Hey friends, welcome back! We’re right in the middle of our five-part series on giving your practice’s outdated data a major facelift. So far, we’ve covered things on the admin side—how to inactivate old providers, clean up those adjustment types, and organize your payment types. But today, it’s all about showing some love to the clinical team. Specifically, we’re going to tackle one of the most common messes I see in practices: that cluttered, overwhelming health history, particularly the medication list.
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Let’s be real, if you’re like most offices, you probably have three versions of “diabetes” and about five entries for Zoloft, some with dosages, some without. It can be a nightmare! Today, we’re diving into how to clean up that health history module and, just as important, how to stop it from happening again.
Now, I wish I could give you a magic wand to just “poof” fix everything. My daughter actually has a Harry Potter wand, and believe me, I’ve tried it! Sadly, no spells are coming to save us. What I can give you, though, is a practical approach to inactivating duplicate entries and some tips to teach your team how to prevent future chaos. Ready? Let’s go!
Cleaning Up Your Medication List
First, you’ll want to dive into the health history module in Dentrix. Let’s start with medications because that’s where most of the clutter tends to live. Often, duplicates happen because of small things like misspellings (capital “L” versus lowercase “l”), or different versions where one has the dosage and another doesn’t.
Here’s the deal: if a medication is already linked to a patient, you can’t just delete it. If you try, you’ll get a message saying, “You cannot delete this medication because it’s attached to a patient.” Your only option is to inactivate it. Inactivating it means it’s removed from the active list, so no one can select it moving forward. But don’t worry, it’s still going to show up in that patient’s health history, you just won’t be able to add that old one to any new patient accounts. Over time, you can switch patients over to the correct medications, but it’s a process—and yes, it takes time.
Medical Conditions and Allergies
The same cleanup process applies to medical conditions and allergies. You can’t simply delete them because, again, they’re tied to patients. Unfortunately, you can’t do replacements in the health history module like you can with other things in Dentrix. So, if you’ve got “epilepsy” listed separately from “seizures” (which, technically, they are but you get my point), you’ll need to manually update each patient.
It’s tedious, but there’s no quick fix. You’ll need to go through the list and inactivate those old conditions and medications.
Training Your Team to Prevent Duplicates
So, how do you stop this from happening? The number one culprit I see is with practices using Dentrix questionnaires and syncing them into the health history module. When done incorrectly, this sync feature can create a mess of duplicates, triplicates, and beyond! If your team isn’t trained properly, they’ll sync over everything—even misspellings and duplicate entries.
Train your team to slow down and search the list before adding new information. When the patient says they’re on a new medication, don’t just add it—take an extra second to search the existing list. There’s a little search icon in the health history module that makes this easy. Trust me, those few seconds save hours of cleanup later.
What’s Next?
Next time, we’re diving into the wonderful world of cleaning up insurance plans—because why stop here? Thanks for hanging with me through the data detox journey. Let’s keep tidying up your practice, one step at a time!
