When I worked in a dental practice, we still had paper charts until 2009. This meant 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.
If you have gone paperless in your office, now all your treatment plans are sitting in the computer, and you still need to find patients who are not scheduled for treatment… but the process is much more streamlined. What I love about patient data in Dentrix is that it is trackable and you can filter that data onto a report. I call it, mining for gold.
In Dentrix, there are three reports you can use to track down unscheduled treatment to follow up with patients.
- The Unscheduled Treatment Plan Report has been in Dentrix forever and is what I used back in the old days. This report gives you information on unscheduled treatment, but you have to print it in order to work from it, and it can be very lengthy. Also, you have to remember that every time you print a report, things will change quickly, and then your report is obsolete. Read this article for information on generating this report.
- 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 by status—treatment that has been Accepted, Rejected, or Proposed—which only works if you are marking your cases with those statuses as you work with patients. The number of treatment cases with each of these statuses is good information for your doctor to see. This report can only be found within the Patient Chart and Treatment Planner modules. Click the printer icon as if you were printing a treatment plan estimate, but instead click Practice Treatment Case Report. Then select the parameters you want and click OK. Read this article for more information on generating this report.
- The Treatment Manager 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 sort 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. Read this article for more information.
Mining for Gold is my motto when it comes to looking for patients with unscheduled treatment. Your practice could have hundreds (if not thousands) of dollars in production lying in unscheduled treatment plans! You need to be proactively following up with these patients. You cannot expect them to pick up the phone and call you to schedule their treatment. Keeping your schedule full is something that requires regular attention from you. I hope these report options help make the task a little more efficient.
Written by Dayna Johnson, Dentrix Certified Trainer
