The treatment plan was presented on Tuesday. It is now three weeks later and nobody has booked it. Dentrix keeps every one of those plans, and one report in the Office Manager lists them all.
Where is the unscheduled treatment report in Dentrix?
It is called the Unscheduled Treatment Plans report. Open the Office Manager, click the Reports menu, go to Lists, and select Unscheduled Treatment Plans.
Do not confuse it with the Unscheduled List in the Appointment Book. That one shows appointments that were broken or moved off the schedule. The Unscheduled Treatment Plans report shows procedures that were treatment planned and never had an appointment in the first place, which is the bigger pool and the one with the money in it.
Which options should I set?
The report dialog asks for a handful of things.
- Provider range. All providers for the practice view. One provider when you are preparing a list for a specific doctor’s coordinator.
- Patient range. Leave it at all patients.
- Date range. This is the treatment plan date. The default is everything. Set it to the last eighteen months. Plans older than that need a fresh exam before they are worth a call.
- Minimum amount. Start at $500. It drops single surface fillings and sealants and leaves crowns, bridges, implants and scaling.
- Patient status. Active patients only. Inactive and archived records only clutter the list.
- Exclude patients with future appointments. Tick it. A patient booked next week for the crown does not need a call about the crown.
Click OK. The report lands in the Batch Processor at the bottom of the Office Manager window. Double-click to preview, or select it and print.
What is on the printout?
Each patient takes a block. The header has the name, phone numbers, the guarantor and the date of the last visit. Underneath are the treatment planned procedures with the tooth, surface, code, description, the date planned and the fee. A total per patient is at the bottom of the block, and a grand total at the end of the report.
The fee is the office fee schedule attached to the patient. It is not what you will collect. A PPO patient with a $1,240 crown fee might bring in $900 after the write-off. Keep that in mind when you sort.
A worked example
A single-doctor practice runs the report with an eighteen-month window, a $500 minimum and patients with no future appointment. 48 patients come back and the grand total is $61,200.
Sorting the blocks by patient total by hand gives this at the top.
| Patient | Planned | Fee | Plan date |
|---|---|---|---|
| Patient A | Implant, abutment, crown #30 | $4,650 | 4 months ago |
| Patient B | Crowns #3 and #14 | $2,480 | 7 weeks ago |
| Patient C | Scaling 4 quads, 2 perio maintenance | $1,310 | 3 weeks ago |
Those three are the first calls. Patient C is recent, so the conversation is easy. Patient A has been sitting four months and probably has a reason, often money, so look at the ledger before you dial.
$61,200 is found. It is recovered only when a procedure is scheduled, set complete and paid. If eight patients book in the first month and five complete and pay by the end of the second, the recovered total is those five, and the rest stay on next month’s report.
How do I work the list without losing track?
Write every contact in the Office Journal. The report does not show who was called last week or what they said. Without the journal, two team members call the same patient and neither calls the one who was ready to say yes.
Run the report on the first Monday of every month and keep the PDF. Comparing this month’s grand total with last month’s is the simplest measure of whether the follow-up is working.
What Calibic adds
Revenue Recovery is LIVE for Dentrix. Calibic reads the procedure, appointment and patient tables over read-only SQL, builds the same list ranked by amount and age, and then keeps watching. When a procedure gains an appointment, then a completion date, then a payment against the account, the patient moves from found to recovered and the Recovered card updates. Nothing is counted until the ledger shows it paid.
Calibic does not write to the Office Journal and cannot change a treatment plan.
Compare your printout with the ranked list on the Revenue Recovery product page. The sibling guide covers the Dentrix recall report, and the Dentrix integration page lists what Calibic reads.