Setting up the Practice Advisor

Before running the Practice Advisor report, you can set up how providers, adjustment types, payment types, benchmarks, the active patient base, and continuing care patients are to be used for the Practice Advisor report.

The Practice Advisor comes with default benchmarks. We recommend that you discuss the settings with a practice management consultant to determine if you need to customize the Practice Advisor benchmarks to meet the needs and goals of your practice.

To set up the Practice Advisor

1.   In the Analysis menu in the Office Manager, click Practice Advisor.

The Practice Advisor dialog box appears.

Note: If you enabled Dentrix passwords, users must have security rights to “Practice Analysis, Open” to open the Practice Advisor.

2.   Click Practice Advisor Setup.

The Practice Advisor Setup dialog box appears.

3.   Set up the following options:

·        Click Assign Provider as Dentist/Hygienist to designate which providers will be hygienists and which will be dentists for the Practice Advisor report (for details, see Assigning providers).

·        Click Assign Adjustment Types as Production/Collections to designate which adjustment types will apply to collections and which will apply to production on the Practice Advisor report (for details, see Assigning adjustment types).

·        Click Assign Payment Types as Over-the-Counter Collections to designate which payment types are over-the-counter and which are not over-the-counter on the Practice Advisor report (for details, see Assigning payment types).

·        Click Benchmarks Setup to designate the benchmarks that will determine variances in report information and flag report information that needs to be addressed for increased profitability (for details, see Setting up production benchmarks and Setting up other benchmarks).

·        Enter a value (from 1 to 60) for Patients are counted for the Active Patient Base if their Last Visit is within the last [number of] months. A patient is considered active and will be counted on the report if the patient has a Last Visit Date in the Family File that falls within the specified number of months.

Note: Many consultants evaluate a practice’s active patients based on the number of patients that have had a visit in the practice within the past 18 months. Some practices may be shorter (for example, 12 months), and some practices may be longer (for example, 24 months).

·        Enter a value (from 1 to 60) for Patients are counted for Continuing Care visits if their Prior Treatment date is within the last [number of] months. A patient will be counted on the report if the patient has had a continuing care visit that falls within the specified number of months.

Note: Many consultants say that a patient is considered active in continuing care if they have had any continuing care visit with the past 12 to 18 months. Set the number of months that reflects how your practice defines a patient as being active in continuing care.

·        You can click Restore Defaults to return the active patient and continuing care box values to 18 and 12 months, respectively.

4.   To save any changes, click OK.

5.   In the Practice Advisor dialog box, click Close to exit the Practice Advisor.