May 22, 2019

While many imaging procedures are common and work well enough, what about those times when you want to take six bitewings instead of four, or need to add a couple of extra molar shots to capture maxillary and mandibular open contacts, or for that emergency where you would like one PA and one BW on the same mount? If yours is an office where exceptions are almost as common as the norm, you should consider building some custom acquisition templates to keep your clinical area humming along smoothly.

How to:

1. Select a patient, and navigate to the Acquire Images menu of the Imaging tab.

2. In the Imaging Procedures page, click the Custom tab. To begin, click Create Custom Procedure.

3. Give this procedure a name, add the associated procedure code, and select whether charges will be applied and insurance billed by default. Note that if your template needs to include multiple codes, either because you want to charge for each code you will do, or you do not want to charge but want the codes to be captured with a zero charge, before you create the imaging template you should first build a custom multi-code that includes all those codes.

4. Add the placeholders for your template. To begin, click Add Horizontal or Add Vertical. A box appears in the workspace. Drag the box to wherever you’d like, and then click the edit icon (pencil) to assign tooth numbers to the capture area.

5. Continue adding boxes and tooth numbers until all your capture areas are included. New boxes appear in the center of the workspace. The active placeholder is green.

6. Click Set Order to specify the order in which the images will be taken. By default, the order is set by the order in which you added the placeholders. To change that, click Reset, and then click the placeholders in the desired sequence. Click Finish to set the order. When your template is ready, click Save.

7. To use your custom template, navigate to the Custom tab, and select your template from the list. It will act like any other template in the system.

Additional Information

• Custom templates are location-specific (not shared across the organization).
• Editing an existing custom template is limited to changing the tooth number assignments and ordering; you cannot add or remove placeholder boxes to an existing custom template. If you need to do this, create a new custom template, and delete the old one.
• If your template is for an emergency (like a toothache) that you don’t know the tooth number beforehand, but you do know how you want the mount to look, just build it with any tooth number. When the emergency comes, select the template name, click the pencil icon, click your placeholder blocks, click the pencil icon under the box, and edit the tooth number as needed for this instance.

• To keep your list manageable, you can delete custom templates that are no longer needed or used.
• To learn more, see Creating custom imaging procedures.