Top 10 Posts of 2019

As the end of the year is fast approaching, I thought we could take the time in this week's post to reflect on some of the topics that have been popular with readers throughout 2019.

Some you may have read, some you may have missed, and some you just may need to be reminded of! Here's our top 10 posts of the year:

10. Route Slips or Patient Visit Forms: Which is Right for Your Office?

9. Speed Up Your Note Writing Process

8. Using the Appointment Checklist

7. How Dentrix Questionnaires Can Streamline Patient Paperwork

6. Assigning User Password Rights in Dentrix

5. Customizing the Hover Window to Fit Your Needs

4. CareCredit Integration with Dentrix G7.1

3. Dentrix G7.2 Health History Features and Why They're Great

2. Managing Accounts Receivable

and our most popular blog post of the year...

1. 5 Tips for Efficient Patient Checkout

Updating Office Fees for the New Year

Do you have a protocol in your practice for how and when you increase your office fees? The insurance companies your office is contracted with will increase their fees periodically. You also need to increase your office fees for patients who are either uninsured, or for whom you are out of network with their insurance.

Some practices don’t increase their fees regularly.  I suggest that fees be increased annually. A good time to do these fee increases is at the first of every year. This ensures this process will be done on a consistent basis.

The cost of running a dental practice goes up. The cost of supplies, lab fees, and other monthly bills increase annually so it makes sense to subsequently increase your office fees.

Every January, make a note on your calendar to increase your office fees. A fair increase is 5-10%. You can increase your office fee schedule by a percentage in the Dentrix Office Manager.
If you aren’t sure how your fees compare to offices in your area, consult with your Henry Schein Field Sales Consultant. They can run a fee analysis to see how your fees compare for your area.

Once you have increased your office fees, any new treatment plans will reflect those updated fees. If a patient has had a treatment plan presented to them recently, those fees should be honored for a defined period of time—and make your patients aware of that timeframe. I would recommend honoring fees for three to six months. When printing treatment plans for patients, add a fee expiration date so that patients are aware of your office policy regarding fee increases.

Make increasing your office fees a part of your annual routine. Do it every January so that it’s done consistently.

Additional Information

• Updating Office Fees Using Automatic Fee Schedule Changes
• It's Time to Update Office Fees Again
• Setting Expiration Dates for Treatment Cases

If you have questions about this topic or others, please e-mail me at vectordentalconsulting@gmail.com.

Happy Holidays!


Charlotte Skaggs, Certified Dentrix Trainer

Charlotte Skaggs is the founder of Vector Dental Consulting LLC, a practice management firm focused on taking offices to the next level. Charlotte co-owned and managed a successful dental practice with her husband for 17 years. She has a unique approach to consulting based on the perspective of a practice owner. Charlotte has been using Dentrix for almost 20 years and is a certified Dentrix trainer. Contact Charlotte at vectordentalconsulting@gmail.com.

Prioritizing those End-of-Year Openings in the Schedule

Does this ever happen in your office? The new year is quickly approaching and there aren’t many more working days left in 2019. All of a sudden, the patients that had treatment diagnosed throughout the year realize their insurance maximum is about to start over and they will lose any unused benefits. They want an appointment, and they want it this month!

This can put a strain on your office as you try to squeeze these patients into your already busy schedule. Ideal scheduling is a puzzle during a normal month, and the month of December can be even trickier. My recommendation is to prioritize patients when scheduling.

Here’s how to prioritize patients to decide which ones to schedule in the last few appointment times you have available:

Prioritize by Procedure

For example, I would consider a patient who has four crowns treatment planned, as a high priority patient. Not only will their treatment plan exceed one year’s insurance benefit maximum, but it will also benefit the patient financially to spread their treatment out over two years. Scheduling these treatment-planned procedures also benefits your practice too, because crowns are higher production procedures. 

An example of a patient I would consider to be a lower priority to get in before the end of the year would be a one surface filling. 

Similarly, you can prioritize hygiene patients. Patients treatment planned for scaling and root planing can be scheduled this year, as this is a procedure that will utilize a lot of their insurance maximum. This will leave 2020 insurance benefits to be available for other restorative procedures.

Prioritize by Insurance Benefits

Patients whose insurance covers two prophys per calendar year should also be scheduled before the end of this year so they don’t lose their second prophy benefits. And patients whose insurance covers prophys once every six months can be scheduled next year since their benefits are not based on the calendar year. When verifying insurance benefits, make notes regarding frequencies and limitations as Insurance Plan Notes in Dentrix for a quick reference.

Prioritize by Patient

The appointments you have available between now and the end of the year are precious. Do not schedule patients that typically cancel or no show for these openings. 

With few working days left in 2019, it’s important to prioritize which treatment and which patients you put on the schedule. Have a daily conversation with the schedule coordinators in your office to make sure they are scheduling the procedures and patients that work best for your practice during this last month of the year. You can also use Perfect Day Scheduling in the Dentrix Appointment Book to create time blocks for procedures to help the with scheduling. If you have any questions, e-mail me at vectordentalconsulting@gmail.com.


Charlotte Skaggs, Certified Dentrix Trainer

Charlotte Skaggs is the founder of Vector Dental Consulting LLC, a practice management firm focused on taking offices to the next level. Charlotte co-owned and managed a successful dental practice with her husband for 17 years. She has a unique approach to consulting based on the perspective of a practice owner. Charlotte has been using Dentrix for almost 20 years and is a certified Dentrix trainer. Contact Charlotte at vectordentalconsulting@gmail.com.

Requiring Referral Sources for New Patients

With the release of Dentrix G7.3 comes some exciting new features. One of them is an option to require a referral source for a new patient. I really like this new feature because I think it will benefit all types of offices.

