The Dentrix Office Manager Blog

Okay, I get it. You are not quite ready to dive into electronic forms, load them up on your website for patients to fill out online or link them up to an iPad. If you are wanting to go paperless, then using the document center in Dentrix is going to be how you will manage all your paper forms. What I am finding with so many offices is that they think they have to settle with the default settings that came with the Dentrix installation.

Since the document center will be your best friend when it comes to paper storage, here are some tips to make it work as best as it can for you.

When you think of the document center, think of it like a big file cabinet with hanging file folders and then you put the pieces of paper into it. I want you to customize the names of the hanging file folders just like you would in a real file cabinet.

Here are some examples . . .

Referring Doctor Letters
Lab Slips
Original Forms from Paper Chart
New Patient Forms
Health History Update (of course if you read my blog you know that I love the Questionnaire module for HHX)
Consent Forms
Pre-Op Forms

So how do you edit the category types? Open the document center > setup > document types, then you can edit the existing names and/or create new ones. Create verbiage that your team will understand and will make it easier to find information.

NOTE: If you are using the feature that sends a virtual copy of the patient billing statement to the document center, make sure you keep the Billing Statements line item at the top of the list.

Have you stopped using Dentrix mobile? If so, may I ask what you are using as a login tool instead? If there is something easier and more tightly integrated with your Dentrix software other than Dentrix Mobile, I would like to know about it.

Maybe it’s just that you don’t know what Dentrix Mobile is or you haven’t been taught how to use it. Over the past few years, I have seen a decline in awareness and use of Dentrix Mobile so I felt it was time to re-post about this useful tool and remind you that it is part of your customer service agreement.

One of the greatest marketing tasks you can do at your practice is follow up with patients after a surgical or challenging appointment. You can easily log into Dentrix Mobile and see your appointment book and look up patient information to make those important calls.

I just finished two of the best books on the market right now for the dental practice, Everything is Marketingand Becoming Remarkableby Fred Joyal. One thing that he recommends in his books is for the doctor to call new patients, welcome them to the practice and ask if there is anything he or she should know before their visit tomorrow. What an amazing marketing tool! This can easily be done using your Dentrix Mobile service because you can make the calls from anywhere and see your appointment book at a glance.

If you would like to read my blog from 2013 (which is still very pertinent today) about Dentrix Mobile, CLICK HERE to be directed.

Last week, I had the honor of attending the Henry Schein Practice Solutions

consultant summit. It is a time every two years where dental consultants and industry leaders get together with the Henry Schein team and discuss the challenges the dental practice is facing and what lies ahead in the future. This helps the R&D department work on enhancements to the many products and services we use every day in our dental practice. It is one of the most amazing brainstorming sessions I have ever attended. It is also a lot of fun.

With that being said, a blog topic idea came into my head while I was listening to Tammy Barker speak about Profitability Coaching and how her team spends quite a bit of time with their clients on making sure the data being displayed on the KPI reports is as accurate as possible. I share the same goal and want all of you to understand how to make sure your numbers are as accurate as possible.

There are five key numbers on the Practice Advisor that are critical to the health and success of your practice. Your team needs to know what they do in the software affects the outcome of these statistics.

Case Acceptance– Dentrix can track your case acceptance accurately if your team manages the treatment plans appropriately. The way Dentrix tracks the monthly case acceptance is if the treatment is diagnosed and completed in the same month OR if your mark the case as accepted. For more about managing treatment plans, CLICK HERE.
Production per day– This is entirely dependent on the setup of the appointment book. You must have your office days, provider days and hours set up accurately in order to get an accurate production per day number. I feel this number is more important than the production per month. To learn more about setting up the appointment to perfection, CLICK HERE.
New Patients – Dentrix tracks new patients based on the first visit date located in the Family File. It also will count a patient as a new patient if this date is empty. The best way to track this on a daily basis is to use the Daily Huddle Report. If you want to read more about the Daily Huddle, CLICKHERE.
Referrals – Your total new patients should match the total number of referral sources. This is important because you want to see where your patients are coming from and know how to spend your marketing dollars. For these two numbers to be accurate, the First Visit Date and the Referral Date must match. I wrote about this back in January and you can re-read it by CLICKING HERE.
Active Patient Base– The active patient base on the Practice Advisor Report looks at the last visit date and how many patients have come in for an appointment within a certain amount of time. This one could get a little tricky for the office that posts a procedure code for things like missed appointments and other non-appointment tracking on the ledger. Every time you post something to the ledger with a procedure code, it will update the last visit date and now your Active Patient Base is updated. You can read more about this topic by CLICKING HERE.

