October 31, 2018
Patients aren’t knocking down your door to get their teeth cleaned or to make a payment on their balance. That’s why you have to reach out to them. Automated patient communication allows you to efficiently contact patients with reminders sent via text or email. Your ability to contact patients, however—by any means—breaks down when you don’t actually have their contact information.
Dentrix Ascend can help you with that. The Primary Contacts without Phone Numbers report lists patients who are missing a phone number, an email address, and/or a mailing address in their patient records.
How to:
- Navigate to Home > Power Reporting > Patient, and click the icon to open the Primary Contacts without Phone Numbers report.
- The report opens and is pretty self-explanatory. Each major row lists the primary contact, and below are all the persons for whom they act as the primary contact. Patients may have a phone number or email address listed, but the important piece is the primary contact: one or both of those data fields is empty.
- You can add data fields and filters to customize to report, for example grouping by location, or only showing active patients. To do so, click the Toggle Edit link, and drag data fields into the layout.
- To save a customized report as a template for later use, click Save. In the Save Report dialog box that opens, type a name for the report, select whether you want to save the report as one of your reports (available only to you) or as an organization report (available to all users), and then click OK.
- Select your preferred way to share this information. Click the Export icon, choose a file format, and then use the Save As dialog box to select a destination for the file.
- Once you have a list, follow the protocol established by your practice to obtain the missing patient information.
Additional Information
- An easy way to capture missing primary contact phone number and email information is to make use of the Appointment Tasks in the Checkout section of the Routing Panel. Tasks named Collect Phone Number or Collect Email appear automatically when that information is missing. You can enter the information right in the panel without leaving your current page.