When scheduling recall appointment, warn user if patient is already booked for a prophy/perio maint
When scheduling recall patients, a warning should come up if patient already has a prophy or perio maintenance scheduled to avoid duplicate recall appointments for a patient.
Nancy Gallant
shared this idea
18 comments
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J
commented
YES~~~~!!!!!!! Eaglesoft has this~!!!! Why doesnt Dentrix~!!
I need to be able to highlight an appointment and the border show up in a different color when clicked on to be more visible and stand out from the other appointment. -
MARY ANN
commented
This is a GREAT idea..this should be added to Dentrix as soon as possible..There are to many double bookings .People call and schedule because they have forgotten that they already made an appt at the last appt.....
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John Dillworth
commented
Even from the "less is best" perspective, it wouldn't hurt to simply add the existing appointment's day/time with continuing care type to the warning prompt. For good measure, the Dentrix team could add a button to jump straight to the existing appointment as well. At the moment, you have to use either "Other Appointments" or "Locate Existing Appointment" to track down the duplicate. I'm not interested in adding unnecessary steps to my daily workflow - so I want Dentrix to add as much sensible automation as possible.
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curtis-r
commented
Dentrix already does this in a way. You are warned that the patient already has continuing care attached to another appointment. Please, no more warnings in the Appointment Book!!!
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John Dillworth
commented
As I indicated a few months ago, the current warning system is acceptable for a number of offices. However, there are some customers (myself included) that believe the existing warning could use some improvements. When you get right down to it, we need Dentrix to take as much of the burden of troubleshooting off our shoulders as possible. We should be spending less time looking for scheduling issues and more time focusing on our customer service. This is where Dentrix has an opportunity to be a true asset to the dental office.
And after giving it some thought, I believe Dentrix could address several scheduling issues by rethinking how we currently schedule appointments in general. Upon setting up the patient's appointment, the team member should be presented with an appointment confirmation screen that summarizes relevant data. If the patient is already scheduled to be seen for another appointment, the confirmation screen should bring that to the team member's attention. It could also show how many months/days the patient is overdue for his/her continuing care. Naturally, there are multiple elements that could be added here that would make our work easier. If I had to liken it to existing elements within Dentrix, it would be similar to what they did with the "More Information" screen (but more streamlined to assist with schedule troubleshooting).
Dentrix is a great practice management system - and I sincerely hope the design team is willing to do what it takes to make Dentrix the undisputed system of choice for today's busy dental office.
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Dayna
commented
Dentrix already does this . . . you just need to stop click through the warning message.
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Tonya
commented
GREAT idea and it would also be helpful if an alert would pop up if a pt is being scheduled to soon for a prophy appt. For insurance purposes it should be 6mos and 1 day.
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Jaime
commented
This feature would help eliminate double booking!! Dentrix needs this ASAP
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Cheryl Bresnahan
commented
Also need to be able to attach continued care to more than one appointment. We have patients that schedule up to 1 1/2 years in advance to get late day appointments. Once the most current recare is set complete the next recare appointment does not have the continued care attached and is easily overlooked as it also does not print recare cards. Can't seem to attach recare without deleting next appointment and then remaking it using continued care.
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Debbie
commented
Great idea!
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Cathy Feuling
commented
Excellent idea, our office has made that suggestion as well.
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Kim Wallace
commented
Also I think that it would be great if when scheduling a prophy/perio maint. appt an automatic alert would pop up stating that this next prophy/perio maint. appointment would not be a covered benefit of this particular patients benefit plan.
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John Dillworth
commented
While there is a warning prompt currently in place, the development team still needs to take another look at how it could be improved. Scheduling recare appointments tends to play out at a frantic pace, and the current prompt can easily be overlooked. Our team feels that simple UI tweaks could help make duplicates easier to notice. For example, Dentrix could include an option to put the warning on a customizable timer - which would force the scheduling team member to slow down and read the warning.
Furthermore, the text of the warning itself could use some improvement. We know that Dentrix tends to focus on "Continuing Care" types to label recurring appointments, but the warning should grab the scheduling team member's attention with something like: "This patient already has a [CC Type] appointment scheduled on Mon/Tue/Wed/Thu/Fri, MM/DD/YYYY at HH:MM AM/PM. Are you sure you want to create an new appointment?"
At the bottom of this prompt would be a formal warning that the patient would have more than one appointment on the books, and that the [CC Type] would be attached to the new appointment instead. It would also help our office quite a bit if Dentrix warned the scheduling team member if the patient was scheduling BEFORE his/her due date for that service.
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AdminRyan Beardall (Admin, DENTRIX) commented
As others have indicated, this warning should already be happening for you if the Procedure Codes that you are placing in the reason box have correctly been setup to a Continuing Care Type. You may want to review the webinar titled "Continuing Care Management" to see how this setup is done.
Visit www.dentrix.com/resource-center, and login as prompted. Click the "On Demand Training" tab, and scroll down to find the webinar. -
Lori
commented
Excellent idea!
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Cynthia Hidalgo
commented
You can already do this as long as the hygiene appointment is scheduled correctly (by attaching the continuing care to the appointment).
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LaDonna
commented
Having this feature would help so much and eliminate patients getting more than one appt. for recall as we have more than one person doing scheduling in our office. I would vote 100 if I could for this one.
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Phyllis
commented
If you always insert recall date on each appt the system will alert you asking if you want to attach recall date to this appt.
