Front Office Professional
The first call through recall, plus the insurance, coding and privacy knowledge the desk actually needs to get right.
Why this one
The front desk decides how much of the schedule gets filled, how much gets collected, and how many patients come back. This covers the whole loop rather than the scripts alone, including the billing and privacy rules that create real exposure when they go wrong.
Who it is for
Front desk staff, schedulers, treatment coordinators and office managers
What you will be able to do
The exam is written against this list. Nothing on it is decorative.
- Handle a first call, a full schedule, and a difficult conversation at the desk
- Read a plan, build an honest estimate, and explain a bill a patient disputes
- Code and document cleanly, and work a denial through to an appeal
- Read a chart well enough to talk to a clinician about it
- Recognise a privacy obligation before it becomes an incident
- Read a contracted fee schedule and say what a plan is really paying the practice
The curriculum
5 courses, 28 lessons. Take them in any order. Every lesson you finish anywhere on the site counts here automatically.
Front Office Fundamentals
The first call through recall: scheduling, verification, checkout, collections, and hard conversations.
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Dental Insurance and Billing 101
How plans work, fee schedules, coding, claims, denials and appeals, and running A/R.
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Dental Terminology and Charting
Tooth numbering, surfaces and directions, the anatomy behind the vocabulary, reading a chart, procedure and specialty terms, and charting cleanly in the software.
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HIPAA and Patient Privacy for Dental Practices
What HIPAA covers in a dental office, the Security Rule in practice, business associates, patient rights and requests, and being ready for a breach.
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Insurance Credentialing and Fee Schedules
Getting credentialed and staying that way: what a contract actually decides, the application and CAQH, reading a fee schedule, negotiating or dropping a plan, and keeping providers current.
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The final exam
This is what separates the certification from a stack of completion records.
Locked until the coursework is done
All 28 lessons have to be recorded complete before the exam will open. There is no skip.
Drawn from 112 questions
Your paper is 30 questions pulled at random from the entire pool, across all 5 courses. The answer order is shuffled too.
Timed, 40 minutes
Long enough to think, short enough that you cannot look everything up as you go.
80% to pass, fresh paper on a retake
Retakes are unlimited and free, and each one draws a new set of questions from the pool. After a failed attempt you get every missed question back with the answer and an explanation, so a retake is a second read rather than a second guess.
Checking your progress in this browser.
What the certificate is, and what it is not
It is a record that you worked through 28 lessons and then passed a 30-question comprehensive exam at 80% or better, with a reference code that stops matching if the name, program, date or score is changed after it is issued. It is reasonable to put on a resume, in a personnel file, or in front of an employer who asks what you actually know about how the front desk actually runs.
It is not continuing education credit, a licence, or a state credential. ChairsideSource is not accredited by any dental board or professional body and holds no CE provider status, so this carries no CE hours. There is no proctor and there are no accounts, which means the certificate records that the exam was passed in this browser, not who was sitting at it. Anyone reading it can check the code at the verification page, and that page says the same thing.
Being straight about that is the point. A certificate that claims more than it can back would be worth less than one that claims exactly what it is.
This guide is educational content and does not constitute legal, financial, tax, or clinical advice. Laws and regulations vary by state and change over time. Consult your own dental-specific attorney, CPA, and state dental board before acting.