This topic of accurate numbers and learning to trust your reports is so important. It is one of the most requested topics I get and one of the most-asked questions I receive from Dentrix users. If you haven’t heard yet, I started a Dentrix Online Community and this week’s user meeting is “Numbers Tell a Story” and it is all about learning what the numbers mean to your practice. It is a live event so join our community at www.novonee.com.

We have all heard the phrase “Garbage in, Garbage out.” This phrase comes into play especially when you and your team are trying to generate a list of patients who have unscheduled treatment and unused insurance benefits. Since this is typically the time of year when you want to start reminding patients to use or lose their unused insurance benefits, you want to make sure that this amount used is not a bunch of garbage.

How do you make sure your unused insurance benefits is a number you can count on?

Here are three tips . . .

Make sure you are up to date on month end. One of the many tasks that the month end procedure will tackle is resetting the insurance benefits used back to zero. I was in a practice a couple of months ago and one reason they have never been able to trust their treatment plan estimates is because they had not performed a month end since 2009. RUN MONTH END!
When you are setting up the insurance plan, make sure that the benefit renewal date is set accurately. Open the Insurance Data window. About halfway down, there is a benefit renewal date. Make sure this is accurate.
Update the patient’s insurance amount used if he or she has gone to a specialist or used benefits at another practice. Open the deductibles tab in the insurance window and manually update the benefits used. This way, when you search for a list of patients with remaining insurance benefits, you will get an accurate list.

For more information on how to run the reports and exports the lists, check out these past articles.

Unused insurance benefits . . . it's now more than a once a year project

Tis the Season

I had the pleasure of speaking last week at the annual American Association of Dental Office Managers (AADOM) meeting in Boca Rotan, Fla. My topic, Medical Billing or Bust, is a passion of mine and anytime I have the opportunity to spread the word about how you can change the world and change the lives of your patients is important to me. Keep your eyes open for registration to The Business of Dentistry Conference coming up in August 2017 where I will be teaching the Medical Billing or Bust to Dentrix users.

There are several things I can bring you up to speed now in this article that will help you understand how to set it up in your Dentrix software. Medical billing is not only about trying to maximize your patients’ benefits that they might not have access to, but it is also about providing the necessary coding for other organizations to use for growing awareness about disease patterns. With this being said, you can use medical coding on both the ADA claim form and the HCFA medical claim form.

Here are a few things to know now . . .

You will need to upgrade your Dentrix software to G6.1 in order to using medical coding on any claim form and send out a claim. This upgrade was released on October 1, 2015 so it has been out for almost a year.
When you upgrade to Dentrix G6.1, the software will include the most common ICD-10 codes for a dental office. This will save you a ton of time with having to input these codes. If there are some codes not included that you need, you can manually enter them into your system.
Make sure the HCFA claim form is added into the Definitions because you will need to attach it to the insurance plan information. There are several medical claim forms available. If you need a different format than the HCFA, you can search the Dentrix Knowledge base for the article that lists all the medical claim forms available so you can add the one you need into the Definitions.
When you upgrade to Dentrix G6.1 and you have not done any medical billing yet, you will need to add in all your CPT codes, Modifiers, Place or Service codes and Type of Service codes. If you need resources for these codes, please email me directly and I can send you a resource page at dayna@raedentalmanagement.com

For more information on medical billing, please read these past articles . . .

Medical Billing - the new shiny toy

Jump Start Your Medical Billing

Okay teams, we are down to the last three months of the calendar year. Now is Are we going to meet our YTD goals?” You still have time to prepare and make some adjustments in your schedule if you are coming up short for the year. Just a couple of weeks ago, I talked about reaching out to patients with unscheduled treatment and how to make sure you have an accurate list of patients with whom to follow up. Now is the time to give your patients a gentle nudge and get them in before they lose out on those precious dental benefits.

the time to ask yourself, “

But there is more to goal-setting than just production goals. You have new patient goals and collections to strive for if you want a healthy practice. You might be asking, “Okay, what can we do over the next three months to maximize the time we have left in the year?” Let’s talk about some things you can do to set your practice up for an end of the year success.