To enable this new feature, in the Dentrix Office Manager go to Maintenance > Practice Setup > Preferences. At the bottom of the Additional Options section, check the box for Require Referred By for new patients.

Occasionally, an office team member may forget to enter a new patient’s referral source. This can cause reports regarding referral sources to be inaccurate. If these reports are inaccurate, it makes it difficult for a practice to use these reports to analyze data and make future marketing decisions.

By requiring a referral source for new patients, you can rely on the data you receive from these reports to be accurate. With accurate information, you can:

• Determine whether your practice advertising efforts are successful and what type of return on your investment you are receiving. Because these reports also include production generated from referred patients, it allows you to put a monetary value on each referred patient, therefore giving you the ability to analyze the return on your advertising investment.
• Know who your main referring doctors are and develop a way to thank them. This is particularly helpful for specialty offices.
• Evaluate which patients are referring their friends and family, especially if your office relies on internal marketing through patient referrals.

The Referred by Patient and Referred by Doctor/Other Reports provide valuable information regarding referral sources to your office. This information can be used to analyze current and future marketing plans. However, these reports are only accurate if referral sources are being entered into Dentrix.

By requiring a referral source for new patients, you can eliminate the problem of no referrals being entered. I’m excited about this new feature. I believe it will benefit all types of offices, both general dentistry as well as specialty, to create more accurate reports and therefore make better marketing decisions.

If you have questions about this topic or others, please e-mail me at vectordentalconsulting@gmail.com.


Charlotte Skaggs, Certified Dentrix Trainer

Charlotte Skaggs is the founder of Vector Dental Consulting LLC, a practice management firm focused on taking offices to the next level. Charlotte co-owned and managed a successful dental practice with her husband for 17 years. She has a unique approach to consulting based on the perspective of a practice owner. Charlotte has been using Dentrix for almost 20 years and is a certified Dentrix trainer. Contact Charlotte at vectordentalconsulting@gmail.com.

A Tip Worth Remembering

As this week is Thanksgiving, it’s time to think about all the things in our lives that we are thankful for. One of the things I’m thankful for is you, my readers. Thank you for taking time each week to read my blog and I hope I’m able to provide you with tips that make your work-day a little easier.

This week, I am re-posting a reader favorite, 5 Tips for Efficient Patient Check Out. This post provides tips on how to use Dentrix for a smoother patient check out, as well as ways to use this time as an opportunity to remind patients to schedule their next appointment.

Happy Thanksgiving!


Charlotte Skaggs, Certified Dentrix Trainer

Charlotte Skaggs is the founder of Vector Dental Consulting LLC, a practice management firm focused on taking offices to the next level. Charlotte co-owned and managed a successful dental practice with her husband for 17 years. She has a unique approach to consulting based on the perspective of a practice owner. Charlotte has been using Dentrix for almost 20 years and is a certified Dentrix trainer. Contact Charlotte at vectordentalconsulting@gmail.com.

Utilizing Treatment Plan Reminder Letters

Last month, I wrote a blog about how to find patients with outstanding treatment that have remaining insurance benefits. It’s important to contact those patients to get them to schedule their outstanding treatment because not only can it increase your practice’s production, but it’s also a good service to your patients to help them track of and use their insurance benefits. Scheduling treatment helps your patients to get the quality dental care need they need while taking advantage of their outstanding insurance benefits.

The best tool to use in Dentrix to create a report of patients with outstanding treatment and remaining insurance is the Treatment Manager. I like to use the Treatment Manager to contact these patients by phone because you can easily log correspondence in the Office Journal directly from the Treatment Manager. However, if you are unable to reach patients by phone, you can send them a letter which includes remaining insurance benefit information. Sending a letter is another way to communicate important information about remaining insurance benefits to your patients.

When sending letters to groups of patients based on customized criteria, I recommend using Letters and Custom Lists in the Office Manager. Letters and Custom Lists allows you to create letters or lists of patients meeting a selected criterion. A good letter to use for patients who have outstanding treatment plans and remaining insurance benefits is the Treatment Plan Reminder letter which is a template in Letters and Custom Lists. To find this letter template, open the Office Manager, click the Letters & Custom Lists menu item and then click Misc. Highlight Treatment Plan Reminder from the list of letters, and click Edit.

From the Letter or Custom List Setup screen, you can set a filter to select a range of remaining insurance benefits. For example, you may want to set the Dental Ins. filter to include patients with remaining benefits of $500-$1500. You can set the Procedures filter to include a particular procedure code, a procedure code range, or to search for all procedure codes. Within the Procedures filter, you can also set a date range for the treatment planned procedures. I would recommend selecting a date range for this calendar year to send letters to all patients with treatment planned procedures in 2019.

Once you’ve set all the filters you need, click OK and create your letters. When generating the letters, I would recommend selecting the option for Dentrix to automatically create an Office Journal entry for these letters. This saves you from having to make manual entries in the Office Journal to say that you sent a letter to the patient.

Send these letters to your patients to prompt them to call for an appointment for their outstanding treatment plans. This can help your office to keep a consistently full schedule and meet your production goals. It’s also beneficial for patients as you are helping them to make the most of their dental insurance benefits.

If you have questions about this topic, please e-mail me vectordentalconsulting@gmail.com.


Charlotte Skaggs, Certified Dentrix Trainer

Charlotte Skaggs is the founder of Vector Dental Consulting LLC, a practice management firm focused on taking offices to the next level. Charlotte co-owned and managed a successful dental practice with her husband for 17 years. She has a unique approach to consulting based on the perspective of a practice owner. Charlotte has been using Dentrix for almost 20 years and is a certified Dentrix trainer. Contact Charlotte at vectordentalconsulting@gmail.com.

