Top 10 Note Spots in Dentrix

Dayna’s top 10 note spots in Dentrix

1. Patient Note – This note is located on the Family File. My recommendation is to use it for light-hearted information about the patient or family such as vacations, kids, pets, etc. The reason I use it for this type of information is because it will print on the Patient Route Slip.
2. Insurance Plan Note - This note box is located within the Insurance information, inside of the Coverage Table box. This should contain insurance frequencies, NG coverage, fluoride coverage, exceptions, and limitations. This information can then be seen on the patient chart in the Treatment Plan panel under the Insurance tab. Having this information accessible to your clinical team can help them treat their patients with same-day procedures.
3. Appointment Book Note - This note box is seen by everyone in the practice, so it is a great central place to let a team member know to do something or use it like “sticky notes.” Integrate it into your morning huddle routine and have everyone on the team get in the habit of looking here for his or her messages, such as clinical notes not finished, reminder to call a patient, clinical narrative needed for a claim, etc.
4. Appointment Note – This note box is for this appointment only. It stays with this appointment and also prints on the Route Slip. Examples might be remind patient to bring NG, pre-med called in, new patient information, etc.
5. Office Journal – This note documents all administrative phone conversations, letters, or follow-up for the patient. The Office Journal is located on every Dentrix module, so it is easily accessible. It is also located on the Continuing Care report, Collections Manager, Unscheduled List, and Treatment Manager Report.
6. Patient Alerts – These are notes that you will use to flag yourself. These notes will pop up when you open certain modules. Examples might be medical alerts, financial status, and scheduling concerns.
7. Procedure Note – This note box is located in the clinical chart and is located on the procedure code. This is the best spot for the clinical justification because it will follow the procedure code from treatment plan to completion and will become part of the patient’s history. This note box also transfers directly to the insurance claim for the Remarks for Unusual Services narrative required by insurance companies.
8. Clinical Note – This is for your notes pertaining to what you did during the patient’s appointment or any clinical follow-up after a procedure. The most efficient way to implement Clinical Notes are to create custom templates to use in your office. Remember, these notes should be only clinical in nature. If you want more information about creating clinical note templates, CLICK HERE to read my blog titled “Where do I make my notes . . . Clinical“. Also, you can e-mail me directly dayna@raedentalmanagement.com and I will send you a step-by-step info sheet on how to create custom clinical note templates for your office.
9. Guarantor Note – These are typically more sensitive notes about the account or financial issues. This note box only shows up in three places in Dentrix – ledger, billing statements, and the collection manager report.
10. Statement note – This is a custom note you could put on the patient’s billing statement. You are limited to characters, so make sure you abbreviate.

My goal when I am working with an office is to create efficiency, consistency, and security and this is why I teach practices and team members to document specific things in these specific areas. There is nothing worse than redundancy.

 

Your daily motivation . . .

My sister has run two full marathons and one half-marathon and I have been there as her cheerleader for all three events. During the full marathons, I met her at different mile markers to give her fuel, energy drink, or just a “LET’S GO RAYCH” to motivate her on to a successful finish. What if you had a coach like this in your dental practice to be there for you at different points throughout the month and give you a snapshot of how your month was shaping up, as well as give you some motivational tips to help you on to a successful finish at the end of the month? Well ... you do. This daily motivationally coach is called “The Daily Huddle Report."

In my last blog, I said you had a personal practice management consultant with the Practice Advisor Report because this report will give you footnotes with management tools available in Dentrix to help you reach your goals. The Daily Huddle Report is like your personal trainer.  After you have entered in your office goals for production (Office Manager > Analysis > Practice > Setup > Goals), the Daily Huddle Report will give you a day-to-day picture of what happened yesterday, what is scheduled today, and what is left remaining for the month. You can see clearly what needs to happen to meet your production goal for the month. 

It is not just limited to production. The Daily Huddle Report gives you a bird’s eye view of five key performance indicators ...

•         Production – This first section shows you what was billed out yesterday, what is scheduled today, what you have schedule on your books for the rest of the month, and what your goal is for the month.

•         Collection – This next section shows you what was collected yesterday and your monthly collection rate so far for the month.

•         Case Acceptance – This breaks it down by day so it will show you what was diagnosed yesterday and what was accepted yesterday, then it gives you a M-T-D total.

•         New Patients – Remember new patients in Dentrix are calculated by first visit date so make sure this is accurate on their Family File in order to get accurate numbers here. This section will show you how many new patients you saw yesterday, how many are scheduled today, how many you have had through the month so far, and how many new patients are on the books for the remainder of the month.

