Warning of inactive pation

[Nate]

We have inactive patients that call years after we have sent them notices to follow up with treatment. They do not follow thru with recommendated treatment If the front desk goes to schedule an inactive patient she will get a pop up that they are inactive. Of course it’s a little late to do anything or have the record reviewed after he offer to schedule them. It would be nice that anytime an inactive patient is selected (even family module), that a pop up is displayed to the front desk to get Dr approval to schedule an appointment. Is this possible currently?

[JoeMontano]

Sounds like this should work for you! http://opendental.com/manual/popups.html

[tgriswold]

I'm a little confused at your question. Are you looking for ways to notify when you select these patients or ways to find these types of patients before hand so you can add notifications (Their chart never got followed up on after not doing treatment so a popup was never added)?
For notifying the front desk your best option is definitely our popups system which Joe linked above. This works for most people, make sure you have the popup set to the family level so it will show for all family members. You can also create a patient field http://www.opendental.com/manual/custom ... ields.html to note that/why they shouldn't be scheduled yet and train staff to look for it if they see a popup.
For finding patients that had TP work that was never followed up on so you can add the popup in the first place, your best bet is looking at some of our reports. Staff would need to go through the patients on the report on a semi-regular basis to review these accounts ahead of time to add the pop-up to these type of accounts. There is the built in treatment finder report http://www.opendental.com/manual/reporttreatfinder.html but that might not catch everyone you're looking for, and we have a variety of other reports that might be useful for this purpose. You can always look over our query examples and see if there is already anything that looks like it might be what you want, or if you have a good idea of what the chart of these patients look like (example: Has TP work over X age with no future appt scheduled and hasn't been seen in X time) you could look into our custom query writing service to specifically tailor something to fit your offices needs. Info for both can be found on this page: http://opendental.com/manual/queryoverview.html.

If your problem is getting the popup on accounts in the first place i'm sure some other users here on this forum might have some good suggestions about their current processes too, but those are the two big things that come to mind.

[Nate]

I was hoping there was a global setting that can be used. For example, we have a lot of patients that have been inactivated over the years. Some that have simply moved away or transferred to other offices. However, some have been inactivated because of payment issues or not following through with treatment recommendations.

Just recently a new employee took a call from an inactive patient (hadn't been in for 4 years), with a toothache and wanted to get in the same day. She pulled him up in the system and said she could get him in at 3pm. Then she went to schedule it and there was a built in pop up that said he was inactive. I wish it would have popped up as soon as she pulled him up in the system rather than waiting until she was actually scheduling him.

That would allow us to have a policy for myself or office manager to review inactive patients before we schedule them. The front desk could simply say 'Oh I noticed you are inactive. Let me get your chart information and we can call you back about scheduling." That way if we find a patient like this that we had no interest in seeing again we could let him know he will have to find another office.

I noticed the pop up will work but we would have to add it to every single inactive patient which would be very time consuming. If there was a global box to check that all inactive patients would have an automatic pop up as soon as you try to access their chart we could implement a system that works for us. Is there some type of global box to notify of inactive status as soon as you select the patient. It seems like there is a default pop up build in to the system to notify of the inactive status but you dont see it when you first select the patient, only as you go to schedule them.

Thanks for any help!

[allends]

You may want to vote on these feature requests. Choose the ones that best suit what you need

http://www.opendental.com/manual/featurerequests.html

• Request #1700 - Inactive and archive status patients show different color in select patient window
  Request #5162 - Prevent setting appointments complete if the patient status is inactive
  Request #2891 - Select Patient window default setting for Hide Inactive Patients.

[bpcomp]

I found something that may work for you. If you have a billing type for inactive patients, then you can create an automation that will give a pop-up anytime a patient with the billing status of inactive is selected. This would require you to go through and set all your inactive patients to have the inactive billing type. To make the pop-up go away you switch the patient to another billing type like standard. You might even talk the OD staff into writing a query for you that will change all the inactive patients in your office to have that billing type in one fell swoop.

[drtech]

i would say you are cutting out business by turning pts away who haven't not seen you in a while...work them in, do an extra RCT when they arrive or schedule them for that hole in your schedule on Tuesday, improve you bottom line and help that pt at the same time.