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How wide open is the back door of your practice?

How wide open is the back door to your practice? I asked this question to a doctor during one of our training sessions because he was so convinced that his patients did not leave his practice. He knew that his patients were scheduling their next visit and loyal to his practice. This practice was very successful and had very good production and collection numbers … but they were totally in the dark about what their patient retention number was.

I opened their eyes with the click of a button . . . okay, maybe three clicks.

When we opened the Practice Advisor Report during the training session, our entire agenda went out the window and we started down a completely different path. Patients were pre-scheduling their next visit at a rate of 54% and the patient retention was at 66%. I thought the doctor was going to fall off his chair.

Numbers tell a story and monitoring your key performance indicators is a must when running a small business. Remember, your dental practice is a small business. Dentrix and a group of dental practice management consultants put their heads together many years ago and developed the Practice Advisor Report to help you monitor these KPIs. One of the most important numbers comes on page 3 of the report.

From the Office Manager, click on Analysis > Practice Advisor Report. Click on Practice Advisor Report and it will open up a new window. Here are my recommendations when you are ready to look at the numbers for your patient retention.

Select the last day of the previous month in the Generate Report as of:
Select Procedure Date for more accurate numbers
Highlight your active providers
In the Continuing Care section, select only your recare continuing care types (Prophy, Perio, Recare, etc). Do not select X-rays or anything that doesn’t relate to recare.
Click Preview and it will launch the report

The Patient Retention is located on the third page titled Continuing Care. You can see the image below to get a visual of what it looks like. For more information on this topic, CLICK HERE to be directed.

Now if you have never set up this report before, I can send you an info sheet that outlines my recommendations or we can setup an online training session. Email me directly for either option. You can also check out other blogs about the Practice Advisor within this blog.

Your Own Personal Practice Management Consultant

The 5 Stats Every Office Should Monitor

Credit Card option for Insurance payments just added in Dentrix G6.4 release

If you haven’t heard already, Dentrix G6.4 was recently released and there are few new features that are worth bragging about. I upgraded my system a couple of weeks ago and checked out the new features in my demo database. I love how Dentrix is staying relevant to the changing industry and giving the team features that they are asking for.

There have been many improvements to the functionality of the Ledger. When you are dealing with money, insurance and A/R, it is always important to have the most efficient and user-friendly systems as possible. Here are the new highlights to the Ledger . . .

There are also many fixes from previous releases and little tweaks to features that had been released previously. For the complete rundown, there is a Dentrix 6.4 release guide that I can send you or you can find it in the Dentrix Resource Center.

Avoid the awkward moment of not having the lab case

Joe walks in for his scheduled appointment to deliver his nightguard and your dental assistant escorts Joe to the treatment room, puts his bib on and lets him know she would be right back to deliver his nightguard. Ashley goes back to the lab area to locate Joe’s nightguard only to find that his nightguard is not at the office. She frantically calls the lab to find out where Joe’s nightguard is and the response is, “We can have it to you by tomorrow.” Well, that’s not good enough. You need it today. How did this happen? Where was the breakdown in communication?

This common situation can be avoided with a couple tweaks in your system. Your Dentrix software can help you track both the patient appointment and the lab case.

Any time the patient has an impression for something, there will need to be a delivery or seat appointment scheduled. Either the patient will be scheduled or the patient will wait for your call to schedule when the case comes in. When you create the appointment, make sure to include all the details of the appointment and attach the lab case to the appointment. For all the details of how to use the Lab Case Manager, refer back to my blog called “What is the Status of the Lab Case?”

If the patient is scheduling, you are good to go and you will see an icon with a blue L with a white background on the appointment so you can easily see if the case is in the office or still out. When the lab case is set as received, the icon will turn into a white L with a green background.

Now, if the patient is not scheduling, then I would recommend doing all the above steps … except put the appointment on the Wait/Will Call list so you have a way of tracking the appointment. This will hold the appointment on the Unscheduled List so you have a way of keeping track of it. For more information on the Unscheduled List, please click here.

Good tracking systems will ensure that your patients don’t walk in for an appointment when your team is not prepared and will avoid those awkward moments when you have to let Joe know that he will have to reschedule to another day.