Make sure you have time set aside for those new patients who are going to procrastinate and want to schedule in November and December. If you have read my blog for a while, you know that I love Perfect Day Scheduling and it is ideal for blocking out time for new patients. If you have a goal of 20 new patients per month, then using Perfect Day Scheduling will ensure that your new patients calling in will have some options when they call you. It kills me when I am working with practices that say, “We can’t get a new patient in for two months.” This is unacceptable if you want to grow your practice. For more information on how to use Perfect Day Scheduling, refer back to these articles . . .

Monitoring your production goals on a daily basis can give you and your team the statistics needed to make adjustments throughout the month and hopefully end the month on a positive note. You can enter your monthly goals into the software and use the Daily Huddle Report to manage your production goals on a daily basis. Also, when you enter your monthly goals into the software, you can use the monthly calendar as a quick visual to see where you are in respect to your goal. This is a great tool for your morning huddle. For more information on how to enter goals into Dentrix, refer back to these articles . . .

Tracking your collections and forecasting where you will end up for the year is also an extremely important piece for the last three months of the year. Monitoring your collections and accounts receivable can be watched from the Daily Huddle, Practice Advisor and the Practice Analysis. You can have amazing production … but if you are not collecting it, then none of it matters. If your collections are short for YTD so far, then let’s look for ways to step it up and find out where the outstanding money is. For more information on managing your accounts receivable, refer back to these past articles . . .

You can do this! Give your team the tools and reports they need to look ahead toward the end of 2016.

As I write this blog for you all today, I am sitting in a hotel in Jacksonville, Fla., because I am working with an amazing periodontal office with their systems, health history updates and overall practice efficiency. Last night, I spoke to their study club members on some practical measures when it comes to protecting their patient records. It is ironic that, as I write this, we are on the verge of Hurricane Matthew hitting the east coast of Florida … so this post becomes so much more important.

It is up to the practice to make sure that their patients’ Protected Health Information (PHI) is kept confidential, the integrity of the record is sound and your patients’ records are accessible. So as I watch the Weather Channel from my hotel room tonight, I wanted to put together some tips you can follow to help you protect your patient’s information.

Notice what I said “some tips you can follow to help you protect your patient’s information.” It is not the job of your software, your hardware or your office design to ensure the protection of your patient’s data. It is up to you to put systems in place.

Since Florida is on the verge of a Category 4 hurricane, I want to point out a few things that could potentially affect the confidentiality, integrity and accessibility of your patient’s protected health information.

Power outages are going to be a huge issue with this upcoming storm. If you are going to close the office and want to have access to some of your patients’ information for returning calls, phoning in medications or following up with your patients after some surgeries, I would recommend you using Dentrix Mobile. When you use Dentrix Mobile, you have the opportunity to remote in using a mobile device and having access to some of your patients’ critical information.
Make sure an authorized team member has access to the backup of all the patient data in case of flooding or destruction of the practice. The backup of the data might be on an external hard drive or in an online secure backup system. Dentrix has the option of using eBackup to store your patients’ information securely and safely. This would give your practice a good option to access patient data in case of an emergency.
Make sure you have your Business Associate Agreements in place with your outside contractors. What if you are working with a consultant, accountant, attorney or computer company who has access to your patients’ information and they are the ones who are affected by the storm which jeopardizes the confidentiality of your patients’ information?

You can never do too much to prepare for a disaster and you have an obligation to protect your patients’ health information. It is not something you want to take lightly. Seeing this storm and looking back on storms in the past makes me realize we should be prepared for anything.

Did one of my recent articles get you thinking about planning for the end of the year? I talked about how you can make adjustments in your appointment book to make room for those last-minute new patients who are trying to get in before the end of the year so you can make your new patient goal number. I also discussed how you can forecast your appointment book production numbers to see if you are coming up short for your production goals. If you would like to re-read this article, CLICK HERE to be redirected.

These practice goals are not only important, but they are critical to the health of the office overhead and the stress level of the team. But what about you? What are your personal goals? When I was working in a practice, I got my hands on as much CE as I could handle. Do you know what goal I think you could set and accomplish by the end of the year? You could become a Dentrix Master and receive a certificate to prove it. This could be your personal end of the year goal.

Clinical CE is great and, for some of you in the dental practice, it is a requirement in order for you to maintain your license. Your entire day revolves around your practice management software and most offices have zero training or continuing education for the software you use every day. You all must maintain a certain level of knowledge of Dentrix in order to function on a daily basis. I am asking you to up your game and not just function, but excel. Become a Dentrix Master.

