The Patient Visit Form allows you to create custom route slips for patient appointments that contain only the information you decide is relevant.
It’s 8:00 AM, and your work day is about to begin. You pick up your charts from the front desk for the patients you will be seeing today and begin scanning the route slips in an attempt to mentally plan the events of the day. It takes a few seconds to locate the patient’s appointment information on the route slip, and you have a dozen or so route slips to look through in the few minutes before patients start to arrive.
Wouldn’t it be nice if you didn’t have to sift through information on the form that wasn’t necessary? Now your office can create route slips that contain only the information you choose, with the new Patient Visit Form.
The Patient Visit Form is a customizable route slip that you can view or print for a selected appointment, a specific patient, or multiple patients at a time. You can generate Patient Visit Forms for specific providers, operatories, or appointment dates. You can even customize the information that’s included on the form, including patient, family, account, continuing care, and insurance information; patient and family alerts; patient and account notes; treatment-planned procedures; and/or future appointments.
Generating the Patient Visit Form
You can generate the Patient Visit Form using one of two methods: from the Appointment Book or from the Office Manager.
Use the Appointment Book to generate a form for an individual patient with an appointment. To do so, first select the appropriate patient appointment. Then, from the File menu, click Patient Visit Form. Alternately, you can click the Patient Visit Form button on the Appointment Book toolbar.
To generate a form for multiple patients at a time, use the Office Manager. From the Reports menu, select Lists, and then click Patient Visit Form. You can choose to generate forms for patients who have certain primary providers, appointment providers, or operatories. Once you have clicked Patient Visit Form in either the Appointment Book or the Office Manager, the Patient Visit Form dialog box appears.
Customizing the Patient Visit Form
There are over 30 different options you can customize to create a patient visit form that works best for your office. For example, you may prefer not to include the primary and secondary dental insurance information as well as the primary and secondary medical insurance information on the form. With a couple of quick mouse clicks, you can remove the medical insurance information from the form.
You can also choose between displaying a brief summary of insurance information, which includes basic carrier and subscriber details, and a more detailed view, which includes everything that shows in the brief summary plus the patient and family benefit maximums and deductibles, insurance plan name, and coverage table. It’s your office, why not include the information you want to see?
After you select which information will appear on the Patient Visit Form, a Preview feature allows you to see how the form will appear on the page before you print. Note: Before you preview your form, be sure to check the Do Not Close When Preview/Print/Batch box, or when you close the Preview screen you will lose any changes you made within the Patient Visit Form dialog box and have to start over before previewing or printing again.
Once you decide which patient information you want to include on the form, save those settings as the default by checking the Save As Default box on the lower left of the form dialog box. Dentrix will save the custom settings only on the computer used to set up the form.
The new Patient Visit Form makes it easy to create customized patient route slips that display only the information you need.
Learn More
To learn more about the Patient Visit Form, see the Patient Visit Form topic in Dentrix Help.
By Sean Eyring, Contributing Editor
Originally published in Dentrix Magazine, Summer 2011