Help your hygienists monitor their own goals

If you listen to a hygiene coach or consultant speak about numbers during a conference presentation, you may hear some industry standards like hygiene production needs to be 30% of practice production or they should be producing three times their salary. You will need to discover what the goals are for your hygiene department and help them reach those goals. Today, I want to help you with some tools inside Dentrix to help your hygienists monitor their goals.

Once you know what each hygienist’s individual monthly goal is, I would recommend entering those goals in the computer so your team can monitor those goals. You can enter the goal for each hygienist from the Office Manager > Analysis > Setup > Goals and select the provider ID to add the monthly goal. I would recommend adding in the goals for the entire year if you have that information available and you know everyone’s vacation schedule.

Now you can start using some of the amazing tools available in Dentrix to monitor the goals. One of my favorite ways is also a favorite for the hygienist because he or she doesn’t have to run a report. This is super easy and really helps to see the goal versus the scheduled versus the actual in a super easy to use view on the appointment book. From the appointment book, click on view at the top of the page then you can click on Add or Edit to change the view. You will need to change two things in order to see the production goal: Select the provider ID and make sure there is a check mark in View Amount. If you only want to show one provider’s goals at a time, then only select one provider for your view. Then when you click on the monthly calendar in the upper left corner of the appointment book, you will see it calculate the goal, scheduled production and actual production for that provider you selected in the view.

The next tool you can use is the Daily Huddle Report. This report will also add up the goal, scheduled production and actual production based on the provider IDs you select in your filters for the report. You can use this report as part of your morning huddle or each provider can look at it on a daily basis to see how he or she is doing for the month.

I strongly believe that the hygiene department is a highly integral part of the practice and should be held to the same accountability for production as the doctor. They just need some helpful tools to help bring awareness to the numbers.

Don't get caught with FOMO

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.

CLICK HERE to learn more

Use my promo code when you register

BDC2017JOHNSON

Referral Coordinators . . . tracking your gift baskets is super easy

Last week, I was talking directly to the referring doctor coordinators who work in specialty practices. I detailed an idea of how to keep track of your referral slips that come in and the patient does not have an appointment. If you want to re-read it, CLICK HERE because this article ties right into it.

How are you tracking your gratuities to your referring docs? Do you have a manual spreadsheet that you use to track the amazing gift baskets and coffee mugs you give away? What if you could track it in your Dentrix software, see the analysis and view it on the Referred By report? Let’s find out how.

When you enter the referral source in the patient’s family file, you also have the opportunity to add the gratuity here. Click on the Referred By on the Family File and then click on the Analysis. Here you can click on the Add Gratuity and either select the gratuity or add a new one. When you click on the Analysis again, you will see a list of all the gratuities this referring source has received over their history of working with you.

When you run a Referred By Doctor/Other report, the gratuity will also show on this report. Having all the information about your referring doctors, gratuities and knowing where to find the referral slip at your fingertips is so important to your specialty practice. Your practice management system can help you with almost everything. It just needs you to input the data.

CLICK HERE for other articles on referral management.

Referral coordinators at specialty practices - this one is for you

I was recently working with an oral surgery practice and a periodontal office and learned something that the general dental practice usually does not have to manage . . . patients being referred into the practice without an appointment. Now, in a general practice, you would need to manage patients being referred out of the practice to these types of specialists, but let’s look at things from the specialty practice point of view.

At both of these offices, the referral coordinators had an accordion file filled with referral slips of patients who had been referred to their office but have not scheduled. They both had a good system. However, both of these offices are in the process of going paperless and we were looking at systems for managing these patients inside of the Dentrix software.

Here is what we came up with . . .

When you go paperless, you will use the Document Center a lot for paper storage. Now some of you know that every patient has a Document Center because you have been using it for a while, but did you know that every provider has a Document Center as well? Yep, you can scan and store documents inside of your own Document Center and eliminate a lot of paper that floats around on your desk.

So, for these two offices, I recommended using this feature and also attaching the document to the referring doctor for easier tracking. Then, when a patient calls, they can go to their Document Center (or the provider you choose to use) and then search documents attached to a particular referring source and get a list. Then, when the patient schedules and they open the Family File, they can attach the referral slip to the patient and that document has now been linked up without having to scan it again.

