Pending Treatment Reminder - Process ???

[opensource]

Hello Team,

I am sure, we all face this challenge...what is the best way to follow-up with the Patients on their pending treatement. We all do the follow-ups in different ways..phone, email, US Mail..etc.

Would it not be GREAT to have a feature in open-dental...similar to the "Mass" billing option under 'Manage'. Maybe with options such as 'what priority' treatments should be included in the reminder...etc...etc. This will go a long way in ensuring that we do have a standard follow-up process for pending treatment. The adhoc follow-up methods of phone, email..etc can be an added way to be aggressive on the followups.

Dr. Jordan / Team...your thoughts ???.

Cheers,

OpenSource

[jordansparks]

That's what the planned appointment tracker is for.

[drtech]

...if all your patients have planned appointments like there are supposed to......(which doesn't always happen)

[opensource]

In addition to 'drtech' comment, The question was to tie the 'planned appointment tracker' to the 'Work-Flow Process' of sending the reminder / doing the follow-up.

For Example :
1. Open 'Planned Appintments' List
2. Select the 'Patients' that the remidner should go to.
3. Select a Template (Letter format) that should be used for sending the 'Reminder' (1st Reminder, 2nd Reminder, etc)
--- Similar to what is available in the email communication module
4. Print or Email the reminder (as a mass list)
5. Log the fact that reminder has been sent in the communication log

....I am sure I have missed a few additional steps in the workflow above. Unfortunately, Step # 3, 4 and 5 currently need to be done 1-by-1 manually. All the information is already available in opendental, it might be a simple matter of integrating various features already available in other modules of opendental.

I think the above will go a long way in adding to the productivity of the admin staff.

Your thoughts ???

Cheers,

Opensource

[atd]

I agree that a batch process for sending treatment reminders would be very useful – but I’d prefer that it was linked to the treatment plan rather than the planned appointment.

The majority of our patients are nursing home residents that have family members responsible for signing their treatment plans. We treat the patients on-site at the nursing home and the family members are usually not present, therefore we have to mail the treatment plan to the families for consent. Sometimes we don't hear back after the first mailing, so after 30 days we send a second copy of the treatment plan with a different cover letter. We send 3 copies and if we don't hear back after 3 we put the patient on recall. Our main office mails anywhere from 50-100+ treatment plans/day - having to do that manually would be very time consuming.

We’re in the process of converting from our own custom software to Open Dental. We have a batch treatment plan process in our old system and I’ve been trying to find a workaround in Open Dental. If this is something that could possibly be added, I have a lot of ideas on how it could be implemented.