•         Scheduling – This section will break your schedule down into smaller pieces and show you what the unfilled hours are for the doctors and hygienists. Being able to see at a glance how many unfilled hours you have left in the month can give you an idea of the potential revenue still available to create in the month.

Even if your office does not have a daily huddle meeting each day, this resource can be extremely valuable for your office manager, scheduling coordinator, and doctor. This is what practice management is all about . . .

For more information on the Daily Huddle Report, check out these other blog posts:

The 5 Minute Morning Huddle

The 5 Minute Morning Huddle . . . continued

 

Your own personal practice management consultant at your fingertips

The Practice Advisor Report in Dentrix has been out for a few years and I hope you have implemented this amazing reporting tool into your practice management routine. It is like having your own personal practice management consultant at your fingertips whenever you need him or her. This report tracks the key performance indicators that dental practices should be monitoring for managing the health of their practices. During the recent Train-the-Trainer meeting, I learned a few new things about the Practice Advisor Report that I would like to pass on to you.

The most valuable thing I learned was how it pulls information from your continuing care system. This information is located on the Continuing Care section of the report.

·         Patients seen with CC visits within the last 12 months – This is considered your patient retention rate. Many dental consultants, including myself, consider this an extremely valuable number and the Practice Advisor report keeps track of this automatically for you. The industry standard is above 85%. Keeping an eye on your retention rate lets you know if you might be slipping in certain areas like confirming appointments or managing your Continuing Care lists.

·         # of patients seen with Appt Scheduled - This is the number of patients that were seen for CC and have a next appointment scheduled, CC appointment not restorative. This lets you know how many patients scheduled their next CC before they left the office.

 

Another important piece of information I learned about the Practice Advisor report is how it calculates unfilled hours. Before you look at the unfilled hours calculations, make sure that your Provider setup on the Appointment Book is accurate. This is something that you need to keep up-to-date at all times. If one of your providers takes a day off, make sure you change it on his or her schedule in the Provider Setup so it will reflect this change in hours on the Practice Advisor report.

·         Dentists and Hygienists # of production days – This number comes from the provider setup, not the schedule.

·         Dentists and Hygienists Daily and Hourly production – This calculation comes from the total production (total production not net production) and divides it by the number of production dates and hours in the provider setup. The system considers a full day at 5 hours or more and a half day under 5 hours. With this being said, if your hygienist works from 8 a.m. until 1 p.m. and you only want her to be calculated for a half day, put her in the provider setup for 4 hours and 50 minutes.

·         Unfilled Hours – This is the one everyone gets stuck on and it was explained so well at the Train-the-Trainer meeting that I hope I can give it justice. It takes the total available time (number of minutes in the provider setup) minus the total scheduled time (number of minutes in the appointment book). In other words, if you looked across the schedule at all operatories horizontally and there was nothing scheduled, this is considered an unfilled time unit. In the provider setup, it knows which providers are scheduled for that day and it looks for empty spots. If you schedule an event, this is still considered unfilled time.

The last piece I want to talk about is Case Acceptance. This number can vary depending on the type of office and specialty. I hesitate to give industry standards because this number varies widely. However, it is good to know how the Practice Advisor will calculate the case acceptance and also know that this is a “moving” number. For example, if you treatment plan something in January and it is accepted in March, the report will recalculate the January case acceptance number to include this treatment. What this means is that the Y-T-D number will change.

·         Amount of Treatment Diagnosed – Any treatment that is treatment planned that day, including the Reason box on the appointment. This includes all hygiene procedures.

·         Amount of Treatment Accepted – Any treatment that has been diagnosed and completed in the same month, any treatment that has diagnosed and the case has been marked as accepted will be calculated as accepted. Remember this also includes all hygiene regardless of whether it was set complete on the appointment book or posted to the ledger.

This is an amazing report and I hope that you will use some of these tips to implement the Practice Advisor into your monthly routine. For more information on this report, check out Knowledgebase article # 49693 for an online tutorial available in the Dentrix Resource Center.

Create incredible treatment plan presentations

I am on my flight back home from the Dentrix Train–the–Trainer annual meeting. The meeting was held this year in San Antonio during Fiesta Week, so not only did we have three days of learning opportunities, but we also had a ton of fun doing it. My next couple of blogs will focus on some of the cool, new things that I learned during my time in San Antonio.

