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Do I break the appointment or just deleted it?

The single biggest pain point in the dental practice is holes in the schedule. WhenWhat is the difference between breaking an appointment and deleting an appointment?” Just the other day I encountered an office that was leaving the missed appointments on the appointment book so they could track them. What happens in these situations is that the office has not had any formal training or been given any resources on the best practices for managing the appointment book so they just make up their own system for tracking missed appointments.
I write about keeping the schedule full, it is always a big clicker. One question I receive a lot is, “

Keeping your schedule full is a management system that needs to have a protocol in place so that the entire team knows what to do when a patient misses an appointment and what steps to take to fill that opening. Today, I would like to give you all some best practice tips on what to do with the appointment if the patient does not keep the scheduled appointment.

  • Move the appointment to the Unscheduled List if the patient does not reschedule and you want to follow up with the patient. If you do not want to lose the appointment details, then you can store the visit on the Unscheduled List for a short period of time so you can make a couple of follow-up calls. There are two ways to get an appointment onto the Unscheduled List
    • Wait/Will Call the appointment – Use this if the patient did not show and gave you adequate time to fill the open time. Some offices have a 24- to 48-hour no-show policy so, if the patient cancels outside of that policy, then I would use the wait/will call feature.
    • Break the appointment if the patient is a no-show or cancels inside of your cancellation policy. When you break the appointment, it will put a note on the Office Journal and track the missed appointment on the Family File for future reference.
  • Delete the appointment if you do not need to follow up with the patient and just want to remove the appointment off your appointment book. When you delete an appointment, it will only show up on the Audit Trail and this task can also be password-protected.


For more information on this topic and read other articles, click the links below . . . 
Keeping Your Hygiene Room Full . . . part 1 of 3
Keep Your Schedule Full Like a Pro

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What's the best way to block out my Appointment Book?

“I need to make sure my team knows where to schedule appointments because I feel like there is no organization with the schedule,” said a doctor during one of our recent training sessions. “What is the best way to block out our schedule so my team know where to put the correct type of appointment so we can be more productive and less stressed out?”

These were the exact words from a doctor who was trying to create a system for scheduling and didn’t know where to begin with setting some standards for his team. We talked about the different methods for blocking out the schedule inside of the Dentrix software so that he could make the best decision for his practice.
I have seen offices use both the Perfect Day Scheduling feature and the Events feature for mapping their schedule. Today, I wanted to give you some pros and cons for using these tools to help you make the best decision for your appointment book.
  • Perfect Day Scheduling is designed to map out the schedule and give you a guideline for your team so they can easily see what type of appointment goes in that place. The great thing about this feature is that you can place multiple blocks throughout the day and, once you set it up, it will be set up every day until you change the setup. You can set up different colors to symbolize different appointment types. One complaint I get from doctors is that you can easily schedule over the top of the Perfect Day Scheduling blocks. In my opinion, this is more about the discipline of the team member scheduling to the system than the system itself. If you want to read up more about Perfect Day Scheduling, CLICK HERE.
  • Using Events to map out your schedule can be done and it will fix the issue of not being able to schedule over the top of the block. With an event, the team member would have to delete the event in order to schedule an appointment. Events can be created to span over multiple days and you can set them in your appointment book for up to a year time frame. Just right click on the appointment book and click on Create Event. You can also set the Events in different colors to symbolize different types of appointments. 

Our goal here in The Dentrix Office Manager blog is to not only give you great tips and tricks, but also give you resources to make the best decisions for your practice.

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Medical Billing or Bust . . . spend your Friday afternoon with me at BDC

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Top 3 tips from my BDC course . . . "15 Ways to Make Scheduling Easier"

It is Business of Dentistry month and the countdown to August 17th has started. Since transitioning my own office to Dentrix in 2003, becoming a Certified Dentrix Trainer in 2006 and then accepting the position of the Dentrix Office Manager blogger in 2011, attending the Business of Dentistry Conference is at the top of the list. I love networking with other Dentrix users and offering any resources I can. It is extremely fulfilling.

This year, I am slated to teach seven courses over the two-day event and I wanted to give you a sneaky peek into one of them today. On Saturday, I will be teaching “15 Ways to Make Scheduling Easier” and I have no doubt this will be a great topic. This article will not go through all 15 things for you, but give you my top three items from my course and point you to some blogs that I have written in these areas.

