how to follow up on NP who dont schedule?

[lethstang]

We would like to call them two days after their initial appt, then two weeks later, and then finally two weeks after that. Right now Im keeping an excel spreadsheet to keep track of all this, can the software do it better?

Steve

[jsalmon]

It sounds like repeating tasks but patient specific which I can't think of anything off the top of my head at the moment.
http://www.opendental.com/manual/tasklistrepeating.html

[Jandrew]

If your patients have been in and have recalls setup, then the recall list is what is normally used to track communications between your office and the patient.
With recalls set up correctly, you can define which patients show on the list and how long they should stay off the list after contacting them.

http://www.opendental.com/manual/recalllist.html

You could even create your own custom recall type that you assign to new patients if you wanted.

[gthiele]

It used to be said "There's a million dollars sitting in your filing cabinet, you just need to know how to get it out." Now it's all in your computer waiting to be found. if you hire a PM consultant this is one of the first things they look at.

My very strong belief is that unscheduled treatment plan follow-up should be automated in OD, but it is not. You could manually run a treatment finder report and look frequently and make notes in there. But it would be so easy for you and your staff to let this fall by the wayside. Things happen, multiple staff don't know what the other team members have done. People come and go. Vacations happen and people forget some of the things they were doing before they left, etc.

It's WAY to important for that. The software I'm presently using has this task and many more automated. I'd love to be able to share with design team how this works so that OD could incorporate. Would have been on OD years ago if they had these features, and still hoping they will somehow magically appear in one of the frequent updates. They did actually incorporate some basic automation a several years ago in V11.0

Basically how this works is that an internal "report" is run automatically every AM. Several tasks are on this list including insurance claims, pre-determinations, A/R, pending appointments, schedule openings, scheduling to goal, statements, appointment confirmations, unaccepted treatment plans, and the one you mentioned the unscheduled treatment, etc.

For the unscheduled treatment "report", several columns are available, many with the ability to order your list alpha-numerically. The headings include name, tx plan descriptions, NV $, remaining tx plan $, ins pays $, ins pays %, and could contain hourly production $. Click on any of the ordered headings and start marching down the list, all on your screen or printed out if you desire. Notes are made to be able to access later if the patient did not schedule, and follow-up time is set at that time. This plan would then not show up on your next "report" until that date or later, or if you ran your "report" to include those not due for follow-up.

This one report is so valuable that there was a company recently offering to provide just this one service as an add on to your software. Any guesses how much per month? I don't recall exactly, but try around $500.

Sorry for the long post, this one is near and dear to my heart. I'm not sure where to go from here, but maybe there will be someone who will take on the task of setting this up inside the software. We can only hope.