Go to the Office Manager > Document Center > select the provider you want to use for holding these documents and then scan the referral slip and put it in the correct folder. I would recommend putting the patient name in the description field. You can now shred these referral slips and clean up your desk.

For more information on the Document Center, CLICK HERE.

Welcome to 2017 . . . update fees and keeping your reports accurate

It’s a new year! Welcome to 2017! It’s time to think about new insurance benefits, fee schedule updates and making sure that all your reports are up to date. There is a lot going on at the beginning of the year that we need to plan for and make sure your practice is running like a well-oiled machine.

First, let’s tackle the new insurance benefits. Now, not all insurance benefits renew in January but most still do and it is important to keep your insurance as accurate as possible so you can keep your accounts receivable in check. The insurance benefits used is updated and reset back to zero at the time you run the month end process.

It might be time to do a fee increase in your practice or maybe one of your contracted PPO plans has sent you an updated fee schedule (wishful thinking I know) that you need to update. If this is the case, then go to the Office Manager > Maintenance > Reference > Fee Schedule Maintenance. Now you can select the fee schedule you want to update and choose the appropriate process you want to complete. If you are going to update your office fees by a set percentage, then highlight the fee schedule name and click on auto updates and enter the details. If you have a PPO fee schedule plan that you need to update certain procedure codes, then highlight the fee schedule and click on View/Update. Then edit the procedure codes one at a time.

Now, the last thing I want to really hit home is how important it is to run your December month end so that your management reports are as accurate as possible. The month end routine will move your ending balance from the previous month into the beginning balance of the new month, so if you need to know what your A/R is at the end of December for accounting purposes this is extremely important. The easiest way to check your accounts receivable is to look at the Practice Analysis from the Office Manager > Analysis > Practice and then looking at the YTD ending balance. This ending balance will not be accurate if you have not performed month end.

Looking for an amazing year! Thank you for being a loyal reader of my blog.

New Associate? Get the setup right from the start

Do you have a new associate in your practice and not quite sure how to make sure the provider settings are correct? Let me help.

There are a couple of settings that you need to make sure are correct to avoid any delayed claims, rejected claims and provider payment allocation. Depending on if your new associate is paid on production or collection will determine how you should setup your default payment allocation. Also, it is important to know how Dentrix looks at the provider with some of the management reports.

The first thing you will set up is the provider ID in the Practice Resource Setup. This is where you will enter the NPI, Tax ID, DEA and provider license number. The doctor’s personal (Type I NPI) number will go here and the office tax ID number.
After you have the provider setup finished, then double check that the claim is set up the way you want it. The claim setup in located in the Practice Defaults, go to the Office Manager > Maintenance > Practice Setup > Practice Defaults. This is where you want to double check that the Billing/Pay To Provider and the Rendering/Treating Provider is set up the way you want it. The information here makes up the bottom two boxes on your insurance claim form and the insurance companies use this information to know who to send the check to and if the rendering provider is a contracted provider.
Depending on how your associate is being paid may prompt you to double check your default payment allocation setup. Go to the Office Manager > Maintenance > Practice Setup > Preferences and look in the upper left corner of this window to see how it is set up now. There are four choices and you can read a blog I wrote recently about these options by CLICKING HERE. If your new associate is being paid on collections, this is going to be extremely important.

The above list are the critical things to makes sure the billing and claim form is set up correctly for your doctors.

You will also need to setup your new provider with the appointment days, hours and a special color for the appointment book. You can read more about how to set up the appointment for your new doctor by CLICKING HERE.

Why do I need to run Month End?

January is right around the corner and that means we are coming up on Year End. I get asked a lot of questions about what the process is this time of year. Is there a special report I should run? Is there anything I need to know about running Year End? The fact is there is nothing different to running Year End as there is to running Month End.

Month End is a very important process to keeping your system running smoothly and making sure all your data is as accurate as possible. It is also a very important security feature and should not be ignored. I am surprised how many offices have not run a Month End for months, or even years. Let’s go through exactly what the Month End process does so you have a clear understanding of how important it is.

