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.

• 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.

“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?”

• 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. 

1. You can now select Credit Card as a payment method for insurance payments. When you are applying an insurance payment to a claim, there is now a credit card option in the drop-down menu for payment type. Now, even though I recommend to all my offices to opt-out of credit card payments from insurance companies because you end up paying a 2.5 – 4% merchant fee which ultimately reduces your collections, Dentrix needed to add this feature to keep up with the ever-changing dental insurance landscape. I applaud them with this new feature. It will definitely help the practice balance the day sheet and keep the accounting straight.  Thank you Brad!
2. There is a new Payment Agreement Manager and it is located on the Ledger not the Office Manager. For the dental practice that takes a lot of payments and wants a report to only show the payment agreements in the practice, this could be helpful. If your practice is going to allow for payments, you need a way to track them. My favorite report continues to be the Collection Manager Report for managing all accounts receivable, including Payment Agreements, so I will be on the lookout for feedback on how this new report is working in the office.
3. The Payment Agreement Setup has also been updated so check that out as well. In my practice, we did about 25-30% of our practice production in ortho so we had many patients on Payment Agreements for their monthly ortho payment. This worked well. I created a special instruction sheet specifically on the ortho setup in Dentrix and if you would like a copy of it, please email me directly.

I remember when I attended my very first Business of Dentistry conference in 2006.  It was the first year I was a certified Dentrix trainer and I was super excited because my doctor agreed to tag along with me because it happened to be held at his favorite ski resort (so he could bail out if he got bored).  I remember Dr. Gordon Christensen was the keynote speaker that year and my doctor was so impressed with the entire event he never made it to the slopes (at least during class time).

Since 2006 I have never missed a Business of Dentistry Conference  (I would have serious FOMO) and this year will be no different.  This year I am teaching six courses over two days and I am super excited to be such a big part of this amazing event.

•  More Information Button – This feature is located on all Dentrix toolbars and you can also find it in the lower left corner of the schedule appointment window. Have you ever been on the phone with a mom and she wants to know when her three kids and husband are scheduled next for all their future appointments … but you’re not sure what’s the most efficient way to find all these appointments for the entire family? Or are you working in the Patient Chart and your patient asks you when her husband is due for his checkup but you really don’t want to leave the chart and figure out how to look for that information? Both of these scenarios can be completed using the More Information button. See the image below of the More Information window.

• Locate Existing Appointment - This seems to be a feature easily forgotten and so easy to use. It is, however, only found on the Appointment Book. Click on the icon and enter the first few letters of the last name and click on the >> to search. Then you will see a list for appointments for that patient or if he or she has a common last name, you may see other people listed here as well. You can click on one of the appointments and click on View. It will take you out to the appointment and highlight it for you to easily see.
• Other Appointments – You will find this quick button inside of the appointment and can be helpful if you have the patient’s appointment open. This can be helpful if you are looking to see if the patient has his or her next visit scheduled.

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.  

Don’t you just love this time of year . . . tax season!  Patients are calling in asking for a printout of

• Change the Beginning Balance Forward date to the beginning of the year reported and the Statement Date to the end of the report year
• Select the Guarantor family
• Set the Minimum Balance to Bill to 0
• Uncheck all options
• Clear out the Statement Message
• Uncheck Save as Default

• The dashboard will keep a running clock from the time the patient walks in the door to the time he or she walks out. This will give your team data on how often you are running late with patients. 
• When the patient is assigned to the doctor for treatment the timer can give you precise statistics so you will know exactly how long certain procedures take and you can adjust in your default time units, which could increase your production per hour.
• With the iWatch integration, the doctor will receive information about the patients currently waiting. The iWatch will send info such as medical alerts, today’s visit and last visit. 

What an amazing year it has been. The Dentrix Office Manager blog continues to grow and this year we topped over 17k page views each month . . . . thank you so much! Thank you for sharing your favorite posts with your friends and colleagues.

Enjoy the top 10!

