Do I break the appointment or just deleted it?

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

I write about keeping the schedule full, it is always a big clicker. One question I receive a lot is, “

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

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

For more information on this topic and read other articles, click the links below . . . 

Keeping Your Hygiene Room Full . . . part 1 of 3

Keep Your Schedule Full Like a Pro

Dayna Johnson, Certified Dentrix Trainer

Dayna loves her work. She has over 25 years of experience in the dental industry, and she’s passionate about building efficient, consistent, and secure practice management systems. Dayna knows that your entire day revolves around your practice management software—the better you learn to use it, the more productive and stress-free your office will be. In 2016, Dayna founded Novonee ™, The Premier Dentrix Community, to help cultivate Dentrix super-users all over the country. Learn more from Dayna at www.novonee.com and contact Dayna at dayna@novonee.com.

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

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

These were the exact words from a doctor who was trying to create a system for scheduling and didn’t know where to begin with setting some standards for his team. We talked about the different methods for blocking out the schedule inside of the Dentrix software so that he could make the best decision for his practice.

I have seen offices use both the Perfect Day Scheduling feature and the Events feature for mapping their schedule. Today, I wanted to give you some pros and cons for using these tools to help you make the best decision for your appointment book.

• Perfect Day Scheduling is designed to map out the schedule and give you a guideline for your team so they can easily see what type of appointment goes in that place. The great thing about this feature is that you can place multiple blocks throughout the day and, once you set it up, it will be set up every day until you change the setup. You can set up different colors to symbolize different appointment types. One complaint I get from doctors is that you can easily schedule over the top of the Perfect Day Scheduling blocks. In my opinion, this is more about the discipline of the team member scheduling to the system than the system itself. If you want to read up more about Perfect Day Scheduling, CLICK HERE.
• Using Events to map out your schedule can be done and it will fix the issue of not being able to schedule over the top of the block. With an event, the team member would have to delete the event in order to schedule an appointment. Events can be created to span over multiple days and you can set them in your appointment book for up to a year time frame. Just right click on the appointment book and click on Create Event. You can also set the Events in different colors to symbolize different types of appointments. 

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

Dayna Johnson, Certified Dentrix Trainer

Dayna loves her work. She has over 25 years of experience in the dental industry, and she’s passionate about building efficient, consistent, and secure practice management systems. Dayna knows that your entire day revolves around your practice management software—the better you learn to use it, the more productive and stress-free your office will be. In 2016, Dayna founded Novonee ™, The Premier Dentrix Community, to help cultivate Dentrix super-users all over the country. Learn more from Dayna at www.novonee.com and contact Dayna at dayna@novonee.com.