Continuing Care provides a flexible way to monitor your patients’ pending dental care. Below is a list of the advantages the Continuing Care system can bring to your office:
Multiple Recall Types - You can create as many Continuing Care types as needed to help patients maximize their insurance benefits and dental health, while maximizing production. For example, you can create a type for Panorex or have a file for separate Perio and Exam recalls.
Continuing Care Cards - Continuing Care allows you to efficiently separate cards for recall patients without appointments from those with appointments. Continuing Care will save you time and money with its sorting features, and patients will see a tremendous difference in your ability to effectively communicate with them.
Individualized Continuing Care - With the Continuing Care system, each patient can have specific defaults (intervals, types of Continuing Care, providers, and so forth). This individualized information allows you to run your practice more efficiently while at the same time providing better care for your patients.
Simplicity of Scheduling - With Continuing Care’s ability to give specific patients their own Continuing Care defaults, Dentrix becomes much more capable of scheduling patients as individuals. By attaching the Continuing Care type to an appointment, the system can automatically assign the appointment to a provider and the correct amount of time needed for that patient.
Increased Tracking Ability - Continuing Care types were designed for tracking recall exams but can also be used to monitor other things. For example, you could create a Continuing Care type that would track which patients have started a treatment plan. When a treatment plan is entered, these patients may be assigned a TP-Call date and call back interval. At the end of the interval, if they had not completed the Treatment Plan, you have a ready-made phone call list to follow up with those patients and even schedule the appointment, right from the list. In this example you have practically guaranteed the completion of most treatment plans simply by following up. This aspect of Continuing Care alone could be worth thousands in extra production.
The Continuing Care system is quite powerful. However, there are two keys to using the system effectively:
Understand How to Use Continuing Care - Because Continuing Care is so flexible, it will require learning how it works to make it work for you.
Time - It will take time to set up the Continuing Care system. Take the time now to get the system in place and the benefits down the road will be well worth the effort.
To get your Continuing Care program up and running, complete the following:
Set Up the Continuing Care Type Defaults - Take some time to sit down as an office and define what to track. Then add or modify existing Continuing Care types to meet the needs of your practice. See Continuing Care setup for more information.
Assign Procedure Codes a Continuing Care Type - The computer has the ability to automatically assign Continuing Care types to patients when they have certain procedures completed. Similarly, Dentrix will automatically reset Continuing Care due dates when those procedures are completed. You will need to assign Continuing Care type to the procedures to be used in this manner. See Procedure Code setup for more information.
Customize your Continuing Care Views - Each practice can have a specific way to organize a list of Continuing Care patients. The Continuing Care views setup allows you to create many different ways of looking at the Continuing Care information. Decide how you would like to sort your Continuing Care information and then refer to Continuing Care views setup for more information.
Customize Patient Continuing Care Defaults - For the next few months, when a patient calls to schedule a Continuing Care appointment or visits the office, take a minute to set up their Continuing Care defaults in the Family File. See Assigning Continuing Care types for more information. Within six months, you will have set the Continuing Care defaults for every patient active in the Continuing Care program.
Attach Continuing Care to Appointments - From this point forward, when a patient calls to schedule a Continuing Care appointment make sure you attach the appointment to the Continuing Care type. See Creating Continuing Care appointments for more information.
To learn more, click the following links:
Accessing the Continuing Care list
Continuing Care list view options
Adding Continuing Care from the Continuing Care list
Clearing Continuing Care types
Making phone calls from the Continuing Care list
Adding an Office Journal entry
Printing the Continuing Care list