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.