It’s easy to start and extremely rewarding to finish. The Dentrix Mastery Tracks were launched to help you learn more about your software, things you might not know exist and things you want to learn more about. This is your chance to set a personal goal and help your office at the same time. I believe in you.

Your first test is free!

To get started CLICK HERE and Create New User. Then enter code FreeTestDOM

You spend a lot of money on marketing, direct mailers and advertising. I am

shocked sometimes when I see how much these advertising campaigns cost the practice. How do you know if they are working? Do you know the ROI on your investment? I can help you see the statistics you need to know to help make decisions on your referral programs and new patient acquisition.

First things first . . . your team must be recording where your new patients are being referred from. If you are starting a new patient referral program or just signed up with a marketing company that is launching some direct mail campaigns, I want you to add these into your referral sources. Go to the Office Manager > Reference > Referral Maintenance. Then click on add new and enter the name of the campaign. Make sure to check Non Person and then, at the bottom, click on Referred By. The reason you want to select Non Person is because these campaigns will be tracked as Referred by Marketing on the Practice Advisor Report.

Second, make sure your team is checking the new patients against the referring sources on a daily basis. The easiest way to do this is using the Daily Huddle Report. Look at the Daily Huddle each day and make sure the total number of new patients is accurate and make sure the total number of new patients matches the total number of referral sources. This makes sure that every new patient is tracked with how he or she found you.

Now the juicy stuff . . . you can run a report that will show you the total number of patients by each referral source, see how much their treatment plan is worth and how much production has been completed. This is invaluable because you can not only see how many patients this campaign is bringing you, but also how much revenue. AMAZING!

Go to the Office Manager > Reports > Management > Referred By Report. Next, select the referral dates, production dates and select the referring source you want to analyze. Then at the bottom make sure to check Show Production Detail.

This will be great information when you are looking to renew a campaign or just great feedback to your marketing company

When I worked in a dental practice, we still had paper charts until 2009 when I helped my practice transition to a paperless environment. This means that we had a ton of treatment sitting in these paper charts that we had to search for manually in order to find patients who were unscheduled. It was an extremely time-consuming process but it is what we had to do in order to keep our doctor’s schedule full.

When you are working in a chartless environment and all your treatment plans are sitting in the computer, you still must follow up with patients who are not scheduled … but the process is much more streamlined. What I love about computer data is that it is all trackable and you can filter it onto a report. I call it “Mining for Gold.”

In Dentrix, there are actually three reports for you to use to track down unscheduled treatment to follow up with patients. I do have a favorite but I will let you decide for yourself what works best in your practice.

The Unscheduled Treatment Plan Reporthas been in Dentrix forever and it is what I used back in the olden days. This report gives you information on unscheduled treatment but you have to print it in order to work it and it can be very lengthy. Also, we have to remember that every time we print a report, things will change quickly and then your report is obsolete. To find this report, go to the Office Manager > Reports > Lists > Unscheduled Treatment Plans.
The Practice Treatment Case Report is also a printed report but you can filter it by very specific data points that you cannot find in other reports. What I like about this report is that you can search for treatment that has been Accepted, Rejected or Proposed if you are marking your cases with this status. This is good information for your doctor to see. In this report, you can also search by the case severity if you are using the stop light feature (for more information on this, CLICK HERE). This report can only be found on the Patient Chart and Treatment Planner modules. Click on the printer icon as if you were printing a treatment plan estimate, but instead click on Practice Treatment Case Report. Then select the parameters you want and click OK.
The Treatment Manager Report This is by far my favorite report in Dentrix. It offers you a way to search for patients with unscheduled treatment and create your own interactive spreadsheet where you can resort the columns to organize the report any way you want. You also do not have to print this report because everything you need to follow up with the patient is at your fingertips. For more details about using this report, refer to the blog I wrote called “Holes in your Doctor’s Schedule?” and learn more.

“Mining for Gold” is my motto when it comes to looking for patients with unscheduled treatment. You need to be proactive when it comes to following up with patients. You cannot expect them to pick up the phone and call you. Keeping your schedule full is something that requires a little bit of work from you. I hope these report options help make the task a little more efficient.

Did you know that not only does every patient have an office journal but every team member has an office journal? You might be wondering why that is relevant. Let’s take a little test. Can you answer YES to any of these questions?

Does your doctor’s desk have sticky notes all over it?

Does your desk have sticky notes all over it?

Are you looking for a better way to communicate with your team?

Do you work best off a list to To-Do’s?

