In preparation for year-end, use Dentrix reports to find patients with unscheduled treatment and remaining insurance benefits while giving your practice production a boost.
With the approach of the end of the year comes the need for end-of-year routines in your dental office. In most dental practices, one of those tasks is assisting your patients in using their remaining dental insurance benefits for the year. As you help patients maximize their benefits, you can also increase your practice’s production for the remaining months of the year by scheduling appointments for patients with outstanding treatment plans.
There are two reports you can generate in Dentrix to find patients that have outstanding treatment plans at the end of the year: the Unscheduled Treatment Plan List and the Treatment Manager. The benefit that the Treatment Manager has over the Unscheduled Treatment Plan List is its ability to apply filters to find specific groups of patients who have outstanding treatment plans. For example, you can apply a filter to find patients who have at least $500.00 of their dental insurance maximum remaining, or who have larger treatment plans over a specific dollar amount. You can also filter the Treatment Manager by procedure code to find patients who are treatment planned for high production procedure codes such as a crown. Once you have identified the patients with the outstanding treatment plans you want to find, you can then contact them by phone, or you can send them an email message or letter explaining that their dental insurance benefits will expire December 31st and your office would like to assist them in taking advantage of those benefits before they expire. You can then offer to schedule the patient an appointment to complete their outstanding treatment plan.
In order to maximize your practice’s production, you can use the Scheduled Production Forecast in the Dentrix Reports module to analyze your future scheduled production and the daily and monthly production in relation to your practice production goals for each provider. That way you can easily see where the low production days are for each provider and where you need to focus your scheduling efforts in order to increase production.
Keep in mind that for all of this to work effectively, your team must be entering the benefit renewal date and insurance maximum for each insurance plan for Dentrix to be able to calculate remaining insurance maximums. Also, Resetting Insurance Benefits should be a part of your monthly routine in the Task Scheduler, so the dental insurance maximums and deductibles are reset properly. It’s also important that each provider’s working days and hours are set up accurately for Dentrix reports, including the Scheduled Production Forecast to calculate accurately.
As the end of the year approaches, remember to generate the appropriate Dentrix reports to find patients with outstanding treatment plans and remaining insurance benefits. You can then contact those patients to schedule their appointments so they can use their insurance benefits before they expire, while also increasing your practice’s production for the remainder of the year.
Learn More
For additional information, read the following:
- Using the Unscheduled Treatment Plans List
- Finding Specific Groups of Patients in the Treatment Manager
- Running a Scheduled Production Forecast
- Make Sure You Complete These Tasks When Closing the Month
- Changing Provider Schedules
By Charlotte Skaggs
Certified Dentrix Trainer and The Dentrix Office Manager columnist
Charlotte Skaggs is the founder of Vector Dental Consulting LLC, a practice management firm focused on taking offices to the next level. Charlotte co-owned and managed a successful dental practice with her husband for 17 years. She has a unique approach to consulting based on the perspective of a practice owner. Charlotte has been using Dentrix for over 20 years and is a certified Dentrix trainer. Contact Charlotte at [email protected].
