may have a team of 5 or a team or 25, but you all have one thing in common … Post-it notes and messages everywhere. Almost every front office I walk into has colored Post-it notes all over the desk and almost every doctor has piles of charts on his or her desk. I hope you all have stock in the 3M company for all the colored sticky notes you use. Let’s figure out a way to clean this all up.

1. My favorite option is to use the Office Journal for communicating with your team. Did you know that not only every patient has an Office Journal but every team member as well? You can create your own TO-DO list or put a task on someone else’s TO-DO list. What if your doctor needs to write you a narrative or phone in a new RX for a patient? What if you need to remember to call a patient back in April or send in your doctor’s license renewal by June 1^st. Putting a Reminder on the Office Journal will solve all of this.
1. If it is regarding a patient, open the patient’s Office Journal and add a new entry. Add it as a Reminder, give it a due date, put in the provider ID that you are assigning this message to, enter a description and a note. Click OK. Now this message will show up on the patient’s Office Journal and the team member you assigned to.
2. Now, if it is a message you just want to send to one of your team members, go to the Office Manager and open the Office Journal. Now it will ask you for a provider ID and you can select the team member you want to send a message to. Put it as a Reminder, enter a date, description and your message. Click OK.
3. The Office Journal can be set up to open automatically when you log in your workstation in the morning. Go to the Office Manager > Maintenance> Practice Setup > Preferences > and then check mark Automatically Launch Office Journal. I would recommend filtering your Office Journal so it will load faster. To do this, click on View at the top of the Office Journal and click on Filters, then select Reminders and give it a beginning balance date and click on Save as Default.
2. You can use the Appointment Note as a TO-DO list for the entire office. This note is located in the upper left corner of the Appointment Book and it is just a blank piece of paper you can make notes on. Think of it as a big sticky note.
3. The third option for Intra-Office Communications is to use the Dentrix integrated IM system, Dentalink. You can set up Dentalink and send messages back and forth from workstations to alert team members of things happening. If the hygienist is running behind, he or she can send an IM up to the front alerting them. Or maybe the front office wants to send a message to the doctor’s office workstation. These IM messages show up as a “bubble” in the lower right of the workstation and are good for today only.  

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