Open Dental Forum

There seems to be an issue with the New Patient report (Reports, New Patient) in OpenDental 16.3.15.

When a New Patient registers we check the box in the Edit Appointment window that says, NP and check the appointment completed at the end of the visit.
A manual count for the month of October 2016 says we had 94 new patients but the report (Reports, New Patient) says 69.

This custom query says 79
SET @FromDate='2016-10-01', @ToDate='2016-10-31';
SELECT Year(DateFirstVisit) AS Year, Month(DateFirstVisit) AS Month,
COUNT(DISTINCT patient.PatNum) AS 'New Patients'
FROM patient, procedurelog
WHERE procedurelog.PatNum = patient.PatNum
AND patient.patstatus = '0'
AND procedurelog.ProcDate BETWEEN @FromDate
AND @ToDate
AND procedurelog.ProcStatus=2
AND patient.DateFirstVisit >= @FromDate
AND procedurelog.ProcFee > 0
GROUP BY Month(DateFirstVisit)
ORDER BY patient.DateFirstVisit;

So we have three different totals. Not knowing the code behind the Report in OD I could not compare the two queries.
Anyone else have this issue? Any ideas?

drtmz

The reason you are getting different results from different reports because the internal report gets a count of patients having their first completed procedure in the date range, while the query you posted is getting a count of patients with their "Date First Visit" in the date range (this is a column in the Edit Patient window), and your process seems to be to check the appointments "New Patient" checkbox. You might want to get a custom query that checks for appointments with the New Patient checkbox checked in the date range.

""The reason you are getting different results from different reports because the internal report gets a count of patients having their first completed procedure in the date range, while the query you posted is getting a count of patients with their "Date First Visit" in the date range (this is a column in the Edit Patient window), and your process seems to be to check the appointments "New Patient" checkbox. You might want to get a custom query that checks for appointments with the New Patient checkbox checked in the date range.""

I'm confused. What is the difference between ' first completed procedure' and 'Date First Visit'? Every patient gets a procedure completed on their first visit. Rarely if ever is there a no charge and therefore no completed procedure on the first ever visit. I just want to be consistent in my tracking.

Which number is usually referred to by practice management gurus as New Patients per month? I want to use it to track our growth. Or doesn't it matter?

drtmz

Can anybody help clear this up?
Which number is used for practice management purposes?

drtmz

There are a few reasons why your Date First Visit would be different than the date of your first completed procedure. First, Date First Visit is user editable in the Edit Patient Information window. Second, the Date First Visit is only guaranteed to update once. To elaborate, the program tried super hard to automate and keep track of the first visit date via completing a procedure, however if something goes wrong or we detect that there is already a date entered into the column, we abandon ship. This is because a user could have entered the real Date First Visit that Open Dental has no way of knowing about. Third, there was a few minor versions where adding a Broken Appointment Procedure was triggering the Date First Visit automation. This is fixed in the most recent stable. If you run the internal report and your report and find patients that are only on one of the reports and not the other, go to that patients chart and see what the first completed procedure date is and compare it to the Date First Visit.