Things to Focus on in the Fourth Quarter

Yesterday was the first day of fall, which means cooler weather, football, and pumpkin-flavored…everything! 

It also means it's time to think about what you can do for your patients during the fourth quarter of the year. 

We are all experiencing challenging times and some patients may be experiencing financial hardships. Your dental office should be doing everything you can to make your patient’s treatment affordable. One way you can do this is by helping your patients use their dental insurance benefits. 

Here are a couple of ways you can help patients take full advantage of those benefits.

Continuing Care

Due to offices being closed because of the pandemic, patients may have missed out on their recall appointments. I would suggest generating a Continuing Care report for patients who are past due for recall, as well as for patients are due for recall in the upcoming months. You could use a due date range of January 1st, 2020 – December 31st, 2020 to view patients who were due earlier in the year or who are going to be due for a prophy or periodontal maintenance sometime before the year ends. 

If you have made a habit of documenting frequency limitations in the insurance plan note, view those notes before contacting the patient to schedule. You can help patients to make the most of their insurance benefits by reviewing this information. For example, if a patient was seen in July for a prophy, and that was their first prophy of the year, they technically aren’t due for six months, which would be in January 2021. But, if their insurance allows for a prophy two times per calendar year, you could schedule them to come in for another prophy in December, so they can maximize their insurance benefits. This research may take a little more work, but would be worth it to get your patients their maximum benefit.

Outstanding Treatment Plans

The Treatment Manager in Dentrix is my favorite tool to find patients with outstanding treatment plans towards the end of the year. You can use filters when setting up the Treatment Manager to generate a list of patients whose insurance benefits renew in January and who have an outstanding insurance maximum remaining. 

This can be very beneficial for patients, especially those with several treatment-planned procedures, as they can split up their outstanding treatment and do part of it in 2020 and the remainder in 2021. This can result in both a higher insurance reimbursement for your practice and a lower out-of-pocket expense for the patient. 

Help your patients maximize the insurance benefits they pay for, before those benefits renew in January! It's not only a service to your patients, but can also help your practice keep a full schedule and consistent production during the final quarter of the year. 

Email me with 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.

A Few of My Favorite Dentrix Reports

Dentrix has so many great reports! There are end-of-day reports such as the Day Sheet and Deposit Slip that you run on a daily basis, reports that help you to gauge the overall health of your practice including production and collections, and so many more. 

Here are just a few of my favorite reports and how I like to use them:

Referral Reports

There are two reports for referral sources: Referred By Patient and Referred By Doctor/Other. I recommend running both of these reports on a monthly basis.

• The Referred By Patient report can be used for internal marketing. If a patient refers a friend or family member, it’s a nice touch to send them a thank-you note. Some offices thank patients for referrals by sending them a gift card for a coffee shop or some other small token of appreciation.
• The Referred By Doctor/Other report is for referrals from other doctors and other sources such as paid advertising or marketing campaigns. This report is especially important if your office has invested in these types of marketing campaigns. When the report is created it will show the number of referred patients by referral source and the production that was generated by those patients. You can use this information to evaluate the return on your investment of the marketing campaign and if it will be worth continuing in the future. 
• For additional information on these reports, read Grow Your Practice with Patient Referrals and Tracking the Value of Social Media Marketing in Dentrix Magazine.

Production Summary Report

The Production Summary report, which is available in the Practice Analysis Reports, can be generated by procedure code category or by a procedure code range. This report shows the quantity preformed of each procedure code as well as the total production generated by that code for a selected date range. It also provides the average fee for the procedure and the percentage of the total production generated by that procedure code.

Here are a couple of scenarios when this report is especially useful. When evaluating how much of a product to order to have available for sale in your office, such as electric toothbrushes or mouth rinses, it’s helpful to know how many have been sold over the last month. Reviewing the average fee charged for the product can also help you to evaluate the fee you charge for the product. Another scenario where the Production Summary Report is very helpful, is when considering purchasing a new piece of equipment, such as a new panorex or CT machine. You can review how many of these procedures have been completed and what the average charged fee was, to compare costs and see if the new equipment will be a good investment for the office. 

Treatment Plan Statistics Analysis

The Treatment Plan Statistics Analysis can be generated as a comparison of treatment-planned vs. completed procedures by provider. This report can be run on a weekly or monthly basis for each provider in your office. 

I find this report to be helpful because if the percentage of completed procedures compared to treatment-planned procedures is low, there are several items to evaluate. Are there appointment times available for patients to complete their treatment? If not, you could consider adding additional office hours in order to offer more available appointments. Are patients accepting their treatment plans? If not, does your team need additional training on patient education? A good goal when reviewing this report would be for 75 percent of treatment-planned procedures to be completed. 

