Release Notes: 31st October 2018 (iteration 326)

The product update includes many exciting new features and feature enhancements focused on improving practice operations. Highlights include: 

• New patient online booking to increase bookings
• Schedule templates to help get the perfect treatment blend each day
• Exit workflow to ensure your recare is booked and reminders reach your patients
• And more!

Workflow

Exit Walkout Workflow Compliance Reminder

For the last couple of releases, Dentrix Ascend has been adding workflow tasks to the digital routing panel (status tracker). This release adds a new enhancement: requiring users to provide a reason when they choose not to complete a task. To review, the tasks are scheduling recare, making sure you have a phone number and email for the primary contact, and collecting a payment when the patient portion is greater than zero.

  

The story behind this feature is that studies show the average time between recare appointments is 11 months. Completing the walkout workflow tasks will ensure your practice has more complete patient communication data and can thereby increase its success rate. It is a form of safety net.

It works like this: when a user attempts to set an appointment that is in the Checkout status to the Complete status and one or more of the tasks has not received a completed task checkmark, the user receives warning messages and an invitation to provide a reason for not completing all tasks.

 

  

When the user clicks on the provide a reason for skipping incomplete tasks hyperlink, the Reason to Skip Completing All Tasks window opens and he or she can select from a standard reason or provide a custom reason for skipping one or more tasks.

  

After the user enters a reason and clicks Save Reason, the appointment will move to the Complete status. 

Administrator Notes for Workflow Compliance

• When this full compliance reminder feature is turned on, Schedule Recare reminder pop-ups no longer appear; however, the Update Patient Recare pop-up appears if a patient has no recare associated or has unscheduled recare.
• The feature is turned on by default. To turn this feature off, in the Location Information page toggle the new Track appointment tasks and require reasons for incomplete tasks switcher to No.
• A report on workflow compliance will come out in the next software update; there is no report on skip reasons at this time.  

Scheduling

Schedule Template Appointment Reasons

The Schedule Template page (Settings Schedule Template) is now much more than just the place to set up online booking; it’s a place to set up how you would like your schedule to be filled with appointments. While it will not force anyone to schedule according to the guideline, it can provide a visual reminder of the practice’s preferences in reserving certain times during the day in which to schedule specific procedure types. 

  

The Calendar View menu has a new toggle allowing you to show or hide the template time slots. Turn Show template time slots to On to see the time slots in the Calendar. The guide is just a background and will become hidden as you fill up that time slot with appointments. 

Schedule Template Booking Types

In addition to recare appointments, you can now define and set aside time slots for new patient visits, or for existing patients only, or any combination of the three.

  

Schedule Template “Book on your website” Link

To make it easy for your practice website manager to link patients from your website to online booking, the Schedule Template page now includes a Book on your website button. Click this to open a window with HTML code that can be copied and pasted directly into your website. 

When a patient clicks the link, he or she is ready to start the online booking process.

  

The online booking interface guides the patient through selecting an appointment reason, selecting a provider (if they know your providers and have a preference), and selecting an appointment time. The patient must enter their basic information, and a verification code, which will be sent to the patient’s email or SMS, depending on which option the patient selects. The verification code must be entered to complete the appointment. 

NOTE: In your schedule template you will define blocks of time which can accommodate multiple appointments; for example, a three-hour block can hold six 30-minute appointments. Dentrix Ascend automatically offers the first open appointment time. For example, if the time slot runs from 9:00 to 12:00, Dentrix Ascend tells the first patient that 9:00 is open. When that appointment time is taken, the next patient is told that 9:30 is available, and so on until the time slot is filled. 

Online Booking Appointment Reasons

When patients book online, you can assist them by allowing them to select from a list of reasons for booking an appointment. This reason will populate the appointment Other section automatically.

 

You are in complete control of the appointment reasons list. In the Schedule Template page click the Appointment Reasons button to open the Appointment Reasons dialog box. For each appointment reason you create, you will also define a default appointment length. Dentrix Ascend will reserve in the schedule the amount of time you specify when an appointment is booked.

