Open Dental Forum

Any way to limit the number patients in the same family from scheduling on the same day?

I would like to make it three per day. Had a new family call yesterday and front desk scheduled seven of them in one afternoon.
Something tells me that isn't going to work out very well.

Thanks,
drtmz

I haven't heard of anything like this that automatically happens in the program. You might check out the list of feature requests and see if someone else wants this sort of functionality. http://opendental.com/manual/featurerequests.html I can't think of a way to get Open Dental to do this as it stands. Might just tell the person in charge of scheduling to not schedule more than three a day.

Laughing with you Tom! What was going on in that front desk's mind????? (and of course, they'll break the appointment)

Rick

PS - sounds like a normal day at this ofice

The really big families in our office are really great at showing up. It's around 4 family members when we have the most problems. I would second the opinion that your front office just needs better training, you can also put a pop-up on the problem families so that the front knows not to schedule so many on the same day.

She wasn't one of the regular receptionists. Just an assistant jumping in to help out that can't say no. End of story is we don't participate with their insurance plan so they were cancelled out.
Should be fairly easy, use guarantor and family members referencing an appointment time stamp of some type.

Telling and popups have limitations. Program limits are the best way to go so they can tell the patient, 'our dental program will not let me schedule more than three family members on the same day'. Shift the balme to the programmer and not the office. (It's all about shifting blame for things isn't it?)

I would think it could be a selling point for OD especially if the other PM software doesn't have this feature.

Tom -

You're right. In our office, we are pretty lean and have a number of part timers working together (long story). Getting people on the same page, communicating, and following the same protocols are what it's all about. Maybe about two years ago, we had some of these discussions (on the forum) concerning the automation features of the program. I think the real slick solution would be a consolidated setup page that asks for all sorts of office preferences, and then creates the pop-ups and rules and automation needed. Similarly, I would love to have pop-up phone scripts to guide our front desk so that their situation handling would be properly documented, consistent and thorough.

I know that the wiki takes a step towards this, but when the phone rings and a family of seven wants to book in at the same time, you don't have time to go to the reference manual.

Rick