Dentrix Magazine Q2 2016 Jul. 2016 | Page 18

D O N ’ T L E T PAT I E N T S FA L L THROUGH THE CRACKS IN WORKSHOP WISDOM W W This excerpt from the Continuing Care Management workshop will teach you how to find patients who have fallen through cracks in your hygiene program and get them back on track. Follow along with the step-by-step instructions and advice in this article to improve the continuing care workflow in your office. YOUR HYGIENE PROGRAM A smoothly running continuing care system is one of the essential elements of a thriving dental practice. If your continuing care system is running efficiently and effectively, you’ll be better able to keep your patients coming in for regular cleanings and exams, which will lead to faster diagnoses and increased treatment rates in your practice. But when your continuing care system isn’t functioning properly, you can lose track of patients, which puts their health at risk and causes your office to miss out on treatment opportunities. THE PROBLEM: Patients aren’t coming in for regular continuing care appointments. They aren’t receiving reminders from your office and don’t show up on your continuing care reports as being overdue. One of the most common problems with an office’s continuing care system is patients who have fallen through the cracks. These are patients who haven’t been assigned to a continuing care type, so they don’t show up as being overdue for treatment in the Family File or on your reports. These could be patients who haven’t yet had a cleaning and exam appointment in your office and never had continuing care assigned to them. They could also be patients whose appointments weren’t scheduled correctly and weren’t attached to continuing care. How do you know that a patient has fallen through the cracks of your continuing care system? There are three ways to identify that a patient could be in this situation. 1. The continuing care type is not listed in the patient’s account in the Family File. 2. The patient calls to schedule a cleaning and says they never got a reminder from you. 3. The patient does not show up as overdue in the Continuing Care List but has not been in for their continuing care appointment. In the worst case scenario, these patients may not be attached to the PROPHY* continuing care type, which means they are overdue for a cleaning and in need of screenings, diagnoses, and treatment, but you don’t realize it. In other cases, patients may be attached to the PROPHY continuing care type but not the BITEWINGS type or the PANOREX type. In those cases, patients may be coming in for cleanings, but Dentrix isn’t alerting you that the patient is in need of those other services. T H E S O LU T I O N : Locate patients who are not attached to a specific continuing care type, and then assign it to them. In order to solve the problem of patients falling through the cracks of your continuing care system, you need to first find the patients that are in that situation and then assign them to all the relevant continuing care types so you can track them along with the other patients in your practice. *If the continuing care types in your office have been customized, they may be named differently than they are in this article. 14 | www.Dentrix.com/Magazine