March 25, 2020

It’s not often that dental staff have any downtime; however, if you do, you can use this time to set up electronic treatment consent forms. Dentrix Ascend gives you the ability to create messages to explain the risks associated with the patient’s specific treatment so that you can present the consent form, collect signatures, and store the form electronically— without using one piece of paper.

Setting up digital consent forms takes time because you must set up for each location, but the time spent is well worth it in the long run. Once you create a set of messages for the procedures most commonly performed in your office, you can use them over and over again in future treatment.

How to:

1. Go to the Patient Forms page (under Settings).

2. Click the Add button in the Tx Consent Messages section of the left-side panel to open a new, blank message window.

3. Give the message a title, and either type or paste in the language you wish to include in the consent form. The title you give the message will be the name that shows up in the Tx Consent Messages list and be the title or header of that section in when you present the consent form to the patient.

4. Associate this message with one or more specific procedures. Click + Add Procedure.

5. Search for the procedure code(s) you would like to associate with this treatment message, which you can filter by categories. You can search for procedures by name or by code number. Click to highlight the procedures to include, and click Select to finish.

When you present a treatment plan that includes any of the procedures in the consent form list, the title and wording automatically appear in the treatment consent form. The procedure-specific language appears prior to and in addition to the default Insured/Uninsured Disclaimers and Consent for Dental Treatment language in the consent form.

Additional Information

  • Any saved consent form contains the messages as they were at the time the patient signed it. If you change a message, only new consent forms reflect those changes.
  • You can review and revise the list of procedures associated with this consent message at any time. Click + Add Procedure again to add more procedures, or click the X next to a procedure name to remove it from the list.
  • Dentrix Ascend allows you to associate the same procedure code with multiple consent messages. When you treatment plan that procedure, ALL the procedure-specific messages will be included in the consent form.
  • For more information on presenting treatment consent forms, see Providing treatment consent forms.