New Dubai Insurance Standards: All You Need To Know About Dental Coverage

This year, Dubai Health Authorities introduced a new legal framework that obligates all local insurance companies to offer a list of new services, including dentistry, in the standard coverage package.

All these changes have had a significant effect on the emirate's healthcare industry, and in this article, we have collected all recent news and experts' opinions regarding this matter.

What happened?

Dubai Health Authorities extended the range of mandatory benefits in health insurance, aiming to create more comprehensive services, including dental care, psychiatric services, organ transplants, and dialysis coverage. According to local media, most insurance companies in the emirate revised their basic plans, raising premiums by an average of 20%.

What do documents say?

According to DOH's Essential Benefits Plan – the list of mandatories for every insurance company in the emirate – coverage of dental treatment procedures is limited up to 500AED annually, which includes:

Dental consultations
Extractions
Fillings
Root canal treatment
Scaling
X-rays
antibiotics and prophylaxis

Outpatient care coverage includes a 30% coinsurance per visit that the patient should pay. Also, there is no coinsurance for the follow-up visit, which will be made within the next week.

Still, a list of exclusions within dental services, such as dental prostheses, orthodontic treatment, and cosmetic and aesthetic procedures, is not mandatory for coverage, according to the Essential Benefits Plan.

What do experts think?

Most industry executives optimistically characterized the new DHA requirements. For instance, Moin ur Rehman – a director of Unitrust Insurance Broker company – suggested that only about 75% of insurance firms will revise their prices, as some of the presented insurers already have dental coverage.

In turn, Avinash Babur – CEO of Insurancemarket.ae platform – noted that soon after the law was enacted, some companies changed their premiums by 10-15%, so a rise of about 20% is a situational targeted adjustment.

What does it mean for dental service providers?

New Dubai Health Authorities standards are highly likely to increase the average number of dental clinic patients, as a wide range of necessary services are now included in all insurance packages. Still, that means that Dubai clinics should improve their billing practices to account for new coverage rates.

For that purpose, we recently released a novel digital tool that will help you automatically handle insurance billing in a few simple clicks. This feature is built into our web-based EMR system: register an insurance company, attach it to the particular patient, and you are ready to go—you can bill any invoice with coverage simply as if you were making it with a card or cash!

Schedule a demo to try the feature and read our Newsfeed to learn more insights about dental clinic management:

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