When and How to Use Treatment Case Statuses

I’ve had some questions come up recently regarding tracking case acceptance in the office. I wanted to provide some tips on how to track the status of a treatment case in Dentrix, and which reports you should use to track treatment cases most effectively.

This week, let’s talk about the different case statuses you can assign in the Dentrix Treatment Planner and when you should use them.

In either the Treatment Planner panel within the Patient Chart, or from the Treatment Planner module, select a treatment case and then click the Update Case Status button.

Select one of the following case statuses:

Created
When a new treatment case is created for a patient, it will automatically be assigned a created status.

Printed
When you print a treatment case, the status will automatically change to printed. In many offices this is a good indication that the patient has been provided with a copy of their treatment plan.

PreAuth (Pri)
Update the case with this case status when sending a pre-authorization to insurance. This can be a good way to track which cases’ pre-authorizations have been sent, and can help to remind your team why the patient is waiting to schedule an appointment.

PreAuth (Sec)
Use this case status to indicate when a pre-authorization has been sent to secondary insurance.

Follow-Up Made
If you have followed up with a patient about their treatment case, you should change their case status accordingly. I would also recommend making detailed notes about what was said during the follow up call in the Dentrix Office Journal.

Referred
If the entire treatment case has been referred to another provider outside of your practice, you should indicate that by changing the case status. I would use this in the case of extractions. If some of the treatment will be done in your office and the rest is referred, you could create a new treatment case for the referred treatment and change the status of that case.

Proposed
This status indicates the case has been proposed to the patient, but they haven’t made a decision about whether or not to proceed with treatment. This would be a temporary case status until the patient accepts or rejects the treatment case.

Accepted
Use this status when the patient has accepted the treatment case and scheduled an appointment.

Rejected
Use this status when the patient has decided not to proceed with the treatment case. I would recommend adding detailed notes why the patient has rejected the case.

Completed
Change the case status to completed once all of the procedures within the case have been set complete.

Keeping statuses updated is important because it is an easy for everyone on the team to see what is going on with a particular case. Also, you can run reports based on the status for an easy follow up system for outstanding cases.

Join me next week when we’ll talk about which reports to run in order to track case statuses most effectively.

If you have questions about this or other topics, please e-mail me 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.

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