Filling Last-Minute Cancellations

During this challenging time, it may be harder to keep your practice schedule full. Your patients may be home-schooling their children or returning to work themselves, and you may find that your office has more holes in the schedule and more last-minute cancellations.

Dentrix offers a feature that your office can use to offer available appointment times to patients. It’s called Fill Appointment*. You can use this feature to send a text message to a select group of patients letting them know you have an appointment time available. This is a great feature to fill an appointment time that became available today or tomorrow and that you would like to offer to other patients. Patients are notified about an opening, and they'll call YOU to schedule an appointment!

There are several filtering options available to help you find specific patients who are likely to respond to fill the opening, and send them a text message. You can filter by provider, date range, or by appointment type.  For example, if you are trying to fill an appointment on your hygiene schedule, you can filter by Continuing Care. You also have the option to fill the appointment by looking at patients with the status of ASAP or who have appointments on the Broken, Will Call, or Pinboard lists.

When you send the text message to the patient, I would suggest writing a text that explains that you have an appointment available today, without mentioning the specific time, and to call the office if they are interested. In my experience, if your text message says that there is an appointment available at 2:00 pm today, you may have several patients just show up for that appointment, without calling to let you know. This could result in your office not being able to see all the patients, which could cause a negative experience for the patient.

Using the Fill Appointment feature can give your office the ability to contact several patients all at once regarding an available appointment, and you may have multiple patients call to claim the opening. Schedule the first patient to call you back in the opening you advertised, and then you can work with the other responders to fill other holes in your schedule, since you’ve already got them on the phone.

Making full use of the Fill Appointment feature is beneficial for your office because your staff doesn’t have to spend their time calling patients individually to fill openings. It’s also beneficial for the patient as a quick text message may be easier for them to read and answer versus listening to a voicemail and returning a phone call while they are at work, or home-schooling children.

For additional information on using this feature, read the A Faster Way to Fill Appointments article in the Dentrix Magazine online archive.

*The Fill Appointment feature requires Patient Engage.  If you don’t currently have Patient Engage, your office can contact the eServices team at (833) 471-7253 for more information.

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.

Finding Patients to Schedule After Reopening

Now that many dental offices have been able to re-open, it’s time to get patients scheduled. For many offices, looking at an empty Appointment Book, this may seem like a daunting task. I have some recommendations on how you can not only start scheduling appointments again, but where you can find these patients in Dentrix.

First, reschedule the existing appointments that had to be canceled due to COVID-19. Most likely, you either broke those appointments in Dentrix, or used Wait/Will call to move the appointments to the Unscheduled List.  Either way, you can easily find these patients by viewing the Unscheduled List. You can sort the Unscheduled List by date to find patients that appointments were cancelled during the last couple of months. You can reschedule these patients directly from the Unscheduled List—all of the information you need to contact the patients is stored right there in the list, including phone numbers. You can even drag and drop appointments from the list right to the Appointment Book. Use the Unscheduled List to find patients who were scheduled for an appointment for hygiene as well as patients who were scheduled for treatment with the doctor.

Next, contact patients due for continuing care procedures. This will help to fill your hygiene schedule and often times, restorative treatment is diagnosed during the hygiene visit, so it will help fill your doctor’s schedule too. I would recommend starting with patients that were due for continuing care over the last three months. You can create a new Continuing Care View to find these patients. You can create a view that includes patients who are due for the prophy continuing care type, without an appointment. You can set the due date range for 3/1/20-5/31/20.

Once you click OK to generate the Continuing Care List, you can contact patients directly and access the Office Journal to make notes about contact with the patients. You’re also able to schedule the appointment directly from the Continuing Care List. Once you have found and contacted all patients who are due for a Prophy, I would also suggest creating a second Continuing Care View and find those patients overdue for Perio, in order to contact and schedule your perio maintenance patients. 

As you work to fill your schedule, make sure you are following your state guidelines regarding length of appointments and how many patients can be seen in the office at a time. 

Lastly, contact patients with outstanding treatment plans to fill your doctor’s schedule. A couple of weeks ago, we talked about the Treatment Manager to find patients with outstanding treatment plans. I would recommend using the Treatment Manager to find patients with a treatment plan date range from January 1st, 2020 to the current date. This will provide you with a list of patients with procedures diagnosed three months prior to dental offices closing.

Using a methodical approach to schedule patients can help you to fill both your hygiene and your doctor schedules as your office is re-opening. Follow your state guidelines and use the American Dental Association guidelines for safe back to work practices. If you have 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.

Returning to Work - 4 Recommendations and How to Implement Them Using Dentrix

As many states are preparing to re-open dental practices for non-emergency procedures, the American Dental Association has released a Return to Work Interim Guidance Toolkit. Here are some of their recommendations and how you can implement them using Dentrix.

Send Patients a Welcome back Reassurance Letter

This letter should describe your office’s procedures for infection control which will ease patient’s minds and give them confidence to come to the office for their appointments. The American Dental Association has provided a sample letter for offices to use. The letter could be mailed or e-mailed to patients. If you want to mail a physical letter, you can create a letter template in Microsoft Word and use Dentrix data fields to enter patient information (such as names and addresses). Then you can use Letters and Custom Lists in the Office Manager to create and print the letters. I would recommend sending the letter to all patients that have been seen in your office in the last twelve months.

If you are using Dentrix Patient Engage, you can create a letter template and e-mail it to patients. If possible, e-mailing may be a more convenient way to communicate because the patients will receive the letter immediately.

Pre-Appointment Screening Process

The American Dental Association is recommending asking patients a list of questions to screen them prior to their appointment. This can be done over the phone during the appointment confirmation call. You can also create a questionnaire in Dentrix with the screening questions. A link to this questionnaire can be put on your office website and you can direct patients to fill it out prior to their appointment. 

Limit Patient Traffic

In order to limit the number of people in your office, have patients wait in their cars until you are ready to bring them in to the operatory. You can text them using Dentrix Patient Engage when you’re ready for them to enter the practice. Bring them directly to the operatory to avoid patients being in close contact with each other. For patients who are minors, speak to their parent/guardian prior to the appointment, during the confirmation call. Let them know for the health and safety of all patients, you are limiting the number of people in the office. Therefore, only one family member can accompany the patient to the appointment. 

Employee Screening

Keep a daily log of employee health screenings. Keep this in a folder for future reference. If any employee isn't feeling well, send them home right away.

Use the American Dental Association Return to Work Interim Guidance Toolkit to help plan and implement strategies so you can re-open your dental practice in a way that ensures the health of your patients and staff. 

If you have questions, 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.