July 24, 2019

Thirty-eight percent. According to a survey conducted by Henry Schein, that’s how many patients walk out of your building without scheduling their next hygiene recare appointment. They become your growing Unscheduled Recare list. What are you going to do about it? One solution might be to put a policy in place to follow a certain workflow when checking out a patient. Here’s how Dentrix Ascend can help.

Digital Routing Panel
First, are your staff using the routing panel to track the patient’s status through the appointment lifecycle? The blue bar accessible from any page in Ascend is always ready to help you do this.

If they’re not, we can’t help you. But if they are, we can.

Checkout Status
If a patient’s status has been tracked to the Chair and then to Checkout—meaning the patient is ready to go back up front—then their appointment card contains an automatic prompt to schedule the next primary recare appointment.

Notice how there is no green checkmark next to the Schedule Recare appointment task? Click the arrow to open the patient’s list of recare assignments. In this example, there is only one assigned.

You can see the recare type, the due date, and a link that says Unscheduled. Click the link to open the Calendar for that date, and ask the patient to choose an open time for that or a subsequent day.

That’s it! If you feel that your Unscheduled Recare list is too long, or that too many patients fail to schedule their next recare appointment, let the automated Dentrix Ascend exit workflow act as a failsafe reminder to every time, every time, invite the patient to schedule their next recare appointment before they walk out.

Additional Information

• If the next recare appointment has already been scheduled, a green checkmark appears next to the task name. No further action is required.
• To learn more about using the routing panel to facilitate exit workflow, watch Using the Routing Panel for Patient Check Out.
• For more information on the power of exit workflow to make your organization more successful, watch the webinar Fill your schedule and reduce outstanding A/R with Exit workflow in the Resource Center. Click the link within the article, fill in the required fields, and then click Register to open the recorded presentation.