 

Identifying and Validating Appointments Booked Online

In the Calendar, appointments booked online have several indicators to help you see that they came from that source. First, there is a Booked Online icon.

  

Within the appointment panel, the Note section tells you that the appointment was booked online, including the time at which it was booked.

 

The appointment panel also has a message near the patient name.

  

Dentrix Ascend will always check to make sure the patient booking online is known to the system. When a patient appears to be new or is not a perfect match for an existing patient record, Dentrix Ascend will ask you to verify the patient. When verification is needed, an extra “booking needs to be assigned to a patient” icon appears in the appointment block.

  

The appointment panel provides guidance to help you finalize the patient assignment. An assignment is only required for new patients or for existing patients which Dentrix Ascend cannot match with a high degree of certainty.

  

The Appointments Booked Online report (Schedule Appointments Booked Online) has been enhanced with filters by appointment type, provider, and operatory. Booking Type and Reason columns have been added to the report.

 

Insurance

Insurance Benefits Summary from Ledger

The Patient Portion amount in the Ledger is now a hyperlink, which reveals a Show Details button. When you click it, a new Patient Portion page opens.

  

The Patient Portion page summarizes how Dentrix Ascend calculated the Patient Portion amount by listing the charge amount, the insurance portion, and any adjustments or payments made. If you entered the page from a guarantor view, all patients for that guarantor will be listed. Payments and credit adjustments are listed as negative numbers to help make it clear how they affect the remaining balance. When you are done looking at the explanation, click Back to Ledger to return to the Ledger. 

Note that the hyperlink does not show for a new patient with an empty ledger, nor when a patient’s portion is 0.00. 

Procedure Distribution by Service Date

The listing of procedures when you are creating claims in the Create Claims, Patient Walkout, and Unattached Procedures pages has been updated. Procedures are now grouped by service date, and the fee for each procedure is now included.

  

Insurance Information Usability Enhancements

The insurance carrier and plan pages can now be accessed directly from within the patient’s Third Party page. The carrier name and plan name are now hyperlinks to those pages. Also, the payer ID is now included with the carrier name displayed.

 

Financial

Ledger Production/Collection Options

This update adds the ability to change adjustments to indicate whether each adjustment impacts production or collections (Settings Ledger Options), according to your accounting practices. Making changes here will not affect balances—a transaction is still either a charge or a credit—but it does affect the production or collections logic, which is revealed in the reporting.

  

For a description of the default production/collection assignments in Dentrix Ascend, please see the article Common Adjustments & How to Use Each One in the knowledgebase. We always recommend you contact your account or consultant if you have questions about whether an adjustment type is for production or collection. 

Provider A/R Totals

A Totals line was added at the bottom of the Provider A/R Totals report.

Clinical

Clinical Decision Support

Clinical Decision Support in Quick Exam was enhanced to show recommended treatment procedures that require additional information (such as a tooth number or surface) when the corresponding condition code doesn’t require the same information. 

ICD-10 Codes

A new Diagnosis tab has been added to the Edit Procedure window in the Progress Notes. In it, you can manually link an ICD-10 code to a completed procedure code. This is a preparatory step for future updates where the linked ICD-10 code can be included in an insurance claim.

  

When searching for diagnostic codes, an additional 23 of the most frequently-used ICD-10 codes that were missing have been added to the Dentrix Ascend database.

Usability

Search Based on Location

The search by location feature added to the main patient search bar and other areas has been expanded to additional areas within Dentrix Ascend. This means when a user tries to search for a patient name, only patients belonging to the location to which the user has rights will appear. Any patient in the organization can still be seen by using the advanced search option. New areas with this capability include:

• Patient “Referred by” search box in the Patient Information page
• Reassigning an examination in the Imaging module
• Selecting claims inside the Bulk Insurance Payment module 

New Feature Request Portal

As you already know, when you have an idea for an enhancement or a new feature that you would like to see in Ascend, you click ? Request a Feature. With this update, you will notice some changes to the look and feel of the site. This is because it is now powered by a new roadmap software that allows the Dentrix Ascend development team to use a single solution to track ideas from request through roadmap prioritization.