The Month End process does four main things . . .

It will age your account balances. This will move your current balance into 30 days, 30 days into 60 and so on. On many reports, including the Provider A/R Totals report, it will move your ending accounts receivable balance into the beginning balance for the new month.
Your ledger for that month will now be placed into history, which means that you cannot edit or delete anything on the patient’s ledger. You will need to make an adjustment if you want to fix something on the ledger.
The Month End will lock up any clinical notes that have not been signed so there can be no editing to your clinical documentation. If you need to change a clinical note, you can do an addendum.
It will reset any insurance benefit used back to zero if the insurance plan is scheduled to renew. This becomes very important for your December Month End because so many plans renew in January.

For more information about the Month End process, please check out these other blog posts.

CLICK HERE for some sample reports to run

Mining for Gold - the 3 reports for searching unscheduled treatment

When I worked in a dental practice, we still had paper charts until 2009 when I helped my practice transition to a paperless environment. This means that we had a ton of treatment sitting in these paper charts that we had to search for manually in order to find patients who were unscheduled. It was an extremely time-consuming process but it is what we had to do in order to keep our doctor’s schedule full.

When you are working in a chartless environment and all your treatment plans are sitting in the computer, you still must follow up with patients who are not scheduled … but the process is much more streamlined. What I love about computer data is that it is all trackable and you can filter it onto a report. I call it “Mining for Gold.”

In Dentrix, there are actually three reports for you to use to track down unscheduled treatment to follow up with patients. I do have a favorite but I will let you decide for yourself what works best in your practice.

The Unscheduled Treatment Plan Reporthas been in Dentrix forever and it is what I used back in the olden days. This report gives you information on unscheduled treatment but you have to print it in order to work it and it can be very lengthy. Also, we have to remember that every time we print a report, things will change quickly and then your report is obsolete. To find this report, go to the Office Manager > Reports > Lists > Unscheduled Treatment Plans.
The Practice Treatment Case Report is also a printed report but you can filter it by very specific data points that you cannot find in other reports. What I like about this report is that you can search for treatment that has been Accepted, Rejected or Proposed if you are marking your cases with this status. This is good information for your doctor to see. In this report, you can also search by the case severity if you are using the stop light feature (for more information on this, CLICK HERE). This report can only be found on the Patient Chart and Treatment Planner modules. Click on the printer icon as if you were printing a treatment plan estimate, but instead click on Practice Treatment Case Report. Then select the parameters you want and click OK.
The Treatment Manager Report This is by far my favorite report in Dentrix. It offers you a way to search for patients with unscheduled treatment and create your own interactive spreadsheet where you can resort the columns to organize the report any way you want. You also do not have to print this report because everything you need to follow up with the patient is at your fingertips. For more details about using this report, refer to the blog I wrote called “Holes in your Doctor’s Schedule?” and learn more.

“Mining for Gold” is my motto when it comes to looking for patients with unscheduled treatment. You need to be proactive when it comes to following up with patients. You cannot expect them to pick up the phone and call you. Keeping your schedule full is something that requires a little bit of work from you. I hope these report options help make the task a little more efficient.

Personal goals = personal growth = practice success

Did one of my recent articles get you thinking about planning for the end of the year? I talked about how you can make adjustments in your appointment book to make room for those last-minute new patients who are trying to get in before the end of the year so you can make your new patient goal number. I also discussed how you can forecast your appointment book production numbers to see if you are coming up short for your production goals. If you would like to re-read this article, CLICK HERE to be redirected.

These practice goals are not only important, but they are critical to the health of the office overhead and the stress level of the team. But what about you? What are your personal goals? When I was working in a practice, I got my hands on as much CE as I could handle. Do you know what goal I think you could set and accomplish by the end of the year? You could become a Dentrix Master and receive a certificate to prove it. This could be your personal end of the year goal.

Clinical CE is great and, for some of you in the dental practice, it is a requirement in order for you to maintain your license. Your entire day revolves around your practice management software and most offices have zero training or continuing education for the software you use every day. You all must maintain a certain level of knowledge of Dentrix in order to function on a daily basis. I am asking you to up your game and not just function, but excel. Become a Dentrix Master.

