Open Dental Forum

In an office where there are HMO,Union, PPO and FFS patients how we clearly, in other words, in a glance look at the schedule and tell who has what insurance plan.
Ideally Id like to see a color difference in the appt book green = FFS, PPO Blue etc

make a custom "Patient Field Def" like "PPO/Fin Status" (that's what mine is), then in your appt view setup, have that field show right on the appt. It is not a color, but will do what you want. (you have to fill in the data in the family file.)

An interesting request would be to allow colors assigned to patient fields.

The reason I'd like to do this is to clearly mark people with certain insurance plans in the schedule. So For example Dr. X is seeing a Pt with a HMO, we would give that patient an Orange Appt, FFS patients would be Green, so on and so on.

One idea I have had would be to have multiple "providers" for each doctor. So Dr X would we labelled DRX for HMO appointments, and for FFS appointments the provider would be DRX2.

DRX and DRX2 would be different colors and voila, you can see who has what insurance any patient has much clearer...This does pose a small problem with counting production and so on though unless you are very careful.

Any one have a better way of doing this, or a better idea?

jordansparks wrote:An interesting request would be to allow colors assigned to patient fields.

I agree - this would be nice. One field that we recently added is for Quality Dental Plan, and it does show on the Appointment, but it would really be great if that could be "highlighted" to really stand out.

I think I figured it out, but before I implement it for all the docs I wanted to run it by you guys and let me know what you think.

For each doc and hyg, we now have two providers - one is their name, and one is their name with the ending "$$"

For example PAYET and PAYET$$ - the info for each is identical to one another but whats different is the color...and if you want to do it a little more subtle then you can keep the color the same and just change the highlight color to bright green.

Now we can clearly see who has a crappy union, HMO plan and who is a PPO or FFS patient. It helps us book appointments better, manage payroll (albeit it's a little more work) and see who is better at up selling treatment
It's dirty and I'm not necessarily proud of it, but for the next few months I need to know how my marketing campaigns are going. And as we transition from a mill to a PPO, FFS I'd need something to see the whole from a macro view and this will help. Docs will be motivated too ( I hope)

thats how i do it there are multiple providers for each doctor with symbols for different types of insurances. the only irritation is that your front office has to make sure the provider is marked correctly

we do similar things. messages on the schedule get "NOTES" as the provider and highlighted yellow, hyg in purple, im orange, new patients get "NEW" and are green, financial things get "finance" and are red. that way, glancing at the schedule we can easily see new patients, mine, etc.