1. Checking insurance benefits will suck the life out of you unless you change your system  Dental insurance benefits are the thorn in our side every day. Checking benefits, eligibility and maximums for our patients is a great benefit … and it also sucks the life out of us to the point where we don’t have time for other things during the day. There needs to be a balance between it being a customer service task and a hand-holding task. The insurance benefits belong to the patient. They do not belong to the practice and we need to put the verbal skills in place to help our patients understand this . . . 
2. Give your scanner a break . . . two ways to eliminate scanning  Does your front office have a basket over flowing with papers with a sign on it that reads “TO BE SCANNED?” No one in the office wants to touch it because it is one of those tedious tasks that no one wants to do … so it just grows and grows. I know how you feel and many practices I work with say that scanning is one of the biggest pain points they deal with every day . . .
3. Health History Update . . . it's about being prepared for anything  If your patient had a medical emergency and your team had to call 911, how long would it take you to pull up his or her most current medical history? Is the list of current medications and allergies buried among all your clinical notes or does your most recently scanned health history form have the words “no changes” all over it, forcing you to continue searching back to the next scanned document … only to find the words “no changes” all over this one as well. It’s not just about being prepared for an emergency … it’s about being prepared for anything . . .
4. Protect yourself from an insurance audit with proper documentation  Have any of you been noticing your X-rays being denied more frequently than usual or have you been subject to an insurance audit on excessive X-rays? It is happening and if you have not seen it yet, you will soon. I want you to be as prepared as possible when the insurance companies come knocking on your door . . .
5. Must Reads for Doctor, Assistant, Hygienist and Admin team  . . . So I thought for the holiday weekend I would put together a priority list for the doctor, hygienist, dental assistant and admin team.  Here are the top three posts in each category . . . 
6. Three tips for an accurate list of patients with unused insurance benefits  We have all heard the phrase “Garbage in, Garbage out.” This phrase comes into play especially when you and your team are trying to generate a list of patients who have unscheduled treatment and unused insurance benefits. Since this is typically the time of year when you want to start reminding patients to use or lose their unused insurance benefits, you want to make sure that this amount used is not a bunch of garbage . . . 
7. It's the little things . . .  It’s the little things that matter.  I hear that statement all the time being out in the dental industry working with dental practices from all over the country. I love it when I show clients something and their eyes light up because they now know something that is so simple but makes such a huge impact on their day . . .
8. Hygienists . . . you are one of the primary educators in the practice  We all know that research shows the systemic links between oral health and the rest of the body, especially the relationship between periodontal disease, cardiovascular disease, diabetes and respiratory disease. As oral health providers, it is our responsibility to educate our patients about the significance of periodontal disease and how it will affect the rest of their body . . . 
9. Accurate Family Balance or Accurate Patient Balance . . . you choose  In my last post, I talked about the fact that I love how many things in Dentrix can be customized to fit the needs of the practice, from the toolbars to colors on the patient chart. In addition to visual customizations, you can also change the way payments are handled in the ledger as they are applied to the providers and specific patients. You would think that every office would want to handle payments and track collections the same, but this is not the case . . . 
10. How to generate an Unscheduled Treatment Report for patients who have already said "Yes" to treatment.  Back in February, I wrote an article on using visual tools to help communicate the status of the treatment plan with your entire team. If you want to re-read it, CLICK HERE. If you have implemented some of these visual aids, did you know that you can filter one of the Treatment Plan reports to give you a narrower search?

With that being said, a blog topic idea came into my head while I was listening to Tammy Barker speak about Profitability Coaching and how her team spends quite a bit of time with their clients on making sure the data being displayed on the KPI reports is as accurate as possible. I share the same goal and want all of you to understand how to make sure your numbers are as accurate as possible.

• Case Acceptance – Dentrix can track your case acceptance accurately if your team manages the treatment plans appropriately. The way Dentrix tracks the monthly case acceptance is if the treatment is diagnosed and completed in the same month OR if your mark the case as accepted. For more about managing treatment plans, CLICK HERE.
• Production per day – This is entirely dependent on the setup of the appointment book. You must have your office days, provider days and hours set up accurately in order to get an accurate production per day number. I feel this number is more important than the production per month. To learn more about setting up the appointment to perfection, CLICK HERE.
• New Patients – Dentrix tracks new patients based on the first visit date located in the Family File. It also will count a patient as a new patient if this date is empty. The best way to track this on a daily basis is to use the Daily Huddle Report. If you want to read more about the Daily Huddle, CLICKHERE.
• Referrals – Your total new patients should match the total number of referral sources. This is important because you want to see where your patients are coming from and know how to spend your marketing dollars. For these two numbers to be accurate, the First Visit Date and the Referral Date must match. I wrote about this back in January and you can re-read it by CLICKING HERE.
• Active Patient Base – The active patient base on the Practice Advisor Report looks at the last visit date and how many patients have come in for an appointment within a certain amount of time. This one could get a little tricky for the office that posts a procedure code for things like missed appointments and other non-appointment tracking on the ledger. Every time you post something to the ledger with a procedure code, it will update the last visit date and now your Active Patient Base is updated. You can read more about this topic by CLICKING HERE.

Does your front office have a basket over flowing with papers with a sign on it that reads “TO BE SCANNED?” No one in the office wants to touch it because it is one of those tedious tasks that no one wants to do … so it just grows and grows. I know how you feel and many practices I work with say that scanning is one of the biggest pain points they deal with every day.