Dentrix Tools for Accurate Insurance Estimates

A few weeks ago, I wrote a blog about customizing coverage tables in Dentrix and how you can use them to more accurately estimate patient out-of-pocket expenses. Here are some additional tools in Dentrix you can use to provide your patients with the most accurate estimate of what their insurance is expected to pay.

Payment Table

The Payment Table in Dentrix allows you to enter a dollar amount that an insurance company will pay for a particular procedure code. This can be very beneficial in the case of an alternate benefit, like when an insurance company provides an alternate benefit for a posterior composite filling. 

When making changes to the Payment Table or the Coverage Table, it’s important to remember that changes made will affect all the patients covered under that insurance group plan. This can be a great tool because as you update the Payment Table for one patient, you can provide an even more accurate estimate for the next patient covered under that insurance plan that has the same procedure. 

You can enter amounts into the Payment Table in the dental insurance portion of the Family File, but I find the most efficient way to enter these amounts is when posting an insurance payment, by clicking Enter Payment, and then selecting the Itemize by Procedure option.

Whether you post an insurance payment through an individual claim or if you use the Batch Dental Insurance Payment feature, you have the option to update the Payment Table. 

The majority of the time, I recommend you update the payment table so Dentrix estimates insurance payments more accurately in the future for all patients with this dental insurance group plan. Here are the instances in which I would not recommend updating the payment table:

• A procedure wasn't covered due to a patient's frequency limitations
• A procedure wasn't covered due to the patient needing to meet their deductible
• A procedure wasn't covered due to an age limitation
• A procedure was partially covered (or not covered) due to a patient meeting their annual insurance maximum

Deductibles

Dentrix gives you an option to enter the amount a patient has used of their annual maximum, if they have met their deductible outside of your office. I find this to be a great tool, especially as we approach the end of the year when many patients may have used a significant portion of their annual maximum. If a patient has used some of their maximum at a specialty office, for example if you referred them to an endodontist for a root canal, it is important for Dentrix to calculate the amount of insurance used at the specialist’s office in the treatment plans you create in your office.

You can the features in Dentrix to accurately calculate insurance and patient portions of procedures. Using the Payment Table, entering maximums and deductibles used, and customizing Coverage Tables can help you to provide your patients with the most accurate estimates. This can result in maintaining healthier accounts receivables by allowing you to collect accurately from patients at the time of service. 

If you have questions on this topic or others, please e-mail me at vectordentalconsulting@gmail.com.


Charlotte Skaggs, Certified Dentrix Trainer

Charlotte Skaggs is the founder of Vector Dental Consulting LLC, a practice management firm focused on taking offices to the next level. Charlotte co-owned and managed a successful dental practice with her husband for 17 years. She has a unique approach to consulting based on the perspective of a practice owner. Charlotte has been using Dentrix for almost 20 years and is a certified Dentrix trainer. Contact Charlotte at vectordentalconsulting@gmail.com.

Additional Practice Analysis Reports - What Information Do They Provide?

In last week’s blog post I wrote about the Production Summary report, one of the Practice Analysis reports in the Dentrix Office Manager. This week, I would like to talk about the other Practice Analysis reports, and how they can be beneficial.

Payment Summary

You can use the Payment Summary report to analyze what type of payments are being made to your office based on the Payment Types you have set up in Dentrix. This could be beneficial information for your practice’s accountant at the end of the year. It can also help you to determine what percentage of payments are being made by patients and what percentage are being paid by insurance.

To generate the Payment Summary, open the Office Manager > Analysis > Practice > Reports.
Include all providers and all billing types. Select a date range (for example 01/01/2019-11/05/2019) and check the Payment Summary box. The report will give a total amount for each payment type, the  average payment amount, and the percentage of your total office collections each payment type represents.

Adjustment Summary

The Adjustment Summary report can provide you with valuable information regarding adjustments to payments. You can evaluate what type of adjustments have been made for a selected date range. The report will give a total amount for each adjustment type, the average adjustment amount, and the percentage that each adjustment type contributes to of the practice’s total adjustments. 

To generate the Adjustment Summary, open the Office Manager > Analysis > Practice > Reports.

Include all providers and all billing types. Select a date range and check the Adjustment Summary box. You could use this information to evaluate adjustment types. For example, is the office giving too many professional courtesy adjustments? Being able to see the quantity of each adjustment type, and the collections dollars they represent can help you to make important decisions for your practice.

Patient Summary

The Patient Summary report provides you with a snapshot of your patient population. There are other reports in Dentrix that can provide more detailed information, but the Patient Summary is a nice at-a-glance summary. It provides you with the total of active patients, how many are male, female, insured, etc. as well as some family information. It’s important to note that on this report an active patient is dictated by their status in the Family File and not based on their last visit date. 

To generate the Patient Summary, open the Office Manager > Analysis > Practice > Reports and check the Patient Summary box.

The Analysis Reports in the Practice Analysis can provide you with valuable information regarding your practice. I encourage you to become familiar with them, as they may help you to make important decisions for your practice. If you have questions, please contact me at vectordentalconsulting@gmail.com.


Charlotte Skaggs, Certified Dentrix Trainer

Charlotte Skaggs is the founder of Vector Dental Consulting LLC, a practice management firm focused on taking offices to the next level. Charlotte co-owned and managed a successful dental practice with her husband for 17 years. She has a unique approach to consulting based on the perspective of a practice owner. Charlotte has been using Dentrix for almost 20 years and is a certified Dentrix trainer. Contact Charlotte at vectordentalconsulting@gmail.com.

Practice Analysis - Production Summary: What Information Does it Give You?