One morning, I was registered for a Treatment Plan and Case Presentation class. My first thought was, “I have taught this class. What could I possibility learn?” However, my philosophy is that there is always learning to be done and I was right. I typically do not train on the Treatment Plan Presenter, but I am going to rethink that after what I witnessed in San Antonio.

Did you know that you can add your own X-rays, photos, other images, text, or video into the Dentrix Presenter to create a dramatic, professional case presentation? It is so simple and, once the setup is done, putting a presentation together is a snap. You can pull in an image, X-ray, or video, and then assign it to certain procedure codes so it will automatically load into the presentation for you. Also, these images or text can be printed onto a treatment plan estimate if you so choose.

How do you do it? Follow along . . .

Open up your patient chart in Treatment Plan View > Case Presentation Setup or open the Presenter and click on the Patient Education Topics. Now click on the New Topic icon and a window that looks like this will open.

This is where you can add your own slide for any patient treatment plan presentation. Just follow the instructions in the window. First, select a title for your slide in the Topic Title, then select the image for this slide. The next two boxes are used if you are going to print out patient education when printing a patient treatment plan estimate. Finally, on the right side of the box, select the procedure codes that would relate to this topic. In my example, I selected the porcelain crown code and the adult orthodontics codes. When you are finished, click OK and your new education topic will now show in the list under the category you have put it in.

Have fun with this! After what I learned in the Lone Star State, I am definitely going to create some incredible treatment plan presentations and increase my case acceptance.

 

There is always learning to be done

Seven years ago when I took the Dentrix Certification course to become a trainer, the only reason I did it was I wanted to learn more about the program. When the training department sent me on my first initial training, I knew that teaching, coaching, and consulting was my calling … but I know that I can’t reach everyone out there. I also know that, even with our team of 120 certified trainers, we can’t reach everyone using Dentrix. Whether you are a new team member using Dentrix for the first time or the office manager who has been with the office your entire career, there is always learning that can be done. This is why I am so excited with the redesign of the Dentrix ResourceCenter and the Learning Plans.

With the redesign, when you log into the Dentrix ResourceCenter, you can select a Learning Plan that fits your common tasks or job functions. You also have access to many other tools such as…

·         The Dentrix Magazine, which contains articles from key opinion leaders in the dental industry, great tips and tricks on how to use Dentrix more efficiently, and feature articles on how to optimize your Dentrix software. As a side note, many of my blog posts have been turned into feature articles in the Dentrix Magazine so look out for them.

·         Webinar Recordings that you can access anytime, anywhere 24/7/365. When my office was transitioning from paper charts to digital charting, my doctor decided to go to Mexico on vacation … so I gave him some homework. He had to log into the Dentrix Resource Center from an Internet café in Cabo and watch three webinars I had selected for him. When he returned to the office, he was very happy that I gave him that homework.

·         Knowledgebase Articles are perfect for when you have a specific question and want to do your own research. I use the Knowledgebase all the time. When I get a question to which I don’t know the answer, I go straight to the Knowledgebase. When I find the answer, I print it out so everyone can reference back to it if needed.

·         Dentrix eNewsletter is filled with great tips and tricks, but it will also give you specialized information for your area, such as seminars or workshops that will be offered in your town.

·         User Guides are available to print if you so choose. Dentrix user guides are now only available as PDFs, but every now and then I come across someone who wants a printed manual.

Check out the Resource Center today! If your office is on a Dentrix support plan, this amazing resource is available at no extra cost. I use it at least a couple times each week. If I can benefit from it, so can you.

You won't want to miss this . . .

I have had the pleasure of attending every one of the Dentrix Business of Dentistry conferences since the meeting’s inception in Snowbird, Utah, in 2006. Typically, the dentist I work for does not attend conferences, but I was able to persuade him to attend the inaugural meeting because it was being held at one of his favorite ski resorts. In the end, he was extremely happy that he attended because he learned so much about Dentrix. When I walked into the office the following week, the first words from his mouth were not “good morning, Dayna,” but rather, “Dayna, can you come in my office and help me with this treatment plan? I want to do one of those alternate cases like I learned about at the Dentrix meeting.” I was excited because I knew that he had embraced the one thing that our entire office revolves around—the practice management software!

When I attended my first Dentrix Business of Dentistry conference, I was not only working full-time in a dental practice but I was also a new Dentrix trainer, so I was eager to learn everything I could about the products and how I could implement them into my practice. Now that I had my doctor on board, I knew that I could move forward with helping my office go chartless.

