We are in the home stretch of 2021. If your practice is trending to have an awesome year, keep up the good work! If your practice is searching for some tips on rounding out the end of the year on a positive note, then let’s take a seventh-inning stretch and huddle up to make 2021 the best year ever. Your Dentrix software can be clutch.
Today, let’s look inside your Dentrix software and pull out all our big hitters so we can get patients scheduled before the end of the year and maximize their dental benefits before they expire. Your practice might also still be feeling the “fall COVID effect” from last year because your practice was closed in the spring of 2020.
First, let’s pull out the home run hitter that you all should have on your team and that is the Treatment Manager Report. This big slugger will not only help you find patients who have unscheduled treatment, but it can also be filtered for patients who still have unused insurance benefits to use up before the end of this year. The Treatment Manager Report is my favorite report in Dentrix because it helps you catch patients who walk out the door without scheduling recommended treatment and you can set reminders for when you should be checking back in with patients if you have referred them out to a specialist.
The Treatment Manager Report is very interactive, so you don’t have to print it. Everything you need to follow up with patients is right at your fingertips. If you are still working remotely, this is perfect for you. From this interactive report, you can look up the patient’s treatment plan, check his or her insurance benefits, look up any follow-up notes, and make new follow-up notes. If you want my tip sheet on how to use this report, CLICK HERE to download it.
Now, if you are still feeling the effects from the COVID disruption last year, then I would get busy on working your unscheduled recare.
There are two ways you can do this. The traditional way is to use the Continuing Care List that you will find on the appointment book. Just click on the Continuing Care icon on the toolbar and generate a list. You can create custom lists or you can generate a temporary list to your specific parameters that you want today. Make sure you are tracking all your follow-up calls in the Dentrix Office Journal so you can document all phone conversations with patients.
The other way you can generate a list of patients who are unscheduled for their recare is to generate a report using the patient reports by filter option. This takes a little bit more work to generate, but it is worth it because the report is much more interactive than the traditional one. You can create a list that will include your prophy and perio patients all on one report (you can’t do that on the traditional continuing care list).
Both of these two continuing care reports will help you find patients who are not scheduled for their next recare visit, so choose which one is best for you. In case you missed my live broadcast of “Continuing Care is the Lifeblood of Your Practice” you can re-watch it HERE.
My recommendation is to work these reports on a weekly basis so you can stay ahead of your patients who are unscheduled and follow up with them before you lose them. Now that we are heading into the last few innings of 2021, we want to make every effort to hit a grand slam out of the park.