At the end of each year, it’s beneficial to evaluate your practice to determine what went well during the year and what needs improvement. This can also be a good time to evaluate which procedures were completed throughout the year, and when estimating your practice’s 2020 budget, if new equipment or supplies should be purchased based on those completed procedures.

For example:

• If you find your office is generating most of its production doing crown and bridge procedures, you may want to consider purchasing a Cerec machine or a digital scanner.
• If your office is mainly providing periodontal services, you may want to invest in additional periodontal instruments. 
• If your office is placing a lot of implants (or referring them to a specialist), you may want to consider purchasing cone-beam computed tomography (CBCT).

In my opinion the best report to generate for information about which procedures your practice has completed during the year, is in the Practice Analysis. You can find the Practice Analysis Reports in the Office Manager by clicking Analysis > Practice. When the Dentrix Practice Analysis screen opens, click  Reports.

You have options to filter your Practice Analysis Reports by Provider and by Billing Type. For generating a report to determine which procedures you have completed for the year, I would suggest leaving both options set to <ALL>.

Next, select a date range. Then, in the Select Summary Reports section, check Production Summary. This report can be generated by category (for example Diagnostic, Preventive, Restorative, Endodontics etc.) or by procedure code. You can choose all procedure codes or a procedure code range. 

The Production Summary Report will provide:

• The number of procedures completed within the selected date range
• The total production generated by these procedures
• The average fee for the procedure
• The percentage these procedures contributed to the office's total production

This report can provide you with valuable information to evaluate future purchases for equipment or special supplies. This is good time to review these reports in order to make decisions for the upcoming year. 

Please contact me if you have any questions at vectordentalconsulting@gmail.com.


Charlotte Skaggs, Certified Dentrix Trainer

Charlotte Skaggs is the founder of Vector Dental Consulting LLC, a practice management firm focused on taking offices to the next level. Charlotte co-owned and managed a successful dental practice with her husband for 17 years. She has a unique approach to consulting based on the perspective of a practice owner. Charlotte has been using Dentrix for almost 20 years and is a certified Dentrix trainer. Contact Charlotte at vectordentalconsulting@gmail.com.

Customizing Coverage Tables

In order to maintain a healthy collection rate and accounts receivables, it’s important to collect your patient’s out of pocket portion of their balance at the time of service. This means estimating accurate insurance payments is important in order to know exactly how much the patient should pay. Entering accurate coverage tables into the Dentrix Family File can help you to provide your patients with more accurate estimates.

When entering PPO insurance into a patient’s Family File, most offices use the default coverage table.  The Dentrix default coverage table breaks down ADA codes into sections and categories, such as Diagnostic/Preventive (ADA codes D0100-D1999), Basic Restorative (ADA codes D2000-D2999) Endodontics (ADA codes D3000-D3999) etc.

I recommend customizing your default coverage table in order to make your insurance and patient estimates more accurate. For example, although a full mouth series of X-rays (ADA code D0210) falls into the category of Diagnostic/Preventive (ADA codes D0100-D1999), that particular code is often covered by insurance as a basic service with a deductible applied.

Let’s walk through how to do that.

You can customize your default coverage table in the Office Manager > Maintenance > Reference > Dental Ins Coverage Tables. Click the Add button to create a new line within the coverage table. Leave the Beginning Procedure column set at D0100, but change the Ending Procedure to D0191. Leave the Category, Coverage %, Deductible, Co-pay and Pre-Auth columns as they are, and click Change.

Then click the Add button again, and add a new line with the Beginning Procedure and Ending Procedure both set to D0210. Change the Category to Basic Restorative and enter the Coverage %, Deductible, Co-pay and Pre-Auth information based on what the plan pays. Then click Change.

The last step, is to add the rest of the diagnostic/preventive procedures in a new line on the coverage table. Click the Add button, enter Beginning Procedure as D0220 and the Ending Procedure as D1999, and enter the other column information based on the plan, and click Change.

So what you’ll end up with, is your original grouping of diagnostic/preventive codes at their original coverage, except the one code (D0210) which has a different coverage.

You can modify any coverage table to separate codes out of their original categories, and set a different coverage for them, apply a different deductible, apply a copay or require a pre-authorization. You can customize the coverage table based on the trends you see in your office.

Here’s some ideas of ADA codes insurance companies may pay differently for than are pre-set in the default coverage table:

• FMX (ADA code 0210)
• PA (ADA code D0220)
• Sealants (ADA code D1351)
• SRP (ADA codes D4341 and D4342)
• Crown build up (ADA code D2950)
• Occlusal Guard (ADA code D9940)

One thing to double check when customizing the default coverage table, is to be sure that all procedures codes are included (no gaps) and that they are listed in sequence.

Providing patients with more accurate estimates while they’re in the office can result in healthy account receivables. It can also result in happier patients because they won’t be receiving an unexpected bill from your office.

If you have questions about this topic, e-mail me at vectordentalconsulting@gmail.com.


Charlotte Skaggs, Certified Dentrix Trainer

Charlotte Skaggs is the founder of Vector Dental Consulting LLC, a practice management firm focused on taking offices to the next level. Charlotte co-owned and managed a successful dental practice with her husband for 17 years. She has a unique approach to consulting based on the perspective of a practice owner. Charlotte has been using Dentrix for almost 20 years and is a certified Dentrix trainer. Contact Charlotte at vectordentalconsulting@gmail.com.

Find Patients with Outstanding Treatment & Unused Insurance Benefits

As the end of the year quickly approaches, it’s important to schedule your patients with outstanding treatment in order to maximize their annual insurance benefits. This helps your practice because you can increase your office production, and it also helps your patients because maximizing their dental insurance benefits is financially beneficial for them.