If you answered yes to any of these, then I have a solution for you. Not only can you use the Office Journal for documenting administrative conversations with patients and keeping track of all your notes with patients, but you can also use it as your own personal To-Do list. And your entire team can have their own To-Do list in the Office Journal. You can send a note to one of your team members and it will show up on their Office Journal. Let’s run through a few examples.

Let’s say you are talking to a patient about scheduling his or her treatment and the patient says, “Can you call me after the New Year?” You can enter a Reminder Office Journal entry with a future date and it will show up on the patient’s Office Journal and your Office Journal.

You are trying to send claims for the day but you are missing the narrative for the crown on your first patient of the morning. You need to have the doctor review the X-ray and document it for the claim. That means that, instead of putting a “sticky note” on his desk, you can send him a note on his Office Journal.

A letter came in the mail today from your implant specialist that the implant is ready to restore for one of your patients. You need to let your dental assistant know to order parts and let your doctor know to treatment plan the next visit. You can send an Office Journal note on both of their journals with the specifics to the case and let them know they will find the letter from the specialist in the Document Center.

These examples happen in the dental office every day. How do you communicate with your team? How would life be if you could keep your communication inside of your practice management software? Try it and see.

Read other articles about how awesome the Office Journal is . . .

Say Goodbye to the Post It Notes

Where do I make all my notes

What are you thankful for? As I spend time with dental practices this time of

year, I love listening to how they spend their holidays … not only with each other as a team but how they give thanks to their patients. Many dental offices have elaborate parties to celebrate the end of the year and some go out into their community and volunteer their time in a shelter helping those who need it more.

One of the topics I spend quality time discussing with my teams is Patient Retention numbers and how everything they do not only inside the walls of their practice but out in the community affect Patient Retention. Everything you do is marketing your practice, whether it is walking patients up to the front desk with a very choreographed handoff to the front desk or calling in the evening to make sure they are feeling well after a tough procedure that day.

I would like to hear from you. I would love to hear not only how you give thanks this holiday season, but also about those special things you do for your patients and team members to make them feel special. Make your comments on this post and share your stories.

I will start . . .

“In my practice we would always celebrate our team member’s anniversary of when they started work at the office. Since I was the “techie” in the office, I would change that team member’s screensaver to be a message about how much I appreciated everything he or she did in the office.”

“Our office always gave out flowers on Mother’s Day”

I understand if you don’t want to give out your marketing secrets but let’s have some fun and enjoy reading something other than a Dentrix How-To.

I had a question the other day from an office who had a patient with a new type of insurance plan that she did not know how to setup in Dentrix. Over the last year or so, I have been seeing a lot of new and interesting dental plans popping up around the country. The plans I am seeing the most are patient co-pay plans so I wanted to take a moment to help you with the setup.

Most of us are used to the traditional plans that pay 100% on Preventative, 80% Basic and 50% for major dental treatment. These traditional plans are being replaced with unconventional, harder to manage dental plans. With a co-pay plan, the patient will pay a fixed dollar amount toward certain procedures and then the insurance plan will pick up the difference. Once you get it set up, the computer will take over and calculate the patient’s out of pocket on the ledger and treatment plan estimates.

From the Insurance window on the patient family file, click on Insurance Data and enter in all the insurance demographic information and attach the correct fee schedule if it applies. If you want more info on using fee schedules, CLICK HERE. Then click into the Coverage Table section and this is where most of the setup will happen.

First, select a different coverage table so it will show all the procedures instead of the categories. Next, highlight the procedure code where there is a co-pay applied, enter the amount in the co-pay box and click on Add. Do this for every procedure where there is a patient co-pay and also make sure that the coverage percentage is 100% (it will default to 100% but it doesn’t hurt to double check). The final step is to select the co-pay calculation method. In my example, I have selected the (total fee – co-pay) x cov% because this is the most common.

Now, if this co-pay plan has procedures that are not covered, you can either change the coverage % for that procedure code to 0% or enter the procedure in the Payment Table. Remember that the Payment Table overrides the Coverage Table so it would also be good to check to make sure the Payment Table doesn’t have anything in it that might throw off your estimates.

I hope this helps. Let me know if I can assist with any other odd insurance plan setup. I am happy to help.

What an amazing year it has been. The Dentrix Office Manager blog continues to grow and this year we topped over 17k page views each month . . . . thank you so much! Thank you for sharing your favorite posts with your friends and colleagues.

Enjoy the top 10!