Some of you might have just the opposite situation. Maybe your doctor is enthusiastic about implementing technology and is trying to get the team to go paperless. Whatever your situation, the Dentrix Business ofDentistry conference will give you the tools you need to not only move forward with going paperless, but also to meet many of your practice’s goals and visions.

Are you worried that the Dentrix Business of Dentistry will not give you a broad enough scope of CE? Do you think that it is going to be too specialized? I assure you that’s not the case. What makes this conference different from any other conference I have attended is that it creates an agenda for every member of your team, including the doctor. The speakers customize topics to their audiences and to the tasks they most commonly do in Dentrix. For example, your scheduling coordinator will not only learn how to reduce no-shows, but also how to implement that knowledge in Dentrix. Your financial coordinator will not only learn how to increase collections and learn insurance tips and tricks, but how to also use Dentrix to simplify those tasks. This is one of the unique features of this conference. If you go to the ADA Annual Session, you might learn a great new recall system, but then what? You have to wait until the meeting is over before you can go back to your practice and figure out how to implement it.

Many of the doctors I work with who have attended this conference say to me, “I had no idea Dentrix could do so much for my practice! We are so under-utilizing our software.” I encourage the doctors to attend some of the Dentrix tracks, but for the doctors who will delegate these courses to their teams, there is a redesigned doctor track that now includes clinical courses with an extensive look at digital dentistry.

My favorite part of attending the Dentrix Business ofDentistry conference is the Learning Lab. This is where you can bring specific questions and talk one-on-one with a Dentrix senior support technician. If you have a question, bring screenshots and jot down details about the situation, such as what you were doing before the issue happened. This will help the technician troubleshoot with you and hopefully answer your question.

As an office manager, Dentrix user and Dentrix trainer, I can tell you this conference outweighs any other. If your office is on the fence and cost is the issue, talk to your doctor about putting together an incentive program to pay for it. Maybe it’s just one more Invisalign case per month or increasing your over-the-counter collections from 30% to 50%. Whatever you can come up with to bring your team and your doctor, it will be worth it—and when you get there, make sure you come find me and say hi!

 

Stop all that clicking

In my last blog “Become Super Efficient with Templates,” I mentioned how to make your procedure buttons on the patient chart “super-efficient” by attaching a multi-code to a button. Later, I realized that multi-codes are a great template system that can be used all throughout Dentrix for the entire team, not just in the patient chart. I love multi-codes. In fact, at my office, since the system only allows 8 procedure codes within a multi-code, I have some with multi-codes inside of multi-codes where it will treatment plan 12 procedure codes with the click of one button.

The front office can benefit from using multi-codes just as much as the clinical team. They can be used on the Appointment Book when scheduling or inside the Patient Ledger when posting or treatment planning.

Just in case some of you don’t know how to create a multi-code, I will start from the beginning.

Go to the Office Manager > Maintenance > Practice Setup > Multi-code setup. If you have never added or edited the multi-codes, there will be a long list of Dentrix default templates that you can edit to meet the needs of your practice or delete if you will not use them. From here, click on new and enter the specifics for your new multi-code. Some examples include the different types of hygiene visits, steps involved with dentures and partials, implant procedures, and new patient exams.

Using multi-codes in the appointment book can make scheduling hygiene and new patient exams a snap. Many offices I work with, including my own, have attached multi-codes into the Initial Reason box on the appointment screen. With the click of one button, you have scheduled the patient for his or her exam, prophy, bwx, and fluoride. When you set the appointment complete, it will post all the procedures together.

Another way the front office can use multi-codes is in the patient ledger. I find that many front office team members can be a little intimidated with using the patient chart (especially if they don’t have a clinical background). With that being said, you can easily treatment plan through the patient ledger and still take full advantage of the efficiency of the multi-codes. When you switch from the ledger page to the treatment plan page, you can click on the “enter procedure” icon (or from the menu click on Transaction > enter procedure) then you will see your multi-codes listed on the right-hand side of the screen. Now select the multi-code you want and click add and OK/Post. See how that is much more time-efficient than entering all the procedures individually?

In addition to using multi-codes for efficiency, they are also extremely helpful in ensuring that the correct procedure codes are being posted. Most clinical team members do not have a coding background and haven’t a clue which procedure codes to use. Also, if you have a new member of your front office who is new to dentistry, it is important to setup safeguards to make sure proper coding is being used. Using multi-codes ensures that the clinical team and new employees are coding treatment properly.

Maximizing the tools available in your Dentrix software and creating efficient systems make for a happy team and accurate coding.