Dentrix has a great tool that you can use to generate a list of patients who have outstanding treatment plans and remaining insurance benefits: the Treatment Manager. You can open the Treatment Manager from either the Appointment Book or the Treatment Planner.

There are many options to choose from when generating the Treatment Manager that you can use to build a custom list of patients you want to focus on.  You can use filters such as Billing Types, specific procedure codes or range of procedure codes, or limit your search to patients who have an appointment on the Unscheduled List.

When I’m generating the Treatment Manager to schedule patients at the end of the year to maximize their insurance benefits, I use the following options to filter my patient list:

1. Treatment Plan Date - I like to focus on patients with procedures treatment planned within the last six months. If it has been longer than that since the treatment was diagnosed, the patient may have decided not to proceed, or the treatment plan may have changed, and the patient may require another exam with the doctor.
2. Remaining Insurance Benefits - Select patients with a minimum amount of outstanding insurance benefits. I usually use the amount $500 because that is a significant amount of insurance benefits to use before the benefits expire.
3. Benefit Renewal - Select January for the benefit renewal month in order to generate the Treatment Manager for patients whose insurance plan renews each calendar year.

Once you have selected these and other filters to generate your custom patient list, you can then choose what type of information displays for each patient on the list by selecting Show Columns. 

I like to be sure and show the patient’s phone number because it makes it easy to contact the patient directly from the list. Select the other information you want from the Available Columns list and add them to the Show these columns in this order list.

The Treatment Manager may take some time to generate. Remember that Dentrix is filtering your database and searching for patients that meet the criteria you specified.  Once the list has generated, use the Treatment Manager to contact patients and get them scheduled before their insurance benefits expire. 

My favorite part of the Treatment Manager is that you can select a patient from the list and then select an icon from the toolbar to open another Dentrix module for the patient. For example, this can be very convenient when calling patients to schedule because you have direct access to the Office Journal where you can make notes regarding contacting the patient, or quickly access the Patient Chart to answer any clinical questions the patient may have about their treatment. 

The Treatment Manager is a great tool to use to contact patients with outstanding treatment plans. And the options to filter by remaining insurance benefits make it an ideal tool to use to contact patients with outstanding benefits at the end of the year.

If you have questions about this topic please e-mail me at vectordentalconsulting@gmail.com.


Charlotte Skaggs, Certified Dentrix Trainer

Charlotte Skaggs is the founder of Vector Dental Consulting LLC, a practice management firm focused on taking offices to the next level. Charlotte co-owned and managed a successful dental practice with her husband for 17 years. She has a unique approach to consulting based on the perspective of a practice owner. Charlotte has been using Dentrix for almost 20 years and is a certified Dentrix trainer. Contact Charlotte at vectordentalconsulting@gmail.com.

Track Treatment Cases by Status

Last week, I talked about updating treatment case statuses in the Dentrix Treatment Planner. This week, let's talk about how to track cases according to their case status.

My recommendation is to run the Practice Treatment Case Report on a monthly basis to keep track of your cases. It's important to be informed about what's happening with cases in your office so you can constantly evaluate office procedures.

When evaluating the Practice Treatment Case Report, ask yourself the following questions:

If cases are being rejected, why are they being rejected?

Is the office financial procedure inflexible? Are appointment times difficult for patients to schedule? Asking these types of questions can help you to make informed decisions about offering third party or in-office financing and offering earlier or later appointment times for patients with busy work schedules. If cases are rejected by patients, I suggest making a note when rejecting the case in order to keep track of why the case was rejected. You can view the note in the Case Status history.

Are insurance pre-authorizations being sent back to your office in a timely manner?

If you are sending pre-authorizations to insurance carriers, are they being sent back? If not, why? Is your office sending the required documentation with those pre-authorizations such as a narratives, X-rays or probe depths?

Are your follow-up attempts with patients working?

For your cases with a follow-up status, how are you contacting patients, and most importantly, is it working? For many patients, calling and leaving a voicemail during the day may not be a good way to reach them. Consider e-mail or another form of contact.

To generate the Practice Treatment Case Report, In the Treatment Planner, select the printer icon in the Treatment Plan Case Setup panel. Then select Practice Treatment Case Report.

You have many options in generating this report including limiting results by provider, billing type, and case status. You can choose to select a date range for the treatment planned procedures. There are several report options based upon what you would like to see on your reports. In the Report Options section, I recommend printing a condensed report because the report may be quite long. Also, I recommend excluding completed procedures from cases because for the examples I gave, I would not want to include completed procedures.

Tracking case statuses in your office can help to improve case acceptance and help you to evaluate office policies and procedures regarding patient financing and appointment times.

You can contact me with any questions at vectordentalconsulting@gmail.com.


Charlotte Skaggs, Certified Dentrix Trainer

Charlotte Skaggs is the founder of Vector Dental Consulting LLC, a practice management firm focused on taking offices to the next level. Charlotte co-owned and managed a successful dental practice with her husband for 17 years. She has a unique approach to consulting based on the perspective of a practice owner. Charlotte has been using Dentrix for almost 20 years and is a certified Dentrix trainer. Contact Charlotte at vectordentalconsulting@gmail.com.

When and How to Use Treatment Case Statuses

I’ve had some questions come up recently regarding tracking case acceptance in the office. I wanted to provide some tips on how to track the status of a treatment case in Dentrix, and which reports you should use to track treatment cases most effectively.

This week, let’s talk about the different case statuses you can assign in the Dentrix Treatment Planner and when you should use them.

In either the Treatment Planner panel within the Patient Chart, or from the Treatment Planner module, select a treatment case and then click the Update Case Status button.

Select one of the following case statuses:

Created
When a new treatment case is created for a patient, it will automatically be assigned a created status.

