A common hassle for many clinics is keeping track of office notes, announcements, and patient communications. The Office Journal can help you store and organize electronic records of patient and office communications, billing notices, reminders, privacy requests, emails, and even notes about phone calls.
Much like a journal of your daily communications, the Office Journal has two main functions: to keep a record of past events and to send reminders for future events. It can help streamline your communication process and help maintain effective record organization, which can reduce hassle and stress when working with patient records.
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10 Ways the Office Journal Can Help You be More Productive:
- It records and archives appointments: Scheduled, broken, purged and archived patient appointments are all tracked and recorded in the Office Journal by appointment date, time, reason, and provider.
- It tracks insurance payments: When an insurance payment is posted to the Ledger, a note is added that includes the payment date and amount. The Office Journal then records the date, provider, and amount of insurance and patient payments.
- It can help reduce billing errors: The Office Journal will record the date, the “Please Pay” amount, and account balance of any billing statements generated. In the Office Journal you can keep track of scheduling, financial transactions, correspondence, and referrals. You can also view any guarantor transactions for the entire family.
- It makes a record of privacy requests: The Office Journal records any changes to patient privacy settings made in the Family File.
- It helps increase the effectiveness of intra-office communication: You can use the Office Journal to keep a record of all contact between patients, providers and staff. It can also record the date, provider, and the name of any letters generated for patients. This feature can help reduce time when searching for records of past communications.
- It creates daily reminders: Clinics can use the Office Journal to house daily reminders for staff notices, activities or meetings. For example, you can create a reminder to call a patient to remind them to pre-medicate before their appointment, or to generate and send billing statements, etc. These reminders can be either patient-specific or general tasks that staff needs to complete.
- It keeps a record of patient communications: You can document phone conversations, voicemail, text, and email reminders to record every contact you’ve had with a patient (this can come in handy if the patient contacts you to dispute a bill or a missed appointment).
- It does the work for you with referrals: The Office Journal records when a referral recap or referral slip is printed for the patient and when a gratuity is given.
- It automatically records sent emails: Whenever an email is sent to a patient by clicking Send Message on the toolbar, the Office Journal records the contact with the date and time.
- The view can be customized: You can view the Office Journal for a specific provider, staff member, patient, or family. You can filter the views to show only specified entries, for example, by date or type of entry, or expand the list to show all entries.
The Dentrix Enterprise Office Journal provides you with a comprehensive record of communications among your staff members, providers, and patients. Make sure you are making the most of this useful feature!
Additional Information
- View this Help file in the Dentrix Enterprise Help Center: Adding manual journal entries.
- Watch the Adding an Office Journal Entry and Viewing an Office Journal Entry Essentials videos to learn more about these features. To access the full suite of Dentrix Enterprise Essentials courses, visit the Dentrix Enterprise Resource Center. These training courses are included with your Dentrix Enterprise Customer Service Plan.