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DentOffice will work well in an Orthodontic office. Here are some specific guidelines. As the program continues to mature, features specific to orthodondists, periodontists and OMS will be refined and expanded.
Providers
First of all, if you like to schedule patients with specific assistants, then
you will probably want to set up your assistants as secondary providers.
Then, when scheduling appointments, you can easily tell by the appointment color
which assistant is assigned. See the section on editing
appointments for an explanation of assigning providers to appointments.
If you don't normally worry too much about which assistant sees the patient,
then you could just use one provider for the Orthodontist, and all patients
would be assigned that provider.
Procedures
Just as in any office, procedures for a patient
are entered in the Chart module ahead of time and then
organized in the Treatment Plan module. You
can name the priorities in the Treatment Plan module to allow you to sequence
your treatement as needed. You also set up your procedure
codes ahead of time with the standard fees and time patterns. But, in an
orthodontic office, you would set up some extra no-fee procedures ahead of time.
You will generally have two types of procedures: procedures used for charging
fees, and procedures used for scheduling patients.
For scheduling purposes, you would create a set of procedures that begin with N, for no-fee. For instance N0001 could be "Take records", and N0002 could be "Cement bands". Neither of these procedures would be billed to insurance, so when setting up the procedure codes, check the box for "do not bill to insurance". You can continue to set up as many procedures as you want, one for each different type of appointment.
You would also set up procedure codes specifically for insurance billing purposes. These would be standard ADA codes, although if you have different fees for the same procedure, that can also be handled by setting up ADA codes with one-letter suffixes on them. The extra letter gets dropped when billing. You can, of course, change any fee for any procedure after adding it to the patient's chart.
Payment Plans
See the Payment Plans section for information on how to enter a payment plan.
You can have unlimited payment plans per patient and the guarantor does not
have to be in the same family as the patient, making divorce situations much
easier.
Scheduling Appointments
Scheduling appointments is handled the same as
in any other office, except that you will generally only be scheduling one procedure
for an appointment instead of multiple procedures. Set up your appointments
using the Planned appointment feature. If you need to add
a procedure that is only used for billing purposes, remember that you do not
necessarily have to set up an appointment to enter a completed procedure. You
can simply double click on the procedure from the Chart module or the Treatment
Plan module, and change the status to C. That will cause
it to show in the Account module as a completed procedure to be billed.
When scheduling appointments, it will be common to have many patients simultaneously booked. There is no limit or restriction on overbooking which will make it easy to move patients to the best times. You should try to set up your initial procedure codes with the time pattern showing the appropriate number of X's, which represent provider time. That way, each appointment will also have the correct provider time. The front desk should try to schedule the patients so that the provider time stays fairly constant, even if it sometimes gets double booked.
Tracking Patients
You can use
the Planned appointment tracker to make sure none of your followup appointments slip through the cracks. If
you use it as intended, you will not have to keep
any appointments on the Unscheduled list, although you can still use that feature
if you wish.
Referrals
Referral tracking and reporting will allow you
to see at a glance who referred each patient to your office. You can run reports,
and merge letters for your referral sources as well.