Pract-Eze Dental will work well in an Orthodontic office. Here are some specific guidelines. As the program continues to mature, features specific to orthodondists, periodontists and OMS will be refined and expanded.
Providers
First of all, if you like to schedule
patients with specific assistants, then you will probably want to set up your
assistants as secondary providers. Then, when
scheduling appointments, you can easily tell by the appointment color which
assistant is assigned. See the section on editing appointments for
an explanation of assigning providers to appointments. If you don't normally
worry too much about which assistant sees the patient, then you could just use
one provider for the Orthodontist, and all patients would be assigned that
provider.
Procedures
Just as in any office, procedures for a
patient are entered in the Chart module ahead of time
and then organized in the Treatment Plan
module. You can name the priorities in the Treatment Plan module to allow you to
sequence your treatement as needed. You also set up your procedure codes
ahead of time with the standard fees and time patterns. But, in an orthodontic
office, you would set up some extra no-fee procedures ahead of time. You will
generally have two types of procedures: procedures used for charging fees, and
procedures used for scheduling patients.
For scheduling purposes, you would create a set of procedures that begin with N, for no-fee. For instance N0001 could be "Take records", and N0002 could be "Cement bands". Neither of these procedures would be billed to insurance, so when setting up the procedure codes, check the box for "do not bill to insurance". You can continue to set up as many procedures as you want, one for each different type of appointment.
You would also set up procedure codes specifically for insurance billing purposes. These would be standard ADA codes, although if you have different fees for the same procedure, that can also be handled by setting up ADA codes with one-letter suffixes on them. The extra letter gets dropped when billing. You can, of course, change any fee for any procedure after adding it to the patient's chart.
Payment Plans
See the Payment Plans
section for information on how to enter a payment plan. You can have unlimited
payment plans per patient and the guarantor does not have to be in the same
family as the patient, making divorce situations much easier. You have total
control over the date, principal, and interest of every single payment on the
amortization schedule.
Scheduling Appointments
Scheduling
appointments is handled the same as in any other office, except that you
will generally only be scheduling one procedure for an appointment instead of
multiple procedures. Set up your appointments using the Planned appointment
feature. If you need to add a procedure that is only used for billing purposes,
remember that you do not necessarily have to set up an appointment to enter a
completed procedure. You can simply double click on the procedure from the Chart
module or the Treatment Plan module, and change the status to C. That will cause
it to show in the Account module as a completed procedure to be billed.
When scheduling appointments, it will be common to have many patients simultaneously booked. There is no limit or restriction on overbooking which will make it easy to move patients to the best times. You should try to set up your initial procedure codes with the time pattern showing the appropriate number of X's, which represent provider time. That way, each appointment will also have the correct provider time. The front desk should try to schedule the patients so that the provider time stays fairly constant, even if it sometimes gets double booked.
Tracking Patients
You can use the Planned appointment
tracker to make sure none of your followup appointments slip through the
cracks. If you use it as intended, you will not have to keep any appointments on
the Unscheduled list, although you can still use that feature if you wish.
Referrals
Referral tracking and
reporting will allow you to see at a glance who referred each patient to your
office. You can run reports, and merge letters for your referral sources as
well.
Planned Improvements
This is a list of features
that are planned. Some of these features are on the Future Versions page.
They are listed below in the order that they will probably be added in the
future. Some of them may be done within a few months, and some may take up to 9
months to add.
Payment plan coupons: Print a coupon book that the patient can use to send in with each payment rather than depending on getting a bill.
Patient Check-in: You could place a terminal in the reception area for the patient to check in on. Then, you could more easily track their progress through the office.