Dentrix Ideas

It would be nice if Dentrix warned if a patient was coming in to early for a preventive appointment. Our old software would pop up a msg that the apt you were trying to enter was before the 6 month period.

Ability to have a pop up if a patient is already scheduled for recall appointment. We have had a few occasions where a patient is scheduled for a cleaining and then calls to schedule an appointment, front office does not see if patient is scheduled and then we have 2 appointments. This is the same for a patient with Perio and Prophy under continuing care, have dentrix initiate a pop up telling us that a patient has multiple continuing care (ie perio, prophy)

This should have happened like yesterday! We have patients that schedule 6 mos cleaning at cleaning appointment and then will come in for an emergency appointment and not realize they have a cleaning appointment and schedule again. Dentrix should not let this happen!

Double Click on any open spot in the Appointment Book - you are now in the Appointment Information Dialog Box. At the top of that box is the Continuing Care box with a little arrow to the right. Click on that arrow and it will show you if there is another appointment scheduled ... (assuming your office is using the Continuing Care System). dc

This request is so important and seems to me a simple fix for programming not sure why more people are not voting on this, all the data is in the system, dentrix just needs to have a pop up show up when scheduling a patient who has exceeded their 2 perio or prophy cleanings per year and a pop up indicating a patient has perio and prophy in their continuing care. I am having to pay someone to physically look through the ledger each day while going over route slips to see how many perio maint cleanings they might have for the year. If not a pop up then something to show how many cleanings they have had for the year on the route slip would eliminate patients coming in for their 3rd cleaning thinking we told them it was covered and then grumble to us.

Show upcoming appointments in family file

When my hygienist are scheduling a continuing care appointment...dentrix will sometimes set the appointment up under "Exam," or anything other than a prophy or PM. How do I go about fixing this?

I'd love a report that shows which patients have more than one appointment scheduled. I'm finding an ex-office coordinator wasn't checking to see if they had existing appointments when scheduling and now I'm finding patients that have two cleanings scheduled within a month of each other... usually the day before one of their scheduled appointments which leaves me having to cancel one at the last minute, therefore leaving unnecessary open time. Thanks for listening!

Notification if patient has more then one appointment scheduled, not to double schedule.

Notification if patient has more then one appointment scheduled, not to double schedule.

alert us when scheduling appointment if there is already an upcoming appointment

In our old system, when scheduling a recall or posting a cleaning, a warning would come up to alert us that it was sooner than the 6 month interval. We could override it, but it alerted us before it was booked or posted. When changing appointments, this would help from being seen or billed too early.

When a patient wants to schedule or move a recall appointment, have a box to check in their family file to alert if you are scheduling before insurance will pay for visit due to frequency other than 2 in a calendar year

Kindly create a chain link when there is a multiple patient or family appointment on the same day. Example, John is booked on hygiene @ 9am and he has an appointment at 10am for filling. Then, his son Craig has an appointment 10am on hygiene and Mila (wife) has an appointment later in the afternoon @ 3pm hygiene. These will minimize calling or reminding patient multiple times.

it should have little icon next to pt's name if patient is already scheduled for continuing care. indicator light icon to bring an attention so we don't miss any patient walking out with out their next appointment. it should be easier to just look in the appointment book to see who has one and who doesn't instead of going to family file or ledger.

For a more efficient way to schedule our hygiene patient's recall appointment (to help make sure perio maintenance patients are scheduled as perio maintenance for their recall). When our office used Practice Works we were able to select our patient, click to schedule their recall, and it automatically went out the length of time that had been selected for their recommended recall in the past.

Dentrix shows when a patient is scheduled for another appointment in the Continuing Care List with a cross in front...when you see this, just see "other appointments" the info is there for you:) hope this helps.