Checking insurance benefits will suck the life out of you unless you change your system Dental insurance benefits are the thorn in our side every day. Checking benefits, eligibility and maximums for our patients is a great benefit … and it also sucks the life out of us to the point where we don’t have time for other things during the day. There needs to be a balance between it being a customer service task and a hand-holding task. The insurance benefits belong to the patient. They do not belong to the practice and we need to put the verbal skills in place to help our patients understand this . . .
Give your scanner a break . . . two ways to eliminate scanning Does your front office have a basket over flowing with papers with a sign on it that reads “TO BE SCANNED?” No one in the office wants to touch it because it is one of those tedious tasks that no one wants to do … so it just grows and grows. I know how you feel and many practices I work with say that scanning is one of the biggest pain points they deal with every day . . .
Health History Update . . . it's about being prepared for anything If your patient had a medical emergency and your team had to call 911, how long would it take you to pull up his or her most current medical history? Is the list of current medications and allergies buried among all your clinical notes or does your most recently scanned health history form have the words “no changes” all over it, forcing you to continue searching back to the next scanned document … only to find the words “no changes” all over this one as well. It’s not just about being prepared for an emergency … it’s about being prepared for anything . . .
Protect yourself from an insurance audit with proper documentation Have any of you been noticing your X-rays being denied more frequently than usual or have you been subject to an insurance audit on excessive X-rays? It is happening and if you have not seen it yet, you will soon. I want you to be as prepared as possible when the insurance companies come knocking on your door . . .
Must Reads for Doctor, Assistant, Hygienist and Admin team . . . So I thought for the holiday weekend I would put together a priority list for the doctor, hygienist, dental assistant and admin team. Here are the top three posts in each category . . .
Three tips for an accurate list of patients with unused insurance benefits We have all heard the phrase “Garbage in, Garbage out.” This phrase comes into play especially when you and your team are trying to generate a list of patients who have unscheduled treatment and unused insurance benefits. Since this is typically the time of year when you want to start reminding patients to use or lose their unused insurance benefits, you want to make sure that this amount used is not a bunch of garbage . . .
It's the little things . . . It’s the little things that matter. I hear that statement all the time being out in the dental industry working with dental practices from all over the country. I love it when I show clients something and their eyes light up because they now know something that is so simple but makes such a huge impact on their day . . .
Hygienists . . . you are one of the primary educators in the practice We all know that research shows the systemic links between oral health and the rest of the body, especially the relationship between periodontal disease, cardiovascular disease, diabetes and respiratory disease. As oral health providers, it is our responsibility to educate our patients about the significance of periodontal disease and how it will affect the rest of their body . . .
Accurate Family Balance or Accurate Patient Balance . . . you choose In my last post, I talked about the fact that I love how many things in Dentrix can be customized to fit the needs of the practice, from the toolbars to colors on the patient chart. In addition to visual customizations, you can also change the way payments are handled in the ledger as they are applied to the providers and specific patients. You would think that every office would want to handle payments and track collections the same, but this is not the case . . .
How to generate an Unscheduled Treatment Report for patients who have already said "Yes" to treatment. Back in February, I wrote an article on using visual tools to help communicate the status of the treatment plan with your entire team. If you want to re-read it, CLICK HERE. If you have implemented some of these visual aids, did you know that you can filter one of the Treatment Plan reports to give you a narrower search?

January is right around the corner and that means we are coming up on Year End. I get asked a lot of questions about what the process is this time of year. Is there a special report I should run? Is there anything I need to know about running Year End? The fact is there is nothing different to running Year End as there is to running Month End.

Month End is a very important process to keeping your system running smoothly and making sure all your data is as accurate as possible. It is also a very important security feature and should not be ignored. I am surprised how many offices have not run a Month End for months, or even years. Let’s go through exactly what the Month End process does so you have a clear understanding of how important it is.

The Month End process does four main things . . .

It will age your account balances. This will move your current balance into 30 days, 30 days into 60 and so on. On many reports, including the Provider A/R Totals report, it will move your ending accounts receivable balance into the beginning balance for the new month.
Your ledger for that month will now be placed into history, which means that you cannot edit or delete anything on the patient’s ledger. You will need to make an adjustment if you want to fix something on the ledger.
The Month End will lock up any clinical notes that have not been signed so there can be no editing to your clinical documentation. If you need to change a clinical note, you can do an addendum.
It will reset any insurance benefit used back to zero if the insurance plan is scheduled to renew. This becomes very important for your December Month End because so many plans renew in January.

