As required by the Consolidated Appropriations Act (CAA) and several state laws, we must ensure our Provider Directories are accurate. Your patients — our members — need the most up to date information to reach you. As a contracted provider, you must respond to the notification by providing updated contact information.

We appreciate your due diligence in keeping us informed of any changes impacting you or your office. We are excited to announce our partnership with HealthLink Dimensions to simplify the verification process with your practice. Please be on the lookout for an email from Healthlink Dimensions which will provide steps to complete your verification of your practice. Please ensure you add Healthlink Dimensions to your trusted sender list to ensure vital communication between your office and Healthlink Dimension is received. Working together, we ensure your patients — our members — can reach you quickly while we meet our compliance obligations.

If you have questions regarding grace periods, contact Customer Service using the phone number listed on the back of the member’s ID card.

Anthem Blue Cross and Blue Shield (Anthem) wants you to be able to communicate with your Anthem dental patients clearly and accurately. We offer a free language assistance program to make this easy for you. No advance notice is required, and all languages are supported.

To utilize Anthem language assistance services, contact us at the phone number listed on the member's identification card.

When you call, please be prepared to give the representative the dental patient’s identification number for eligibility verification, as well as your dental practice name and tax identification number. Upon verification of eligibility, the appropriate translator will be obtained and you will be connected to the language line for telephonic interpretation.

Anthem is writing to inform you of the following. We are required to obtain data on both dentists and front office staff who have completed culturally sensitive and anti-bias training in 2024, to remain in compliance with Colorado Insurance Regulation 4-2-80.

Anthem would like to remind you that we offer eLearning experiences. Access Anthem’s on-demand provider training hub (Provider Education and Training - Anthem [on24.com]) and select the My Diverse Patients icon. You can also type My Diverse Patients into your browser. The current continuing medical education course, My Inclusive Practice – Improving Care for LGBTQIA+ Patients, is offered to network providers and office staff and can be found at mydiversepatients.com.

Dental providers and facilities are required to review all member’s information to ensure no misrouted protected health information (PHI) is included. Misrouted PHI includes information about members that a provider or facility is not currently treating. PHI can be misrouted to providers and facilities by mail, fax, email, or electronic remittance.

Dental providers and facilities are required to immediately destroy any misrouted PHI or safeguard the PHI for as long as it is retained. In no event are providers or facilities permitted to misuse or re-disclose misrouted PHI. If providers or facilities cannot destroy or safeguard misrouted PHI, providers and facilities must contact Customer Service or call the number listed on the documentation received to report receipt of misrouted PHI.

Dental providers and facilities should review claims and documents carefully before submitting for payment to ensure that the member ID and name listed on the claim is accurate. Taking these additional steps will help eliminate explanation of benefits being sent to the wrong member and prevent HIPAA violations.

Welcome to Provider News, your new resource for dental communications from Anthem Blue Cross and Blue Shield (Anthem). This platform is designed with usability in mind, providing enhanced features such as the ability to search articles by key terms and organization of articles by category. You can also print articles or save them as PDFs, to share crucial information with your colleagues. This enhancement enables us to deliver essential updates to you in a more timely manner. We're thrilled to share this upgrade with you and look forward to the continued enhancement of our communications. Consider subscribing to our emails by selecting the “Subscribe to Email” button at the top right corner of this page to ensure you receive all updates in a timely manner. Please bookmark this page to ensure you can easily access the resources we post periodically.

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Tobacco use, smoking, smokeless tobacco, compressed dissolvable tobacco, cigars, pipes and water pipes, and electronic cigarettes, is a leading cause of preventable illness and death. The adverse oral effects of tobacco use include gingival recession, impaired healing, oral cancer, mucosal lesions, periodontal disease, and tooth staining.

The most effective clinical modalities for treating tobacco use and dependence are counseling, medication, and both in combination. We know that dental practices can provide an effective setting for recognition (finding patients that smoke and offering information about quitting), recommending that patients quit, assess willingness to quit, help with counseling and pharmacotherapy., and arrange for follow-up contact.

Cognitive behavioral therapy has been found to improve rates of cessation as do other nonpharmacological strategies (hypnosis and acupuncture). Pharmacological interventions, nicotine replacement therapy, as well as other medications (bupropion, varenicline, inhalers) have been found to be effective.

To get started with a program, dental offices will want to include a question about tobacco use as part of their medical/dental history to allow identification of tobacco users and to assess a willingness to quit. And Elevance Health Care can help through the Quitting Tobacco Roadmap Program available to Elevance Health Care medical members. Other resources can be found at the websites of the American Dental Association and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.