Updated 4/20/2022

Clinical notes are designed to help you keep a complete clinical record for each of your patients. Ideally, clinicians should create clinical notes during a patient’s clinical exam to document observations regarding a patient’s oral health and any recommendations given to the patient.

You can add a free-form clinical note, or use a clinical note template as a basis for the note. This blog post will focus on how to add a free-form note, and a future post will talk about working with clinical note templates and prompts.

To add a clinical note:

1. In the Patient Chart, select a patient.
2. Click the Clinical Notes tab in the Progress Notes panel to open the Clinical Notes panel.
3. Click the New Clinical Note button and a time stamp is added to the left column of the Clinical Notes panel.
   
4. With the time stamp selected, enter your note in the Note field.
5. Click the Save Clinical Note button to save the note.
   

Note: Saving a clinical note does not lock the note or prevent it from being edited. You can edit clinical notes until they have been locked. Clinical notes are locked when either the month is closed or the clinical note is signed, so if you want to prevent the note from being changed, you should sign it.

Additional Information

Dentrix comes with over 70 clinical note templates to help you connect the most common procedures, appointment types, and reasons for notation. For a list of the clinical note templates and prompts found in Dentrix, read the Default Clinical Note Templates topic in Dentrix Help.

For more information on using clinical notes in Dentrix, see the Clinical Notes Panel topics in Dentrix Help.

There are also these Dentrix Magazine articles you can read for additional information and tips:

• Stay on Top of your Clinical Notes
• Clinical Notes Made Easy
• Making Changes to Clinical Notes