For more information about the Month End process, please check out these other blog posts.

CLICK HERE for some sample reports to run

Do you have a new associate in your practice and not quite sure how to make sure the provider settings are correct? Let me help.

There are a couple of settings that you need to make sure are correct to avoid any delayed claims, rejected claims and provider payment allocation. Depending on if your new associate is paid on production or collection will determine how you should setup your default payment allocation. Also, it is important to know how Dentrix looks at the provider with some of the management reports.

The first thing you will set up is the provider ID in the Practice Resource Setup. This is where you will enter the NPI, Tax ID, DEA and provider license number. The doctor’s personal (Type I NPI) number will go here and the office tax ID number.
After you have the provider setup finished, then double check that the claim is set up the way you want it. The claim setup in located in the Practice Defaults, go to the Office Manager > Maintenance > Practice Setup > Practice Defaults. This is where you want to double check that the Billing/Pay To Provider and the Rendering/Treating Provider is set up the way you want it. The information here makes up the bottom two boxes on your insurance claim form and the insurance companies use this information to know who to send the check to and if the rendering provider is a contracted provider.
Depending on how your associate is being paid may prompt you to double check your default payment allocation setup. Go to the Office Manager > Maintenance > Practice Setup > Preferences and look in the upper left corner of this window to see how it is set up now. There are four choices and you can read a blog I wrote recently about these options by CLICKING HERE. If your new associate is being paid on collections, this is going to be extremely important.

The above list are the critical things to makes sure the billing and claim form is set up correctly for your doctors.

You will also need to setup your new provider with the appointment days, hours and a special color for the appointment book. You can read more about how to set up the appointment for your new doctor by CLICKING HERE.

It’s a new year! Welcome to 2017! It’s time to think about new insurance benefits, fee schedule updates and making sure that all your reports are up to date. There is a lot going on at the beginning of the year that we need to plan for and make sure your practice is running like a well-oiled machine.

First, let’s tackle the new insurance benefits. Now, not all insurance benefits renew in January but most still do and it is important to keep your insurance as accurate as possible so you can keep your accounts receivable in check. The insurance benefits used is updated and reset back to zero at the time you run the month end process.

It might be time to do a fee increase in your practice or maybe one of your contracted PPO plans has sent you an updated fee schedule (wishful thinking I know) that you need to update. If this is the case, then go to the Office Manager > Maintenance > Reference > Fee Schedule Maintenance. Now you can select the fee schedule you want to update and choose the appropriate process you want to complete. If you are going to update your office fees by a set percentage, then highlight the fee schedule name and click on auto updates and enter the details. If you have a PPO fee schedule plan that you need to update certain procedure codes, then highlight the fee schedule and click on View/Update. Then edit the procedure codes one at a time.

Now, the last thing I want to really hit home is how important it is to run your December month end so that your management reports are as accurate as possible. The month end routine will move your ending balance from the previous month into the beginning balance of the new month, so if you need to know what your A/R is at the end of December for accounting purposes this is extremely important. The easiest way to check your accounts receivable is to look at the Practice Analysis from the Office Manager > Analysis > Practice and then looking at the YTD ending balance. This ending balance will not be accurate if you have not performed month end.

Looking for an amazing year! Thank you for being a loyal reader of my blog.

If you have been reading my blog for a while, you have gained a lot of

knowledge about treatment planning, case management and following up on unscheduled treatment. Keeping your schedule full is imperative to having a successful practice and knowing what reports to manage to ensure patients don’t fall through the cracks is one of the core systems we manage in the practice.

You might be asking yourself, “What is my case acceptance?” and “How can I show my doctor the cases I am closing every day?” Is there a report that will show the treatment plans that are accepted on a daily basis? What if you are on an incentive plan for case acceptance? How would you show that to your doctor?

All those questions came to me from a practice administrator who is tracking case acceptance for his team. Then, the same question came in from a treatment coordinator who is on a bonus program for closing cases. I found it interesting that I was asked basically the same question by two different offices within the same week so I thought, “If they have this question, I bet the rest of the world does as well.”

You may know that I love, love, love the Treatment ManagerReport for following up on patients with unscheduled treatment. However, this report does not let me filter by accepted cases. For my article today, this is where I want to focus. You can generate a daily list of treatment plan cases that have been accepted so you can now know how much treatment you are scheduling and you can show it to your doctor if you need to report it.

