Rescheduling Cancelled Appointments

Last week I wrote a post about implementing a more lenient cancellation policy for those patients who cancel their appointment due to being ill. During this pandemic, encouraging patients to stay home if they don’t feel well can protect the health and safety of your staff and other patients.  

I suggested using the Wait/Will Call option instead of breaking the appointment for these types of cancellations. Once you have cancelled an appointment and moved it to the Unscheduled List, I would suggest waiting two weeks before following up with the patient to reschedule. You can use the Unscheduled List to quickly find patients on the Wait/Will Call list and contact them to reschedule their appointment. I would recommend using the Office Journal to record the contact made with the patient and what was said. From the Unscheduled List, you can easily access the Office Journal and drag an appointment directly to an open spot in your schedule.

It’s very important to keep the Unscheduled List up to date, so that when you’re following up with patients on the list, you don’t contact patients who may have already rescheduled. You can keep the Unscheduled List up to date with a little team training. Most likely, you have seen this warning message when trying to schedule an appointment.

Train your team that when they see this message it means that the patient already has an appointment on the Unscheduled List. 

If you click Yes to this warning, the patient’s Family Appointment List will open. From here you can click the appointment labeled as <Unscheduled Appt>, and then click the View Appt button. This opens the Appointment Information dialog box, which will have all of the appointment information (procedures, providers, appointment length, and so forth) already attached to the appointment. From here you can manually assign an operatory, date and time, or use the Pinboard or Wait/Will Call buttons to move the appointment to either of those lists.

If you click No to this warning, Dentrix assumes you want to create a completely new appointment for the patient and opens a blank Appointment Information dialog box. This is where you run into problems with keeping your Unscheduled List up to date. If you re-create the appointment for the patient, the old, broken (or Wait/Will Call) appointment still remains on your Unscheduled List. Instead of recreating the appointment, you should train your team to open the Unscheduled List, find the appointment, and reschedule it from there.  When you reschedule an appointment from the Unscheduled List, the appointment is removed from the list, which will keep your list up to date and more accurate in order to follow up with patients.

By keeping your Unscheduled List up to date, your office will have a great resource from which to contact patients to reschedule appointments. This can help to fill openings in your schedule and avoid unscheduled time. Email me with questions 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/3bFivUZ