Orthodontic Practices

EZ2000 Plus Dental will work well in an Orthodontic office. Here are some specific guidelines. As the program continues to mature, features specific to orthodontists, periodontists and OMS will be refined and expanded.

Providers
First of all, if you like to schedule patients with specific assistants, then you will probably want to set up your assistants as secondary Providers. Then, when scheduling appointments, you can easily tell by the appointment color which assistant is assigned. This worls well for large offices.  See the section on Editing Appointments for an explanation of assigning providers to appointments. If you don't normally worry too much about which assistant sees the patient, then you could just use one provider for the Orthodontist, and all patients would be assigned that provider.

Procedures
Just as in any office, Procedures for a patient are entered in the Chart module ahead of time and then organized in the Treatment Plan module. You can name the priorities in the Treatment Plan module to allow you to sequence your treatment as needed. You also set up your Procedure Codes ahead of time with the standard fees and time patterns. But, in an orthodontic office, you would set up some extra no-fee procedures ahead of time. You will generally have two types of procedures: procedures used for charging fees, and procedures used for scheduling patients.

For scheduling purposes, you would create a set of procedures that begin with N, for no-fee. For instance N0001 could be "Take records", and N0002 could be "Cement bands". Neither of these procedures would be billed to insurance, so when setting up the procedure codes, check the box for "do not bill to insurance". You can continue to set up as many procedures as you want, one for each different type of appointment.

You would also set up procedure codes specifically for insurance billing purposes. These would be standard ADA codes, although if you have different fees for the same procedure, that can also be handled by setting up ADA codes with one-letter suffixes on them. The extra letter gets dropped when billing. You can, of course, change any fee for any procedure after adding it to the patient's chart.

Insurance Estimates
In the Edit Benefits window you can enter orthodontic lifetime max and percentage.  These will be calculated separately from the General category.

Payment Plans
See the Payment Plans section for information on how to enter a payment plan. You can have unlimited payment plans per patient and the guarantor does not have to be in the same family as the patient, making divorce situations much easier. You have total control over the date, principal, and interest of every single payment on the amortization schedule. This makes the aging report more accurate.

Scheduling Appointments
Scheduling appointments is handled the same as in any other office, except that you will generally only be scheduling one procedure for an appointment instead of multiple procedures. Set up your appointments using the Planned Appointment feature. If you need to add a procedure that is only used for billing purposes, remember that you do not necessarily have to set up an appointment to enter a completed procedure. You can simply double click on the procedure from the Chart module or the Treatment Plan module, and change the status to C. That will cause it to show in the Account module as a completed procedure to be billed.

When scheduling appointments, it will be common to have many patients simultaneously booked. There is no limit or restriction on overbooking which will make it easy to move patients to the best times. You should try to set up your initial procedure codes with the time pattern showing the appropriate number of X's, which represent provider time. That way, each appointment will also have the correct provider time. The front desk should try to schedule the patients so that the provider time stays fairly constant, even if it sometimes gets double booked.

Tracking Patients
You can use the Planned Appointment Tracker to make sure none of your followup appointments slip through the cracks. If you use it as intended, you will not have to keep any appointments on the Unscheduled list, although you can still use that feature if you wish.

Referrals
Referral tracking and reporting will allow you to see at a glance who referred each patient to your office. You can run reports, and merge letters for your referral sources as well.

Palmer Notation
In Chart Module Setup is a box where you can set the tooth nomenclature to Palmer.

Exam Sheets
There is a kind of Sheet called an Exam Sheet. This is a form that you fill out during an exam to record findings. Exam Sheets can have any scanned image as their background, so they could replace any paper exam forms that are currently being used.

Ortho Chart
See Ortho Chart.

School Excuse Slips
Use a Patient Letter Sheet. Use static text fields as described on the Sheets page, to automatically add information about the patient and appointment.

Planned Improvements
This is a list of features that are planned. They are listed below in the order that they will probably be added in the future. Some of them may be done within a few months, and some will take longer to add. Be sure to vote for your favorites in the Feature Request section.

#1325- Expected payments from insurance. They are currently a special type of payment plan. They need to be reworked to be tied more closely to the actual insurance payments as they come in.

#214- Patient Check-in: You could place a terminal in the reception area for the patient to check in on. Then, you could more easily track their progress through the office.

#573- Images on sheets that are pulled from patient's images module.

#24- Custom mounts for digital radiography and photos. This is how image composites will make their way onto sheets.

#271- Referral letters include variables for planned/completed procedure codes.

#2047- Referral letters and patient letters automatically include data from single Exam Sheets.

#350- Payment plan coupons: Print a coupon book that the patient can use to send in with each payment rather than depending on getting a bill.

#108- Charting features enabling graphic display of orthodontic appliances.

#3202- Security permission for editing the Ortho Chart.

(not requested yet)- Graphical charting of elastics. Click and drag to draw elastic on the tooth chart. Allow specifying size and strength for each elastic.