Dentrix has so many great reports. The ones I mentioned are only a few of so many. If you would like to review all the reports available in Dentrix, you can find this information in the Dentrix G7.3 Report Reference. 

E-mail me with 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.

Rescheduling Cancelled Appointments

Last week I wrote a post about implementing a more lenient cancellation policy for those patients who cancel their appointment due to being ill. During this pandemic, encouraging patients to stay home if they don’t feel well can protect the health and safety of your staff and other patients.  

I suggested using the Wait/Will Call option instead of breaking the appointment for these types of cancellations. Once you have cancelled an appointment and moved it to the Unscheduled List, I would suggest waiting two weeks before following up with the patient to reschedule. You can use the Unscheduled List to quickly find patients on the Wait/Will Call list and contact them to reschedule their appointment. I would recommend using the Office Journal to record the contact made with the patient and what was said. From the Unscheduled List, you can easily access the Office Journal and drag an appointment directly to an open spot in your schedule.

It’s very important to keep the Unscheduled List up to date, so that when you’re following up with patients on the list, you don’t contact patients who may have already rescheduled. You can keep the Unscheduled List up to date with a little team training. Most likely, you have seen this warning message when trying to schedule an appointment.

Train your team that when they see this message it means that the patient already has an appointment on the Unscheduled List. 

If you click Yes to this warning, the patient’s Family Appointment List will open. From here you can click the appointment labeled as <Unscheduled Appt>, and then click the View Appt button. This opens the Appointment Information dialog box, which will have all of the appointment information (procedures, providers, appointment length, and so forth) already attached to the appointment. From here you can manually assign an operatory, date and time, or use the Pinboard or Wait/Will Call buttons to move the appointment to either of those lists.

If you click No to this warning, Dentrix assumes you want to create a completely new appointment for the patient and opens a blank Appointment Information dialog box. This is where you run into problems with keeping your Unscheduled List up to date. If you re-create the appointment for the patient, the old, broken (or Wait/Will Call) appointment still remains on your Unscheduled List. Instead of recreating the appointment, you should train your team to open the Unscheduled List, find the appointment, and reschedule it from there.  When you reschedule an appointment from the Unscheduled List, the appointment is removed from the list, which will keep your list up to date and more accurate in order to follow up with patients.

By keeping your Unscheduled List up to date, your office will have a great resource from which to contact patients to reschedule appointments. This can help to fill openings in your schedule and avoid unscheduled time. Email me with 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.

Dealing with Cancellations in a COVID-19 World

I’m normally a proponent of having a strict cancellation policy in place in your office. I believe that while we should respect our patients’ time and take them back for appointments in a timely manner, our patients should respect our time as well by not cancelling at the last minute or arriving late for their appointments. 

However, during these challenging times, I feel we need to be more lenient with our cancellation policy when it comes to dealing with patients who are cancelling due to illness. For example, if a patient has an appointment today, but they call and say they’re not feeling well, we shouldn’t penalize them for canceling, because they’re helping to keep your staff and other patients safe by not potentially spreading the COVID-19 virus. 

Usually, I recommend breaking appointments for last-minute cancellations. Breaking an appointment in Dentrix counts as a missed appointment, reflecting negatively on the patient. You can track the number of missed appointments in the patient’s Family File. 

However, if patients call to cancel their appointment because they aren’t feeling well, or are experiencing symptoms of COVID-19, rather than breaking their appointment, you should mark it as Wait/Will Call within the appointment. This will move the appointment to the Unscheduled List, which you can use to reschedule the appointment at a later time without it counting negatively as a missed appointment.  

Whether you are breaking an appointment or marking it as Wait/Will Call, I would recommend making a detailed note of the conversation with the patient in his or her Office Journal. This way the entire team will be able to read the note and know why the appointment was cancelled, and why it was marked as either broken or Wait/Will Call. 

Implementing a more lenient cancellation policy as we deal with the pandemic is just one way we can continue to evolve in how we work and communicate with our patients. Train your team on how to deal with last-minute cancellations, and make sure they know what happens with a patient appointment when it is broken or when it is moved to Wait/Will Call so patients won’t be penalized when they cancel due to not feeling well. In the long run, this will help you to protect the health and safety of your staff and other patients. And when those cancellations occur, it’s equally important to make sure you use the Office Journal to document the communication you have with patients, so that everyone on your team can see the reasons why appointments are cancelled or rescheduled. 

Please email me with 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.