Let’s say that three months ago, a patient was diagnosed with two crowns and she left without scheduling. Today, you called the patient to follow up and you got her scheduled. Woohoo! If you mark the case as accepted, now you have a way of tracking it.

Let’s also say that, today, you have five patients come in and you schedule three of them for treatment. If you also mark those three cases as accepted, they will also show up on the same report. Now you will have an accepted case report with four cases for today.

Go to the Patient Chart with the Treatment Plan Panel in view or the Treatment Planner and click on the printer icon as if you were going to print a treatment plan estimate. Instead of clicking on the Print Treatment Case, click on the Practice Treatment Case Report. Then select today for your date range and highlight Accepted for the case status. You will generate a list of all the cases that were accepted today and be able to show your awesome hard work for today. Great job!

Keeping track of your patient’s medical alerts can be a tricky thing. There is a big difference between legal documentation and just keeping your team informed about current issues. In your Dentrix software, there are many places you can keep tabs on the specifics … but there are also many differences in how, where and why you would use all these different places. Let me break it down for you so you can make informed decisions on what is best for your practice.

Medical Alerts– This is the + icon that turns from white to red when you enter something in this list. You can have up to 64 things in this list and the list can be edited from the Definitions. In Dentrix G5.2, I think Dentrix added a note box so you could add more details about allergies and other generic medical conditions like cancer. Use this section as a visual aide for your team to see at a glance if there are any medical alerts you should be worried about. However, do not use it as a legal health history update. The Medical Alerts cannot be date stamped or signed for security.
Patient Alerts– Many offices will use the “pop-ups” as a way to keep the team informed about the patients’ medical conditions, allergies and medications. Just like the Medical Alerts (red plus), the Patient Alerts cannot be date stamped or signed for security purposes. The alerts could easily be deleted by a team member accidently so this is a good place for visual reminders but not a good place for secure, legal documentation.
Patient Notes– The reason I am putting this in here is not that I am recommending it. It is that I see many offices using this note as a place for medical conditions and I want you to know it is also not one of my recommended places for secure medical information. The Patient Note is also a good visual because it will print on the Route Slip. However, just like the previous two places above, it is not a secure, legal place for health history documentation.

It’s good to have these quick visual icons and pop-ups to make sure your team is prepared to take care of your patients before they sit them down in the treatment room. However, these quick visual icons are not enough for complete medical documentation. In this world of risk management, it is important to protect your documentation as much as possible.

In addition to these visual icons and pop-ups, there are three places you will want to consider for your secure, legal documentation for health history and medical conditions. Check out the following blog articles that address these locations in your Dentrix software and how to best integrate it into your practice.

Health History Update - it's about being prepared for anything

Where do I make all my notes . . . clinical

Expand your medical alert notes with G6 and Questionnaires

Did you start a new campaign this year to attract new patients? I recently did an online webinar with Laura Hatch and she talked about improving your internal marketing with an option of doing a contest with your team or incentive for your patients. No matter what you implement into your practice for attracting new patients, you will want to make sure you track it in your Dentrix software so you can have statistics on how the marketing campaign performs.

When you start a new marketing campaign, you will want to load it into your Referral Maintenance so your team can add it into the patient’s family file for tracking purposes. Go to the Office Manager > Maintenance > Reference > Referral Maintenance and then click on New and add in the details of the campaign. Make sure that you mark it as a Non-Person so it will show up as a Marketing referral source on the Daily Huddle Reportand the Practice Advisor.

After your marketing campaign is complete, you can look at the referral analysis and see how many new patients were referred and how much production it brought into your practice. Check out the article I wrote just recently about the referral analysis by CLICKING HERE.

Don't settle on the defaults

What an amazing marketing tool!

5 Ways to trust the data on the Practice Advisor Report

Three tips for an accurate list of patients with unused insurance benefits

Medical Billing or Bust - what you need to know now

Will you finish the year at goal?

Bracing for Hurricane Matthew or any natural disaster

Personal goals = personal growth = practice success

Tracking the ROI on your marketing campaigns in three easy steps

Mining for Gold - the 3 reports for searching unscheduled treatment

Your Personal To-Do list

What are you thankful for and how do you show it?

Insurance Co-Pay plan setup

Top 10 Blogs of the Year

Why do I need to run Month End?

New Associate? Get the setup right from the start

Welcome to 2017 . . . update fees and keeping your reports accurate

Case Acceptance . . . how much treatment are you scheduling each day?

Keeping track of your patients medical alerts can be a little tricky

New Patients Welcome and make sure you track the referrals