If you have one recall type set up for your Prophy and Perio recalls, the system will alert you. The problem comes in when you have a Prophy recall and a Perio recall set up for the same patient. You should have one Recall type for both and change the patient's interval. It would be a great idea for an alert that would let you know if a patients schedules multiple recall appointments at the same time. Perhaps it would be a good idea when setting complete, to check Other Appointments in the Appt screen and see if the patient has another Recall appt setup. This way you could attach it to the next appt.

If a patient continuing care is set correctly and attached it will warn you of an appointment already attached. Kay Carver University General Dentistry-Tuscaloosa AL ROLL TIDE

Does any know of any office that needs someone with 25 years experience in billing medical/dental field looking to take over their billing. I am looking for PT work from home.? If so my email address is lhp0529@gmail.com. Serious inquiries only please. Any help would be appreciated.

When a patient comes in for their 6 month pr appt we go ahead and make their next 6 month pr appt in advance then unless they say they state they don't want too. This has worked great in our office and we already have around 80% of the recalls scheduled. We do tell the patient we know this is far in advance and things come up but we don't get very many cancellations.

When a patient come in for a 6 month pr we go ahead approx. 80% of the time and make their next 6 month pr appt. Yes, it is way in advance and we explain to the patient that we understand things come up but at least they are on our books. It has worked great for us!!!!!!

It would also be a great idea if an alert would pop up to let you know if that next cleaning or perio maint. is not a covered benefit of the insurance.

Lynda is correct, if your continuing care is properly set up and attached to the appointment, then you will receive an alert that states "Continuing care is already attached to another appointment. Would you like to remove it and attach it to this one?" This should be your indicator that there is another appointment schedule for the patient.

This would be awesome. Come'on dentrix!!

Our assistant who doesn't schedule often does this all the time. I end up having to make her write down all appts she schedules and clean them up. This would be nice!

As long as your continuing care is set up and attached to the appointments properly Dentrix will alert you if you try to make a prophy/perio that it is attached to another appointment would you like to attach it to this appointment. At this time you can say no and check "other appointment" to make sure they don't have one already made.

This would be so helpful and it would eliminate the embarrassment of having patients say they just got a reminder card to schedule but were just in. It is so easy to have an assistant pre-book the next hygiene appointment and oops they scheduled the patient with a prophy and another continuing care item in addition to the perio continuing care. A pop up flag would fix this, should be easy (I would think).

Also would be nice if when we are archiving a patient, if it would let us know if they had scheduled appointments vs Dentrix automatically deleting them, it also deletes appointments off the books that have alreadly been set complete and closed out..

If this could automatically remove the patient from the unscheduled list as well.

YES~~~~!!!!!!! Eaglesoft has this~!!!! Why doesnt Dentrix~!! I need to be able to highlight an appointment and the border show up in a different color when clicked on to be more visible and stand out from the other appointment.

Dentrix, when writing the software for this, please keep in mind that we are now seeing some insurance plans where they make exceptions to their 2 prophy/year, when the patient is pregnant, diabetic or has heart problems. The patient has to fill out a form with their H/R dept at their employment. Bottom line: There may be different amt. of prophies allowed per year, even though the patients may all be on the same insurance plan.

This is a GREAT idea..this should be added to Dentrix as soon as possible..There are to many double bookings .People call and schedule because they have forgotten that they already made an appt at the last appt.....

Sometimes a patient will call to schedule an appointment on the doctor and they haven't been seen in hygiene for some time. An alert that the patient is overdue according to their continuing care status would be helpful to schedule this patient appropriately: first on hygiene, followed by the doctor.

Even from the "less is best" perspective, it wouldn't hurt to simply add the existing appointment's day/time with continuing care type to the warning prompt. For good measure, the Dentrix team could add a button to jump straight to the existing appointment as well. At the moment, you have to use either "Other Appointments" or "Locate Existing Appointment" to track down the duplicate. I'm not interested in adding unnecessary steps to my daily workflow - so I want Dentrix to add as much sensible automation as possible.

Dentrix already does this in a way. You are warned that the patient already has continuing care attached to another appointment. Please, no more warnings in the Appointment Book!!!