It’s easy to start and extremely rewarding to finish. The Dentrix Mastery Tracks were launched to help you learn more about your software, things you might not know exist and things you want to learn more about. This is your chance to set a personal goal and help your office at the same time. I believe in you.

Your first test is free!

To get started CLICK HERE and Create New User. Then enter code FreeTestDOM

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.

How do you make sure your unused insurance benefits is a number you can count on?

Here are three tips . . .

Make sure you are up to date on month end. One of the many tasks that the month end procedure will tackle is resetting the insurance benefits used back to zero. I was in a practice a couple of months ago and one reason they have never been able to trust their treatment plan estimates is because they had not performed a month end since 2009. RUN MONTH END!
When you are setting up the insurance plan, make sure that the benefit renewal date is set accurately. Open the Insurance Data window. About halfway down, there is a benefit renewal date. Make sure this is accurate.
Update the patient’s insurance amount used if he or she has gone to a specialist or used benefits at another practice. Open the deductibles tab in the insurance window and manually update the benefits used. This way, when you search for a list of patients with remaining insurance benefits, you will get an accurate list.

For more information on how to run the reports and exports the lists, check out these past articles.

Unused insurance benefits . . . it's now more than a once a year project

5 Ways to trust the data on the Practice Advisor Report

Last week, I had the honor of attending the Henry Schein Practice Solutions

consultant summit. It is a time every two years where dental consultants and industry leaders get together with the Henry Schein team and discuss the challenges the dental practice is facing and what lies ahead in the future. This helps the R&D department work on enhancements to the many products and services we use every day in our dental practice. It is one of the most amazing brainstorming sessions I have ever attended. It is also a lot of fun.

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.

There are five key numbers on the Practice Advisor that are critical to the health and success of your practice. Your team needs to know what they do in the software affects the outcome of these statistics.

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.

This topic of accurate numbers and learning to trust your reports is so important. It is one of the most requested topics I get and one of the most-asked questions I receive from Dentrix users.

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.

Dentrix is by far the most comprehensive and feature-rich practice management software in the industry and this is why it is the leading software for dentists. However, when a keystroke or menu maneuver helps you do something better, faster and easier, it is HUGE.

Here are some of the top “Ah-Ha” moments I have seen over my career as a certified Dentrix trainer.

Printing the full day of Route Slips or sorting them. When I walk into an office and I see in the Batch Processor 30-60 single Route Slips being printed, I know this office does not know how to print out the whole day at one time. There are two ways to accomplish this . . .

Office manager > Reports > Lists > Daily Appointment List > check mark Patient Route Slips and send to the Batch. From this menu, you can also sort by provider or operatory.
You can also print the Route Slips within the Daily Huddle Report.

Filter the Office Journal. If you have been reading my blog, you know how much I love the office journal and I recommend all teams use it for admin communication with patients. However, I find that a lot of offices refuse to use it because it takes so long to load. Good news! You can filter your office journal so it will load less information and speed it up. Open the office journal and click on View and then Filters. Here you can select only the information you want to list in your view and you can select a starting date so it doesn’t look back to the beginning of time.
Lock your computer with a CTRL + ALT + DEL and select LOCK COMPUTER when you leave your workstation. This way, you do not have to close down all your Dentrix windows to secure your computer.

Let me know what some of your “Ah-Ha” moments are. I would love to hear your stories and quick tips to share. You can comment on this post or email me directly.

The Thriving Dentist with Gary Takacs - podcast

Practice management software is a critical element in every thriving practice. Yet many Dentists and Team Members are only using a small fraction of the capabilities of their practice management software. In this Thriving Dentist Show, Gary interviews his friend Dayna Johnson on specific tips to optimize your dental practice management software. Dayna is an authority on this subject and passionate about helping her colleagues. In this interview, Gary and Dayna discuss; Why many dental offices are still using a paper chart, the four specific benefits of converting to digital records, the three key elements of a successful paperless transition, important security tips, a fool proof back up system and the five most important statistics that every office should monitor with their practice management software.

