Dentrix Magazine Q2 2016 Jul. 2016 | Page 14

Discover how easy it is to manage treatment options with Dentrix Dental consultants stress the importance of offering patients treatment alternatives as an integral part of the dental office’s responsibility to gain informed consent. Plus, you may find it helpful to give patients options when their preferences don’t align with your preferred or recommended treatment. Dentrix makes it easy for you to create and manage treatment alternatives in the Treatment Planner by linking alternate treatment recommendations together or creating alternate cases. In order to create alternative treatment cases, you must first add both sets of procedures to the patient’s treatment plan. For example, if you are going to recommend an implant to a patient but also offer the option of a bridge, you need to treatment plan all of the procedures for the implant and all the procedures for the bridge. It may seem like you have a lot of things treatment planned for the patient, but once you organize the treatment into cases in the Treatment Planner you will be able to make sense of the options. Linked Cases vs. Alternate Cases Once you have added all alternatives to the treatment plan you can create treatment alternatives in one of two ways: by linking cases or by creating an alternate cases. By linking cases, you connect two treatment cases together in the Treatment Planner so that they function as alternatives to each other. When one linked case is accepted, the other is rejected. Alternate cases are also connected together in the same way as linked cases, but there is one distinct difference between the two. When you create an alternate case, in addition to the two treatment options you can also include the treatment that will be required in either case. For example, if you are offering a patient the option of a bridge or an implant, but the patient needs to have several fillings completed regardless of which treatment option they choose, you would create alternate cases and copy the fillings into both cases. That way each treatment alternative would include the restoration option plus the fillings. ERIN BRISK Contributing Editor 10 | www.Dentrix.com/Magazine