• Letters from specialists
• Treatment plan estimates
• Insurance EOBs and pre-estimates
• New patient forms
• Health history updates
• Consent forms
•  Letters to/from patients

1. “Send to the Dentrix Document Center” is the easiest, most efficient way to get a document into the Document Center without scanning. This can be used for anything you receive in an email, off a website (insurance breakdowns, EOBs, etc.) or as an attachment. You can also send all your treatment plan estimates to the Document Center using this feature and then have the patient sign in the Document Center using an electronic signature device. If your referring doctors are still sending their follow up letter in the mail, you can implement a way for them to send it to you via email and now you can send it to the Document Center without scanning. CLICK HERE for instructions on how this works.
2. Start using the Dentrix Questionnaire module for all in-house forms, including health history updates, all treatment consent forms, financial arrangement forms and updates to your HIPAA acknowledgement. You can use the Questionnaire Module without adding any expense for electronic services … all you will need is a signature pad. You can print out your consent forms and have them laminated so the patient can read them in a paper form. After that, have the patient sign in the Questionnaire or just pull the form up on your monitor for him or her to read. It is so easy. CLICK HERE to learn how to create a new form.

• If your practice is using Route Slips or Patient Visit Forms, then you will see the additional provider in the Appointment Details section of the form.
• Back in (I think) Dentrix G3, they added the Hover. When you let your mouse sit over the top of the appointment, it will pop up a window that will give you more information about the patient such as his or her picture, birthdate, insurance info, etc. One of these new pieces of info in the Hover is the Additional Provider.
• You can add the Additional Provider to the View. From the Appointment Book, click on View from the top toolbar, and select the view you want to edit, then on the right side you will see a bunch of drop-down menus for Appointment Display Info. Here you can select the Additional Provider to show on the appointment book view so you can see visually on every appointment.
  

1. Super Efficient with Templates - For all the Dentrix users, I want to give you some help when it comes to building templates, which can be a huge time-saver in your office. Here are some of my favorite template tips.
2. How to Read Your Clinical Notes - With more offices every day transitioning from paper charts to electronic charting, we need to find the most efficient ways to not only document in the clinical record and view the information without having to click all over the place.
3. Top Five Reports Every Doctor Should Read - I received an e-mail from a doctor the other day who had a situation that needed attention. Her clinical team had started posting procedures in the patient chart and had accidentally posted a root canal as “complete” rather than “existing.”

1. What is the Status of the Lab Case?  Do any of these lab-related scenarios ever happen in your office?
2. How to Chart a Supernumerary Tooth - Our patients walk in with some unusual situations, but one of the more common situations I see is an extra tooth or Supernumerary Tooth. 
3. Health History Update, being prepared for anything - If your patient had a medical emergency and your team had to call 911, how long would it take you to pull up his or her most current medical history? 

1. Oops, the wrong tooth was removed from the chart - Have you had a patient in your chair for his or her 6-month checkup and, while you are perio charting, you notice that the wrong tooth is missing. 
2. Hygienists, you are one of the primary educators in the practice - We all know that research shows the systemic links between oral health and the rest of the body, especially the relationship between periodontal disease, cardiovascular disease, diabetes and respiratory disease.
3. Where do I Make Notes - Do you ever find yourself searching endlessly for the patient’s most recent list of medications? What if the doctor wants to know if the patient has any allergies before the anesthetic is administered?

1. Can you write me an excuse note for school?
2. Get Creative with your ASAP List - I was working with an office recently and they have a program specifically for patients who do not pre-appoint. These patients are mostly retired and have very flexible schedules. 
3. Are you a Stickler for Accurate Numbers - How often does a patient call and ask, “What is my balance?” If it is a single patient ledger, the answer is relatively simple. But what if a mother of five calls and asks for each of her kid’s balances? 

• When you print out the eligibility benefits from eCentral for the patient, I would highlight a few key pieces of information (insurance company phone number, maximum and coverage percentages).
• Hand the patient the printed copy of his or her benefits and say something like, “I took the liberty of checking on your dental benefits for you and here is what we received from your plan. Notice I have highlighted some of the important things about your plan. One thing I want to point out is that if there is a procedure you need that is not on this print out, then we don’t know how much your insurance company will pay so we estimate zero.”
• Let patients know if they would like more details about their plan, you highlighted the insurance company’s phone number for them.

• Fig 1 shows how you can choose a Case Status. You can select all the cases you have marked as accepted and get a call list from this selection. If you have been reading my blog for a while, you know how much I love the Treatment Manager. However, it does not have this filter (which I think is a great tool).
• Fig 2 shows how you can select a Case Severity. If you are marking your cases as Immediate, Eventual or Optional, then you can filter your report by one of these choices.