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Dealing with crazy insurance limitations

Insurance plans are driving us crazy! The benefit coverage creations that some of these plans are coming up with are just ridiculous. Because of that, you have to figure out how to enter it into the computer system so you can give your patients the most accurate treatment plan estimate possible. Some plans will cover only gold crowns on molar teeth while others won’t pay for gold crowns at all. I was in a pediatric office recently and one thing they struggle with on a regular basis is the sealant coverage because it is different and all over the board.

With these tips today, hopefully you can customize your treatment plan estimates for a patient and use your Dentrix software in a more efficient way.

First, let’s look at when an insurance plan will pay for a procedure on one tooth but not another because of plan limitations or patient frequency limitations. There is a way you can override the insurance plan coverage table and payment table directly. When you are in the patient chart or the treatment planner, double click on the procedure code and it will open up the edit window. As a note, this is also where you could put a procedure note or refer it out to a specialist.


In the upper right section of this window, you will see an Override Dental Insurance Benefits. You can put a check mark in the Prim Ins and then the insurance coverage. If they have secondary, you can do the same thing. This technique also works well if you are estimating over two benefit years or if the crown is paid on the seat date or if there is a missing tooth clause.



The next tip is if a procedure is not covered at all on this plan and would apply to any tooth number or any patient on this plan. The best way to handle these types of situations is by using the Payment Table. The Payment Table overrides the Coverage Table and is great for things like posterior composite downgrades, nightguard coverage, grafting, etc.



This type of data would apply to any patient that is on this plan and is not patient specific. Remember that the Payment Table will override the Coverage Table.

For more articles on insurance and estimating, click on the titles below . . .

Insurance Co-Pay Plan setup
Insurance Estimates, make it as accurate as possible


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What happens if I back date a clinical note?

Your clinical note is part of your legal documentation for your patient’s chart. When I say, “legal documentation,” to me, this means that it cannot be deleted or altered without some kind of security feature in place. There are only a few places in Dentrix that I consider “part of the legal documentation” and the clinical note is one of those places. So what exactly happens to make it a secure place to make clinical notes and what happens if you need to edit a note or back date a note?

First, it is important to know that the clinical note will be locked into history if you sign the note or you run the month end process. If you need to alter the clinical note after it has been secured, the only way to do this is with an Addendum. The Addendum will attach itself directly to the original note with today’s date. After you have saved this Addendum, it is also locked up into history and cannot be altered or deleted. If you ever need to print out your patient’s clinical notes, you will see the date of entry and the date of the Addendum.

Now, there may be times when you will need to back date a note. For example, if the doctor comes in the office on the weekend to see a patient and he does not write up the clinical note on that day, he will need to back date the note. Another example might be if you forgot to write up your clinical note for a patient visit (we are all human) and you need to back date it. If you are back dating a clinical note into a month that has already been closed out, your note will automatically be secured into history. Also, if you back date a note, it will show the date it was created and the date it was backdated to. See image below.


Knowing how your clinical note documentation will present when printed is important to know if and when you need to show your clinical documentation. The Dentrix software does a great job to show the dates and times so you can feel confident in the integrity of your clinical documentation.


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Give your patients freedom to fill out forms from anywhere

Last week’s blog titled “How wide open is the back door ofyour practice?” talked about patient
retention and how to track it using the Practice Advisor report. I think it is important to track and monitor your numbers to know the health of your practice, especially your patient retention. You invest a lot into attracting new patients and I would expect the same or more from you to keep your existing ones.

One thing that comes to mind with both new patients and existing patients is the topic of patient forms. Nobody likes to fill out a form these days and the office struggles with the time it takes and scanning paper. Making the task of filling out forms more convenient, easy and faster for both the patient and the practice will help create happy, loyal patients.

Image if your patients could fill out their new patient forms from their mobile phone while they are sitting on their couch watching the MLB All-Star game this week or a patient of record updating his or her health history while sitting on a train during the commute to work. You don’t have to image this. It is reality.

While I was working with a practice recently, the office Wi-Fi was down so we did not have the opportunity to test the new electronic forms from the office website. With no Wi-Fi, every team member got on her mobile phone and filled out the new patient forms from her phone. It was amazing! We had team members ranging in age from 23 to 60 typing in information to submit.


In the newest version of Dentrix, the Questionnaire forms have been redesigned in an HTML format. This gives the patient more accessibility to the forms and gives the office better management of the forms. Don’t make your patients print a PDF from home and bring in a paper form that your team must scan. Give your patients the freedom to fill out patient information from anywhere.

CLICK HERE for more information on how to integrate electronic forms from Dentrix into your website, mobile device or tablet.

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