CLICK HERE to be directed to the podcast

Why don't my reports show the same numbers . . . grrrrrr!

“I have pulled up three different reports trying to find out what my accounts receivable number is and they all have different numbers,” says Nichole from a client office in New York. Renee from a different office states, “I have a patient who has a $6,000 balance and she has never received a statement and she did not show up on my collection report.” Sound familiar? I know these situations can be frustrating and it is easy to blame the software for differences in reporting. However, I want to take you through a few check points to make sure you are getting similar data on different reports and also walk you through what is different on reports.

If you have been reading my blog for a while, you know that my favorite report for managing your accounts receivable is the CollectionManager. There are some things to know about the Collection Manager Report . . .

This report only shows positive accounts receivable so if you are trying to compare it to an Aging Report or the Practice Analysis snapshot, you will not get the same numbers. The Aging Report can be filtered to show all balances, positive balances or credits, and, if you have a lot of credit balances, these two reports could show very different bottom line numbers.
The Collection Manager can be filtered down a lot to give you a very specific report or a very broad report and, depending on how you are matching it up to another A/R report, if you don’t select the same parameters, you will get different numbers.

If you are looking at the snapshot Practice Analysis report (Office Manager > Analysis > Practice), then you will also get a different ending balance depending on a few things . . .

This snapshot is affected by month end so, depending on if you are up to date with month end, will determine how accurate this number is and if it will match up to any other A/R report.
This Analysis snapshot cannot be filtered by billing type … so if you have balances in billing types like “Sent to Collection,” this will affect this number.
This report is only run by Entry Date (you cannot change this). If you are running any of the other A/R reports by Procedure Date, then you will get different numbers.

Most of the accounts receivable and collection management reports can be filtered by different parameters to give you different numbers. Here are the most common troubleshooting tips to check if you are matching up reports.

Did you select the same providers?
Did you select the same billing types?
Did you choose Entry Date or Procedure Date?
What aging category did you select?
Are you selecting the same date range or ending date?
Were there any other boxes that were checked that might have filtered out a particular patient from one report over another? In the first paragraph, I had an office questioning why a particular patient did not show up on the Collection Manager Report. It was because she had checked “If not billed since” on the filters so this particular patient had been excluded.

Hopefully this will help you understand how different each report is and why they might give you different numbers. Numbers tell a story and it is important to have as accurate report as possible.

Inactivating providers and team members . . . is it still on the back burner?

Does it drive you crazy scrolling through the list of providers every time you are trying to schedule an appointment when ¾ of them no longer work at your practice? How about when it is time to print out your payroll reports and you are having to sort through a list of team members who have been gone for years? Would you like to clean all this up but not sure really how to do it or what ramifications it will have on your system?

Inactivating providers and team members is one of those tasks put on the back

burner and then just piles up for the next person to remedy. I think one reason it doesn’t get done is that all workstations have to be closed out of Dentrix in order for you to perform this task. My recommendation would be to do it at the same time you run month end since you have to dismiss everyone out of Dentrix for this task as well.

Once you are ready to inactivate some providers, then you get stuck because you have to choose a replacement. What does this mean? Who do I choose? Here are the most important things to remember . . .

When you choose a replacement provider, it does not change anything in history so don’t worry about the patient ledger being altered. Inactivating a provider and choosing his or her replacement will swap out anything in the future. For example, any future appointments will be changed to the replacement provider, any treatment planned procedures will be changed to the replacement provider, the default insurance claim provider may be switched and, if you have selected a specific continuing care provider, they will be replaced as well.
If you are inactivating your primary provider (PROV1 in the Family File), the replacement provider will take over in this role. This is common in a practice sale or transition. The PROV1 is used on many reports in Dentrix.
When you inactive a provider, all Time Clock data will be removed so make sure you have payroll reports as a backup.
If you are using Future Due Payment Plans, the assigned provider will be replaced as well.

I think once you understand that none of your history will be altered, it makes the process easier to swallow. The most significant change will happen if you are inactivating one of your primary providers because this will change the PROV1 in the family file and will affect some reports. Hopefully this helps and will allow you to move forward with this necessary task.