Printed
When you print a treatment case, the status will automatically change to printed. In many offices this is a good indication that the patient has been provided with a copy of their treatment plan.

PreAuth (Pri)
Update the case with this case status when sending a pre-authorization to insurance. This can be a good way to track which cases’ pre-authorizations have been sent, and can help to remind your team why the patient is waiting to schedule an appointment.

PreAuth (Sec)
Use this case status to indicate when a pre-authorization has been sent to secondary insurance.

Follow-Up Made
If you have followed up with a patient about their treatment case, you should change their case status accordingly. I would also recommend making detailed notes about what was said during the follow up call in the Dentrix Office Journal.

Referred
If the entire treatment case has been referred to another provider outside of your practice, you should indicate that by changing the case status. I would use this in the case of extractions. If some of the treatment will be done in your office and the rest is referred, you could create a new treatment case for the referred treatment and change the status of that case.

Proposed
This status indicates the case has been proposed to the patient, but they haven’t made a decision about whether or not to proceed with treatment. This would be a temporary case status until the patient accepts or rejects the treatment case.

Accepted
Use this status when the patient has accepted the treatment case and scheduled an appointment.

Rejected
Use this status when the patient has decided not to proceed with the treatment case. I would recommend adding detailed notes why the patient has rejected the case.

Completed
Change the case status to completed once all of the procedures within the case have been set complete.

Keeping statuses updated is important because it is an easy for everyone on the team to see what is going on with a particular case. Also, you can run reports based on the status for an easy follow up system for outstanding cases.

Join me next week when we’ll talk about which reports to run in order to track case statuses most effectively.

If you have questions about this or other topics, please e-mail me at vectordentalconsulting@gmail.com.

Charlotte Skaggs, Certified Dentrix Trainer

Charlotte Skaggs is the founder of Vector Dental Consulting LLC, a practice management firm focused on taking offices to the next level. Charlotte co-owned and managed a successful dental practice with her husband for 17 years. She has a unique approach to consulting based on the perspective of a practice owner. Charlotte has been using Dentrix for almost 20 years and is a certified Dentrix trainer. Contact Charlotte at vectordentalconsulting@gmail.com.

Customizing Procedure Codes to Fit Your Office Needs

Dentrix comes already set up with the American Dental Association codes, but did you know you can customize the codes to make them work better for your office? Here are some of the things I like to customize in the Procedure Code Setup in the Office Manager.

In the Office Manager, go to Maintenance > Practice Setup > Procedure Code Setup. Select an individual procedure code, and click Edit.

Then look for the following areas you can customize:

Patient Friendly Description

Patient friendly procedure descriptions can be displayed on treatment plans. They can be a good way to communicate an easy to understand description of a dental procedure.  You may want to edit the verbiage of those descriptions to match the way your office describes procedures. 

Abbreviated Description

The abbreviated description of an ADA code is how the code will be displayed on the patient’s appointment. In my experience, the simpler these are, the better. For example, for a one surface composite filling, an abbreviated description could be 1surcomp. This makes it clear to the entire team exactly what the patient’s appointment is scheduled for. 

Treatment Flags - Difficult Procedure

You have the option to flag a procedure code as a difficult procedure. This can be useful if in the evening your office wants to call all patients who had a difficult procedure done that day. Procedures flagged as difficult will be indicated by an asterisk on the Day Sheet. Since the Day Sheet also has patient phone numbers on it, this can be a convenient tool to call patients.

Treatment Flags - Remove Tooth

By checking this option, the tooth will be removed from the graphic Chart whenever this procedure code is set complete.

Treatment Flags - Show in Chart

This flag allows the procedure code to be accessed from the Chart. If you have confusion from any team members on exactly which code to use for a procedure, it may be helpful to uncheck the Show in Chart option for those procedure codes. That way, the code will not be available from the Chart, so it is less likely the incorrect code will accidentally be used. 

Procedure Time

You can indicate the default appointment time for a procedure. You can also allow for chair time, assistant time and provider time. This is important because a provider (doctor or hygienist) can’t be scheduled for provider time during more than two appointments at the same time. I find this to be an issue when offices are scheduling their doctor in three or four rooms at a time, but it’s an easy problem to correct by changing the provider time to either assistant or chair time. 

Additional Options

You also have options to flag a procedure code for medical cross coding, mark the procedure as do not bill to dental insurance, require start and completion dates for the procedure (great for crowns and bridges) and my personal favorite, setting the do not update patient visit dates option. The reason I like this option so much is that the patient’s last visit date is very important in Dentrix. It is how Dentrix calculates your office’s active patient number. Some procedure codes should not update the patient’s last visit date. For example, if you use a code for a missed appointment, the patient’s last visit date should not be affected when charging this code. 

I really like these features in the Procedure Code Setup in the Office Manager because you have the option to customize settings so that the codes can work best for your office. If you have questions about this or other topics, please e-mail me at vectordentalconsulting@gmail.com.

Charlotte Skaggs, Certified Dentrix Trainer

Charlotte Skaggs is the founder of Vector Dental Consulting LLC, a practice management firm focused on taking offices to the next level. Charlotte co-owned and managed a successful dental practice with her husband for 17 years. She has a unique approach to consulting based on the perspective of a practice owner. Charlotte has been using Dentrix for almost 20 years and is a certified Dentrix trainer. Contact Charlotte at vectordentalconsulting@gmail.com.

Family Relationships in Dentrix

When thinking about the patients in your practice, some of them might have blended families. You're going to need to handle those unique family situations within Dentrix. Today's blog post focuses on different ways of handling those family situations.

