January 22, 2020

When you initially set up Dentrix Ascend, the default length of an appointment is 60 minutes. This means that every appointment you add—from either the Calendar or the Treatment Planner—starts as one hour long, and you must manually adjust the appointment length when you know that the planned procedures will take more or less time.

To make your scheduling workflow more efficient, you can set the default appointment length to a duration that reflects the normal production pattern in your office. That way, you will have less adjusting to do.

How to:

1. Evaluate your schedule to get a feel for the most common appointment length. You can do this by looking at the Calendar, or you could take a more data-driven approach by creating a power report to list your most common procedures and use the typical appointment length of those procedures. A variation on the Procedure Code Billing Report can accomplish this.

2. Once you have a feel for your most common appointment length, set that as your default. Open the Location Hours page (from Settings).

3. Click the plus or minus buttons next to the Default appointment length (min) field to adjust the time in five-minute increments. Click Set to save the change.

From this point forward, all appointments will start with this duration in the schedule.

Additional Information

• The default appointment length is location-specific.
• Power reporting does not track an appointment duration field, so you cannot build a report of average or most common duration at this time.