Recare is the lifeblood of your practice

If you are a general practice or pediatric dental practice, your recare system is the lifeblood of your practice. Your doctor’s schedule feeds off the hygiene patients so it is critical that you have a seamless system. But are your hygiene systems working as well as you think they are? You may have patients falling through the cracks or not receiving the reminders that you think they are.

The most important component of your recare system is the setup and making sure your team understands the details. I want to take some time today to walk you through proper setup, checking your individual patients continuing care, and which report to manage.

First, the setup is key. I wrote a blog post on May 23, 2012, called “KISS your Continuing Care Types,” but obviously not everyone read it so I am going to take some of those tips and re-apply them today. Many offices, understandably, try and create a system for 3-month Perio, 4-month Prophy, etc., by setting up new Continuing Care types but trust me . . . IT DOESN’T WORK! Remember that you can only attach one Continuing Care type to the procedure code. To

understand what I am talking about, go to the Office Manager > Maintenance > Practice Setup > Procedure Code Setup, then highlight the D1110 and click edit. You will notice in the middle of the window there is a >> Auto Continuing Care where you can attach one Continuing Care Type to this code. This means you cannot link up a 4-month Prophy and 6-month Prophy to the same code.

Your options are Prophy and Perio or Recare. You can link the Prophy to the D1110 and the D1120 and the Perio to the D4910, or link the Recare to all three.

After you have this setup corrected, when you schedule your patient for a cleaning, it will link up to the appointment correctly. When you set complete, it will update your patient’s due date.

But what if your patient is a 3-month Perio or 4-month Prophy? How do you get it up update the due date correctly? You can update the patient’s frequency on his or her Family File in the Continuing Care window. Once you change the patient’s recare frequency, then your reports will be accurate. When you schedule the patient for his or her next visit, the system will know when he or she is due.

After you get this setup fixed and the patient’s frequency updated on the Family File, then you can feel confident that your Continuing Care Report is accurate. If you are using the Dentrix eCentral communication manager, you will know that your patients are receiving reminders when they are due. For a full article on the Continuing Care report, CLICK HERE.

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. Many offices I work with find it is easier to post all the payments to the guarantor and the primary provider, but many offices are very particular about itemizing out the payment to the rendering providerand the specific patient ledger. However your practice handles payments, I think it would be a good time to help you understand how each allocation method affects your patient ledgers.

If you want to walk through it with me, go to your Office Manager > Maintenance > Preferences, under the General Options tab in the upper left area is the Default Payment/Adjustment Allocation settings.

· Provider

Split by Provider will separate out the patient payment to pay off each producing provider. Your insurance claims already do this … so why not split the personal payments as well?
To Patients Primary Provider will apply the entire personal payment to the patient’s primary provider (PROV1 on family file) regardless of who the producing provider is. This decision will give too much collections to one provider and, if you run a Provider A/R report, the payments and accounts receivable will be lopsided.

· Patient

Family account will post the entire payment to the guarantor. The result of doing this will be an accurate family balance, but incorrect patient balances.
Current patient will post the personal payment only to the patient ledger you are logged onto currently.
Split by Family Members is a new feature with G6. It allows you to take one payment and distribute it out to multiple family members with one step. The result of doing this will be more accurate patient balances because it looks across the entire family account for patients with a balance. PLEASE NOTE: if you have archived a patient with a balance and you are using this new feature, it will pull that patient out of archive to apply a payment.

·Split Method

Percentage Payments will equally distribute the patient payment between any providers who has a balance.
FIFO (first in first out) will pay off the oldest provider balance first.
Guarantor Estimate is always my first choice. What this allocation method will do is look at any current treatment with an insurance claim pending and allocate the patient payment depending on the insurance estimate. After it has allocated the payment to the estimated patient portion of the claim, it will revert to FIFO.
Equal payments is very similar to the percentage payments method but will just split the payment into equal payments instead of a percentage.

Why does one office choose an allocation method over another? Well, it depends on how you track collections and how important it is to you to have accurate patient ledgers. I want you to choose the method that fits your practice that is why there are lots of choices. Email me directly if you want to discuss this one-on-one.

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