Head-of-Household

The first thing to be aware of is that the person set as the Head-of-Household in the Dentrix Family File is the person to whom billing statements will be sent. This is especially important to consider for blended families, to avoid awkward situations. For example, if a husband and wife are divorced, you will want to take care in where you send the statement. The Head-of-Household can be changed in the Family File.

Insurance Subscribers

Children of blended families may have insurance through more than one subscriber. It’s important to know which subscriber is considered the primary and the secondary for each insurance company. Often times, the Birthday Rule will apply, meaning whichever subscriber’s birthday comes first in the year is the one that is considered the primary subscriber. For example, if Mom’s birthday is in April and Dad’s is in November, then Mom would be considered the primary insurance subscriber for the child. 

If the insurance subscriber is not a patient in your office, it is important to assign the subscriber a Non-patient status in the Family File to avoid Dentrix counting them as an active patient and therefore skewing your practice’s active patient numbers. 

Merging and Separating Families

You may have the need to merge families in Dentrix, as well as separate them. This can be done in the Family File by clicking Edit > Edit Family Relations.

You will need to merge families together in the following cases:

• A Family File was created for a patient whose family are already patients.
• Two patients in your practice get married and need to be joined as a family account.

You will need to separate families in the following cases:

• Husband and wife divorce and require separate accounts.
• An adult child moves out and requires a separate account.

It’s important to note that accounts in Dentrix are family accounts so any patients requesting separate accounts should be separated into their own Family File. 

Those of you who have been using Dentrix for a long time, may remember that separating and combining families had to be done while everyone was out of Dentrix. I’m pleased to say that is no longer the case. However, the family can’t have any outstanding claims or pre-estimates. 

Also, it’s important to remember that individual patient balances will be affected when combining and separating families, which means if your office posts payments to the Guarantor and not the individual patient, the patient balances may become inaccurate. 

Knowing how to manage family relationships in your office is important because over the life of your practice, changes will happen in your patients lives, and you need to know how to handle those changes within Dentrix.

Please e-mail me with any questions at vectordentalconsulting@gmail.com.

Charlotte Skaggs, Certified Dentrix Trainer

Charlotte Skaggs is the founder of Vector Dental Consulting LLC, a practice management firm focused on taking offices to the next level. Charlotte co-owned and managed a successful dental practice with her husband for 17 years. She has a unique approach to consulting based on the perspective of a practice owner. Charlotte has been using Dentrix for almost 20 years and is a certified Dentrix trainer. Contact Charlotte at vectordentalconsulting@gmail.com.

Specifying a Provider for Continuing Care

Selecting a continuing care provider for a patient from the Continuing Care module has been a feature in Dentrix for a long time, but few offices know about it. So, I thought it would be a good topic for this week. The ability to set a provider for a patient’s continuing care can be a very beneficial feature for your office to use! Not only can it save a lot of time when scheduling appointments and eliminate errors, but it also indicates to all team members which hygienist a patient prefers to see.

In Dentrix, when you schedule appointments, the provider for the appointment generally defaults to the patient’s primary provider. But when you are scheduling a continuing care appointment with a hygienist, this can be cumbersome because you have to change the provider assigned to the appointment to the hygienist’s provider ID. Additionally, any time you make a change to the appointment, for example if you add X-rays or fluoride treatment, the provider will change from the hygienist back to the patient’s primary provider.

But, did you know that you can assign a continuing care type to a particular provider? In the Family File, select a patient and double-click the Continuing Care block. Select one of the Continuing Care types, for example, Prophy, and click Edit. You can select a Provider for this continuing care type. The options are Provider 1, Provider 2 or you can assign another Specific Provider from a drop-down list. Assign the provider who will be completing the continuing care procedures during an appointment for this continuing care type, and click OK to save the changes.

Once this has been set up, when you schedule an appointment for that continuing care type, the appointment will be automatically scheduled with the selected provider and there will be no need to change it!  For offices that schedule continuing care appointments, this is a huge time saver and eliminates errors when completing appointments and assigning procedures to specific providers.

Selecting the provider for a continuing care type is also a great way to indicate if a patient prefers to see a particular hygienist. By assigning a continuing care type to a specific provider, when you schedule a continuing care appointment in the future, the preferred hygienist provider number will automatically appear in the Appointment Information window.

Please contact me with questions about this topic or others at vectordentalconsulting@gmail.com.

Charlotte Skaggs, Certified Dentrix Trainer

Charlotte Skaggs is the founder of Vector Dental Consulting LLC, a practice management firm focused on taking offices to the next level. Charlotte co-owned and managed a successful dental practice with her husband for 17 years. She has a unique approach to consulting based on the perspective of a practice owner. Charlotte has been using Dentrix for almost 20 years and is a certified Dentrix trainer. Contact Charlotte at vectordentalconsulting@gmail.com.

Viewing Production Goals in the Appointment Book

Setting and working towards goals in areas of life can help you to achieve them. Setting and working towards goals for your practice works the same way. When scheduling patient appointments, I like to use the Dentrix Appointment Book to help me schedule in order to meet practice production goals.

In the Appointment Book, you can view scheduled production for the day, the week, and the month. This allows you to see how you are doing each day, and can schedule additional production in order to meet practice goals.

You can view an individual day’s scheduled production on any computer by using Appointment Book Views. When setting up an Appointment Book View, make sure the View Amount option is checked.

Then when viewing the Appointment Book, the production amount for the day is shown as a number in the upper right corner of the schedule. Once activated, this number can be seen in the day, week, or month view. A zero is used as the first digit to help disguise that this is a dollar amount.

Another way you can keep track of scheduled production amounts is using the calendar within the Appointment Book. When you view the calendar, click Scheduled Production to see the entire month’s scheduled production, as well as how much is scheduled on each day.

