Specifying a Provider for Continuing Care

Selecting a continuing care provider for a patient from the Continuing Care module has been a feature in Dentrix for a long time, but few offices know about it. So, I thought it would be a good topic for this week. The ability to set a provider for a patient’s continuing care can be a very beneficial feature for your office to use! Not only can it save a lot of time when scheduling appointments and eliminate errors, but it also indicates to all team members which hygienist a patient prefers to see.

In Dentrix, when you schedule appointments, the provider for the appointment generally defaults to the patient’s primary provider. But when you are scheduling a continuing care appointment with a hygienist, this can be cumbersome because you have to change the provider assigned to the appointment to the hygienist’s provider ID. Additionally, any time you make a change to the appointment, for example if you add X-rays or fluoride treatment, the provider will change from the hygienist back to the patient’s primary provider.

But, did you know that you can assign a continuing care type to a particular provider? In the Family File, select a patient and double-click the Continuing Care block. Select one of the Continuing Care types, for example, Prophy, and click Edit. You can select a Provider for this continuing care type. The options are Provider 1, Provider 2 or you can assign another Specific Provider from a drop-down list. Assign the provider who will be completing the continuing care procedures during an appointment for this continuing care type, and click OK to save the changes.

Once this has been set up, when you schedule an appointment for that continuing care type, the appointment will be automatically scheduled with the selected provider and there will be no need to change it!  For offices that schedule continuing care appointments, this is a huge time saver and eliminates errors when completing appointments and assigning procedures to specific providers.

Selecting the provider for a continuing care type is also a great way to indicate if a patient prefers to see a particular hygienist. By assigning a continuing care type to a specific provider, when you schedule a continuing care appointment in the future, the preferred hygienist provider number will automatically appear in the Appointment Information window.

Please contact me with questions about this topic or others 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.

from  The Dentrix Office Manager Blog https://ift.tt/2N9CPUY