JCDA - Canadian Dental Association

News
NIHB Dental Faxback
Confirmation Form C Is
Unacceptable
Recently, First Canadian Health
began to implement the Non-Insured
Health Benefits (NIHB) Next Day
Claims Verification Program, requiring
dentists to fill out Dental Faxback
Confirmation Form C. CDA finds
both the program and the form to be
flawed and unacceptable.
CDA publishes the Uniform
System of Coding and List of Services
(USC&LS), which provides the
procedure codes used by dentists to
document treatments for their
patients. The USC&LS contains
more than 3,000 codes. It is used by
provincial dental associations to
develop their fee guides, providing
specific and detailed descriptions of
procedures.
CDA believes that First Canadian
Health’s request for more details
about services provided should not be
required. CDA’s Guidelines for
Prepaid Dental Plans states: “CDA
believes that any inquiry that goes
beyond the routine confirmation of
patient-related financial data is
deemed to be an audit and within the
sole discretion of the provincial
licensing body.”
Says Andrew Jones, CDA’s director
of corporate and government relations:
“We firmly believe that the
level of detail provided by procedure
codes should be sufficient to allow
claims processors to properly adjudicate
dental benefits payments.”
CDA’s Audit Working Group is
now looking into the matter of
Dental Faxback Confirmation Form
C. “It is our goal that Health Canada
implement a Next Day Claim
Verification program that meets or
exceeds current industry best practices,”
Mr. Jones emphasizes. “While
Dental Faxback Confirmation Form
C remains in use, we recommend
that dentists only provide the
Journal of the Canadian Dental Association
description of the code and not additional
details, as requested on the
form. We believe this is an audit and
that it should be handled by the
provincial licensing body.”C
U of S College of Dentistry to
Join Medicine
In September, faculty at the
University of Saskatchewan College
of Dentistry voted to dissolve the
College and become one of 2 schools
in the College of Medicine. This is
the third dental faculty in Canada to
be folded into a medical faculty. The
other 2 merged faculties are at the
University of Alberta in Edmonton
and the University of Western
Ontario in London.
“We will be a school rather than a
department in medicine,” says Dr.
Charles Baker, dean of the faculty of
dentistry at U of S. “We will retain
our own budget, business plan, staff,
accreditation mandate, and clinic.
The advantages of this merging will
be to obtain the support of medicine
for dentistry, totally integrate the
basic science program of both
colleges, and reduce administrative
overhead. With the research groups
in medicine as a greater critical mass,
we will now be able to increase our
research intensity and attract more
staff members with master’s and PhD
degrees to carry out health research,
while also increasing our chances of
obtaining collaborative grants from
the Canadian Institutes of Health
Research. There will be no layoffs.
We will retain all our staff and infrastructure.”
Dr. Baker will remain as an associate
dean and director in the College
of Medicine. “It’s a rare day that a
dean forcibly pushes forward on
removing his position,” he reflected.
“But I think that it is essential for
achieving the long-term goal of
reconnecting dentistry to general
health in Canada, which was sadly
lost due to worry within dentistry
about autonomy.”
COVER ARTIST
Dr. Bruce Blasberg is a certified specialist in
oral medicine, now in private practice in
Vancouver. He received his DMD degree at the
University of Pennsylvania in 1970 and
completed a 3-year residency in oral medicine at
the same institution. Following his oral medicine
training, Dr. Blasberg joined the full-time faculty
at the University of British Columbia and headed
the division of oral medicine and pathology. Dr.
Blasberg was recently named director of the
orofacial pain program at Vancouver General Hospital.
Dr. Blasberg provides some context for the art that graces this month’s
cover of JCDA: “Two years ago, I began learning to carve stone from a
master sculptor, Alberto Replanski, who was born in Argentina and now
lives in Vancouver. The stone used for the ‘face’ is a cream-coloured
alabaster. It is 16 inches long and weighs about 50 pounds. Alabaster is a
little softer than marble and easier to carve with hand tools. The piece was
carved using a mallet and chisels. It was finished with files and increasingly
finer grades of sandpaper. Carving stone is physical work, but there is magic
in seeing a form emerge from the rough stone.” C
November 2003, Vol. 69, No. 10 637