This option is a great way to view your monthly scheduled production, and also shows you how close you are to the practice’s monthly production goal (if those have been set up) and what has been produced so far. You can quickly view each day and see which days have high and low production.

Here are a couple of things to keep in mind when viewing scheduled production and using this information to schedule appointments.

• For the production amounts to be accurate, the patient must be assigned to the correct fee schedule. If you participate with insurance carriers, the fee schedule needs to be attached to the patient’s insurance and the treatment fees should be updated. This is very important to avoid the scheduled production appearing inflated.
• The procedures attached to appointments need to be accurate. If a patient is scheduled for a dental cleaning, but the exam and X-rays aren’t attached, then the scheduled production won’t be accurate.

Knowing how to view scheduled production and then scheduling patients to meet your practice production goals is a great way to keep your practice on track. If you have questions about how to set up practice goals, or how to implement the ideas discussed here, please e-mail me at vectordentalconsulting@gmail.com.

Charlotte Skaggs, Certified Dentrix Trainer

Charlotte Skaggs is the founder of Vector Dental Consulting LLC, a practice management firm focused on taking offices to the next level. Charlotte co-owned and managed a successful dental practice with her husband for 17 years. She has a unique approach to consulting based on the perspective of a practice owner. Charlotte has been using Dentrix for almost 20 years and is a certified Dentrix trainer. Contact Charlotte at vectordentalconsulting@gmail.com.

Quickly Scheduling Appointments Using Initial Reasons and Treatment-Planned Procedures

When scheduling an appointment in Dentrix you can select procedures from the Initial Reasons list or from the Treatment Plan Reasons list—all from within the Appointment Information dialog box. Here’s how I use both of these options and why.

The Initial Reasons List

I use the Initial Reasons list to schedule routine procedures. For example, exams, X-rays, adult and child cleanings can all be set up as options to choose from the Initial Reasons list.

This is a fast way to schedule routine procedures. This can also be a great way to schedule appointments for team members who aren’t familiar with individual procedure codes. The Initial Reasons list can be customized with the routine procedures you often do in your office in the Dentrix Office Manager. 

Another great way to save time when scheduling using the Initial Reasons list is to set up multi-codes and include them in the Initial list. For example, you could create a multi-code that contains all the procedures for a child prophy, periodic exam, x-rays and fluoride. By adding the multi-code to the Initial Reasons list, you can now easily schedule all those procedures in just a couple of clicks. Multi-codes can be created and edited in the Dentrix Office Manager. 

The Treatment Plan (TX) Reasons List

The other way to schedule a patient appointment is using the TX button, which contains a list of all of a patient’s treatment-planned procedures. This includes treatment-planned procedures that are tooth- or surface-specific, for example, a filling or a crown.

These procedures can be treatment planned in the Patient Chart and then scheduled using the TX button in the Appointment Information window. 

Note: I don’t recommend treatment planning routine procedures (such as cleanings or X-rays) because if a patient cancels their routine procedure appointment, those procedures will be considered an unscheduled treatment plan and will affect your unscheduled treatment plan reports and case acceptance reports. 

Using these appointment scheduling options in Dentrix can help save time and ensure your Unscheduled Treatment Plan Reports are accurate. 

Please e-mail me with any questions vectordentalconsulting@gmail.com.

Charlotte Skaggs, Certified Dentrix Trainer

Charlotte Skaggs is the founder of Vector Dental Consulting LLC, a practice management firm focused on taking offices to the next level. Charlotte co-owned and managed a successful dental practice with her husband for 17 years. She has a unique approach to consulting based on the perspective of a practice owner. Charlotte has been using Dentrix for almost 20 years and is a certified Dentrix trainer. Contact Charlotte at vectordentalconsulting@gmail.com.

A Few Remarks about Claim Remarks Templates

Do you find yourself writing the same narrative over and over on insurance claims? I’ve found that for some procedures I tend to write the same narrative for many patients. For example, scaling and root planing is a procedure I find myself writing similar information for every patient.

In Dentrix you can set up templates for claim remarks to add narratives to claims with a single point and click. This can save time so that you aren’t always re-typing the same notes. And by having a note template set up, it takes the guesswork out of what to write in the claim remarks.

Insurance companies are constantly changing the information they want to know about a procedure and providing them with that information when initially filing the claim can help to avoid delays in payment.

I’ve set up claim remarks for the following procedures:

• Crown due to cracked tooth
• Crown following endodontic therapy
• Crown due to large filling with recurrent decay
• Nitrous Oxide
• Scaling and Root Planing

I also have a claim remark setup that states that a primary EOB is attached, to use when filing a secondary claim.

Pre-written claim remarks can be added to a claim and can also customized within the insurance claim window in the Dentrix Ledger. These notes can also be set up and customized in the Office Manager. You can choose to select one or multiple claim remarks on each claim.

Delays in insurance payment for insufficient information can be avoided by providing insurance companies with any and all information they may request when initially filing the claim. Receiving insurance payments in a timely manner helps to maintain healthy accounts receivable and cash flow.

If you have questions about how to set up claim remarks or why it’s important to add them, please e-mail me at vectordentalconsulting@gmail.com. Let me know what procedures and situations you create claim remarks for!

Charlotte Skaggs, Certified Dentrix Trainer

Charlotte Skaggs is the founder of Vector Dental Consulting LLC, a practice management firm focused on taking offices to the next level. Charlotte co-owned and managed a successful dental practice with her husband for 17 years. She has a unique approach to consulting based on the perspective of a practice owner. Charlotte has been using Dentrix for almost 20 years and is a certified Dentrix trainer. Contact Charlotte at vectordentalconsulting@gmail.com.