Use the Scheduled Patients Summary to quickly find patients who are coming in today and need to schedule appointments for continuing care.
Updated 6/30/20
Holding a morning huddle is the key to a productive and profitable practice. Practices that use the Dentrix Daily Huddle Report see a positive impact on patient retention, increased productivity, and fewer holes on the hygiene schedule.
One of the most useful pieces of the Daily Huddle Report is the Scheduled Patient List. You can use the Scheduled Patient List to identify patients who are coming in today who are overdue for their continuing care appointments (based on the due dates attached to the patient in the Family File) and do not have an appointment scheduled for that continuing care. One of the offices I work with saw a 15 percent increase in their hygiene production because they used this report to find which of their patients coming in that day were overdue for continuing care and then talked to those patients about their overdue care and made a plan for getting them back on the schedule for those hygiene visits.
To include the information about patients who are overdue for continuing care on the Daily Huddle Report, open the Daily Huddle Report dialog box. Under Select Report Sections & Related Options, select Scheduled Patient List. This is the report that will provide you with detailed information regarding your scheduled patients. Then, click the Scheduled Patient Setup button to open the Scheduled Patients Setup dialog box.
Under Select Report Sections & Order, select patients who have overdue continuing care with no future appointment. By checking this box, the Select Continuing Care Types group box on the right becomes available. Here you can select the continuing care type(s) you want to view in the report, or check All to see all types.
Note: The information on the Scheduled Patients Summary is only as good as the continuing care information you are entering and tracking in Dentrix, so you need to make sure you’re properly setting up and maintaining continuing care in Dentrix.
Finally, click OK to return to the Daily Huddle Report dialog box, and click Preview to generate the report based on your settings.
From the generated report, you can easily see those patients on today’s schedule who are overdue for a continuing care appointment and don’t have an appointment scheduled for that continuing care reason. When they come into the office today for their appointment, you can remind them of their needed treatment and work to get those appointments scheduled.
For example, during your daily huddle meeting with your staff, you could make a plan for each member of your staff based on the patient list. I imagine those meetings going something like this:
“Gina, as the hygienist, you need to talk to Mrs. Jones about the importance of staying on top of her prophy visits. Remind her of what her insurance plan will cover, and see if you can get her scheduled for her next cleaning while you have her in the chair.”
“Carol, at the front desk when Mr. Smith checks out, double-check his insurance coverage. I’m pretty sure his benefits reset within the next couple of months, and that he has met his deductible. Try to get him back in for his overdue X-rays since there wouldn’t be any out-of-pocket expense for him.”
It’s all about knowing how to use the information you see on the report, and making a plan to do so. After learning the importance of using the Daily Huddle Report to identify patients coming in for appointment who are overdue for continuing care, one office I work with saw a 20 percent increase in their number of patients who had regular hygiene appointments, while another office had a 17 percent increase in patients who were scheduling their next hygiene appointment in advance.
If you want to increase your hygiene production and have better pre-booking rates for hygiene appointments, start incorporating the Scheduled Patient List into your daily huddle meetings.
Learn More
Learn more about what to discuss in your daily huddle at https://www.dentrix.com/products/daily-huddle.
To learn more about the Scheduled Patient Summary or the Daily Huddle Report, see the the following Dentrix Help topics:
Read Secrets of a Successful Daily Huddle for more ideas about improving your morning meetings.
By Alicia Owens, Dentrix Profitability Coach
Originally published in Dentrix Magazine, Spring 2015
