These policies are implemented from a standpoint of fairness to ensure both patient satisfaction and the health of our practice. Your awareness of the following policies will ensure a long and productive healthcare partnership with Crabtree Dental.

Please provide adequate notice for a change in your appointment

We want to thank you for choosing us as your dental care provider. When you make a dental appointment, we reserve a treatment room, appropriate staff, and equipment just for you. In order to give you and each of our patients the best possible care, we request two business days’ notice for any change to your confirmed appointment. Canceling or missing appointments with short notice makes it impossible for us to offer your reserved slot to another patient. Just as we want you to succeed in your oral healthcare goals, we hope you wish us to succeed in our practice goals. If insufficient notice is received you will be assessed a fee per appointment. The fee is $45 per appointment. For extensive treatment, involving lengthy appointments, you will be asked to make a deposit based upon the appointment length. In such cases, at least four business days’ notice is necessary to make a change. At the conclusion of each preventive care appointment we will schedule your next preventive care appointment in advance (usually 3-6 months in the future). You will be reminded of that appointment four to six weeks in advance. We ask that you kindly confirm it no later than two weeks in advance.

Please complete and honor your Financial Agreement

We are committed to providing you excellent care and payment of your bill is part of successful treatment. Each patient/account guarantor will be responsible to sign a Financial Agreement that outlines our billing practices and insurance policies in detail. So that you are fully informed, our Financial Agreement and Authorization is included right here. It is also included with our patient registration information.

We do not maintain different fee schedules for different patients. We bill the same fee for each service performed regardless of insurance coverage. Payment is due in full for services rendered at each visit with cash, check, or credit card. If you have insurance benefits you may assign them to our practice according to our insurance policy as outlined in section 2 of our Financial Agreement and Authorization.

When we provide you a diagnostic or preventive care service, your fees will be billed according to our prevailing fee schedule. If at any time you wish to know the specific fees in advance of your appointment, we will be happy to provide this to you. However, we cannot always anticipate the services you will need before your appointment. For example, the doctor may request a different type of x-ray than the one we had quoted. We assume our patients will be responsible for such changes in their course of treatment.

When new treatment is diagnosed, we will explain the procedures and associated fees before we begin treatment. In such cases it is our practice to make definite financial arrangements with patients before treatment begins. We’re pleased to offer different payment options including low or no-interest payments through Care Credit, a patient financing program endorsed by the American Dental Association. Our treatment coordinator will be happy to assist you in choosing and qualifying for a payment option that best fits your needs.

Please understand that we can only ESTIMATE your dental insurance benefits.

A dental benefit plan is a financial tool that belongs to the patient. It is usually a contract between an employer and an insurance company on behalf of the patient. Crabtree Dental is never a party to this contract.

There are over 36,000 different dental insurance plans in the state of Texas alone. Dental insurance plans come with lots of variety. They are designed with different deductibles, maximums, copayment percentages, allowances, exclusions and limitations. As if that isn’t complex enough, there is no universal format which insurance companies use to communicate their benefits to consumers, employers, or healthcare professionals. Because of the complexity and variety of these plans we will never guarantee benefit payment from your insurance company. Whenever we provide information on your insurance benefits, please understand that we can provide only an ESTIMATE.

Undergirding every dental insurance plan is specific contractual language that spells out your dental benefit plan. We are not a party to that contract and therefore it is impossible to guarantee insurance benefits to any patient. We ask you to understand that we can only ESTIMATE your dental insurance benefit. We wish you to be aware that when services are provided to you at Crabtree Dental, you are responsible for all fees associated with dental services regardless of insurance estimation. We communicate this in the following ways.

  • Upon registration, patients enter into a signed financial agreement which clearly communicates how we will handle their dental insurance.
  • Our written treatment plans clearly remind the patient that dental benefits are estimated.
  • When engaging in financial conversations with patients we endeavor to re-communicate the estimated nature of dental benefits and the responsibility of patients for their treatment fees.

While we can’t guarantee benefits, we can assure you that we employ decades of experience when we research a dental plan on your behalf. When you provide dental insurance information to us, we prepare for your dental appointment by researching your dental insurance plan using a variety of sources. We compile a profile of your plan based on what we discover in the research process. This information is used to estimate your dental benefits.  We pride ourselves in our ability to unravel the mysteries and benefits of your particular plan and don’t charge a fee for researching or filing your claims. We look for common limitations and exclusions and strive to uncover them during our research process. Because we are not a party to your insurance benefit contract, the process can’t be exact (and occasionally not even close), and that is why we can’t provide insurance benefit guarantees. We do a pretty good job of it as evidenced by the vast majority of dental claims we file which are paid exactly as estimated. We think it would be difficult to find a dental office that understands insuranceand manages your insurance claims better than we do.

A dental insurance plan is a financial tool that can assist you with payment of your dental fees. A retirement plan is a financial tool that provides for your future retirement needs.  Just as we cannot be  responsible for the rise and fall of  the assets in your retirement portfolio, so we cannot be responsible for the rise and fall of your dental benefits based on the exclusions and limitations of your insurance plan.  The best way to take full advantage of your dental insurance coverage is to understand its features as you would the features of any financial asset in your portfolio.  We advise you to become familiar with your benefit information so that you can maximize use of this financial tool. We have prepared this Dental Insurance 101 educational tool with you in mind.