As I indicated a few months ago, the current warning system is acceptable for a number of offices. However, there are some customers (myself included) that believe the existing warning could use some improvements. When you get right down to it, we need Dentrix to take as much of the burden of troubleshooting off our shoulders as possible. We should be spending less time looking for scheduling issues and more time focusing on our customer service. This is where Dentrix has an opportunity to be a true asset to the dental office. And after giving it some thought, I believe Dentrix could address several scheduling issues by rethinking how we currently schedule appointments in general. Upon setting up the patient's appointment, the team member should be presented with an appointment confirmation screen that summarizes relevant data. If the patient is already scheduled to be seen for another appointment, the confirmation screen should bring that to the team member's attention. It could also show how many months/days the patient is overdue for his/her continuing care. Naturally, there are multiple elements that could be added here that would make our work easier. If I had to liken it to existing elements within Dentrix, it would be similar to what they did with the "More Information" screen (but more streamlined to assist with schedule troubleshooting). Dentrix is a great practice management system - and I sincerely hope the design team is willing to do what it takes to make Dentrix the undisputed system of choice for today's busy dental office.

Dentrix already does this . . . you just need to stop click through the warning message.

GREAT idea and it would also be helpful if an alert would pop up if a pt is being scheduled to soon for a prophy appt. For insurance purposes it should be 6mos and 1 day.

This feature would help eliminate double booking!! Dentrix needs this ASAP

Also need to be able to attach continued care to more than one appointment. We have patients that schedule up to 1 1/2 years in advance to get late day appointments. Once the most current recare is set complete the next recare appointment does not have the continued care attached and is easily overlooked as it also does not print recare cards. Can't seem to attach recare without deleting next appointment and then remaking it using continued care.

Great idea!

Excellent idea, our office has made that suggestion as well.

Also I think that it would be great if when scheduling a prophy/perio maint. appt an automatic alert would pop up stating that this next prophy/perio maint. appointment would not be a covered benefit of this particular patients benefit plan.

While there is a warning prompt currently in place, the development team still needs to take another look at how it could be improved. Scheduling recare appointments tends to play out at a frantic pace, and the current prompt can easily be overlooked. Our team feels that simple UI tweaks could help make duplicates easier to notice. For example, Dentrix could include an option to put the warning on a customizable timer - which would force the scheduling team member to slow down and read the warning. Furthermore, the text of the warning itself could use some improvement. We know that Dentrix tends to focus on "Continuing Care" types to label recurring appointments, but the warning should grab the scheduling team member's attention with something like: "This patient already has a [CC Type] appointment scheduled on Mon/Tue/Wed/Thu/Fri, MM/DD/YYYY at HH:MM AM/PM. Are you sure you want to create an new appointment?" At the bottom of this prompt would be a formal warning that the patient would have more than one appointment on the books, and that the [CC Type] would be attached to the new appointment instead. It would also help our office quite a bit if Dentrix warned the scheduling team member if the patient was scheduling BEFORE his/her due date for that service.

Excellent idea!

You can already do this as long as the hygiene appointment is scheduled correctly (by attaching the continuing care to the appointment).

Having this feature would help so much and eliminate patients getting more than one appt. for recall as we have more than one person doing scheduling in our office. I would vote 100 if I could for this one.

If you always insert recall date on each appt the system will alert you asking if you want to attach recall date to this appt.

And to clarify - if CC is NOT attached - It would be nice to pop up that the family has an appointment too so we can try to coordinate those.

PLEASE make this happen for us.  It happens and can be avoided without click 3 different tabs to see it.

This actually already exists. If you use the continuing care box at the top of the appointment when scheduling and you continually use it then you will get a pop up when you press ok to schedule the appointment. 

It would actually be nice to flag for ANY type of appointment scheduled.  That way if they have a family member or maybe a restorative visit scheduled, you can try to coordinate it with them.  Many times I have offered appointments and they have stated, oh, I'm there with my kids that day in the morning, or the next day.......