Continuing Care is an up-to-date, flexible, and powerful module for monitoring your patients' pending dental care (recall or recare). The following is a short list of the advantages that 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 separate types for perio recalls and prophy recalls.
Continuing Care Cards - Continuing Care allows you to efficiently separate cards for recall patients without appointments from those with appointments. Continuing Care can save you save 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 Continuing Care, each patient can have specific defaults, including intervals, types of continuing care, and providers. 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 Enterprise becomes much smarter in its ability to schedule patients as individuals. By attaching the appropriate continuing care type to an appointment, the system can automatically assign the appointment a provider and the correct amount of time needed for that patient.
Increased Tracking Ability - Continuing care types are designed for tracking recall exams but can also be used to monitor other things. For example, a continuing care type can be created that would allow you to see which patients have started work on a treatment plan. When a treatment plan is entered, they may be assigned a "TP-Call" date and call back interval. At the end of the interval, if they have not completed the treatment plan, you have a ready-made phone call list to follow up with those patients and even schedule the appointment. In this example you have practically guaranteed the completion of most treatment plans, and increased production that you otherwise might have missed out on, simply by following up.
The continuing care system is quite powerful, but there are two keys to using it effectively:
Understanding how to use continuing care - Because the continuing care system 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.
Note: To generate the Continuing Care List for the entire practice, you must open Continuing Care from Appointment Book.
Click any of the following links to learn more about Continuing Care:
Getting started with continuing care
Managing Continuing Care views
Editing a patient's continuing care
Clearing a patient's continuing care
Scheduling appointments from Continuing Care