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