The product update released on February 12th adds simple lab case tracking to Dentrix Ascend appointments. You can now manage provider working hours for a specified timeframe, and a location’s default appointment length is configurable. The chairside dashboard now also includes imaging integration.
Simple Lab Case Tracking
With simple lab case tracking, you can see right from the patient’s appointment what lab the work went to, when you expect it to return, and whether it has arrived.
To add a lab case note to a patient’s appointment, open the patient’s future appointment where you intend to place the work. Click the new Lab Case tab.
Toggle the Lab Case switcher to Yes to open the fields.
In the Lab name field, start typing to find and select an existing lab. If the lab name does not yet exist, type the name and then click Create Lab. Use the Create Lab dialog box to finish creating the lab record. The entire organization shares lab names.
The default status of a new case is Outstanding, meaning the work is out. Click the calendar picker to select the Due date, the date work should be back. Enter any notes relative to this lab case. The Insert Date button places today’s date at the cursor position within the Note area.
When the lab work returns, open the patient’s appointment to set the Status to Received. This helps everyone know that the patient is good to come in for that appointment.
Another way to see whether the lab work has arrived is to look at the appointment’s lab case icon in the schedule. When you create a lab case, an “L” icon appears in the appointment.
When you set the lab case status to Received, the icon colors reverse.
This simple lab case tracking is the first phase of the Dentrix Ascend lab case management feature.
Scheduling
Provider Working Hours Management
This update makes it possible to make changes to a provider’s working schedule for a future date. You can go into the provider’s schedule for a specific date range and indicate a special availability case for that date range. To make changes you must have the Edit Working Hours right.
Click here for how to manage working hours for providers.
The user account Working Hours tab now has a date navigator. You can navigate back and forth one week at a time, or click the range to open a calendar picker and select a date farther into the future.
To modify working hours, click Manage and select Setup Working Hours from the dropdown. This opens the Edit Working Hours dialog box.
Define a work rotation cycle for a period of up to four weeks. Select the cycle size, the beginning and ending dates when the modified working hours will apply, and click Apply. When your timeframe is greater than one week, you will next see navigation buttons for the weeks in the cycle. For each week, use your cursor to add or remove hours of availability. When you are finished, click Done, and then Save.
Later, anyone with rights to review user accounts can see those modified hours in the display for that week, and the Calendar will warn you if you attempt to schedule the provider during times that he or she is not available.
The Online Booking feature does not automatically recognize changes to provider working hours; to remove a provider’s availability from online booking, you must create an event for that provider in the Calendar.
Note: If you are a practice using online booking, note that currently, online availability won’t honour future-dated hours changes.
For now, we recommend you either create an event for that provider in the calendar to manually block it off during that period, or hold off using this feature for now.
We will be updating these features to work together in future releases.
Configurable Default Appointment Length
In 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. With this update, you may now set the default appointment length so that you have less adjusting to do.
To set the default appointment length, open the Location Hours page (from Settings) and click the plus or minus buttons next to the Default appointment length (min) field to adjust the time in five-minute increments. Click Set.
The default appointment length is location-specific. We recommend you evaluate your schedule to get a feel for the most common appointment length, and set your default to that value.
Reporting
Location Isolation in Power Reporting
With this update, Dentrix Ascend now enforces location isolation for power reporting data. This means that when you run a report, the results reflect only those locations for which your role has Financial Reports rights.
When you don’t have financial rights to a location, that location does not show up as a filter option when building or modifying a power report.
If you have access to multiple locations, your user role in each location must include financial rights in order to report for all those locations.
User Rights
The following changes to user rights are included in this release:
- Checking to make sure you do not accidentally remove all administrative roles from your list. At least one role must have the ability to manage other users and roles. You will receive a warning and fail if you attempt to delete the last role with Edit User
- Adding a new user right to Edit Third-Party Defaults (Settings category). The right also requires the Review Third-Party Defaults
- Extending location isolation for the Financial Reports right to the Power Reporting module.
Imaging
Imaging Integrated into the Chairside Dashboard
When you turn on the chairside dashboard in the patient chart, the patient’s images now appear in a panel to the right of the page. As with the rest of the dashboard, you can filter to show just today’s work (teeth scheduled for procedures). Clicking an image thumbnail in the panel opens the image in the graphical area.
Text Annotation Tool for Images
This update adds a text annotation tool to the Tools tab in the Image Navigator, next to the drawing tools. Select the radio button next to the “T” to activate the text tool.
After selecting the text color and font size, click on the image where you want the text to appear. In the Text Annotation dialog box, type in the annotation and click Create text.
Like the other annotation tools, you can undo the placement, show or hide annotations, and choose to include annotations when sharing an image. This is phase one for this tool and we anticipate adding future enhancements to text annotations.
Share Selected Image(s)
When sharing an exam, you now have an option to share only some of the images in a series. After you select the Selected image(s) option in the Exam or Image(s) to be shared dialog box, click to highlight the images.
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