The Dentrix Blog

Helping You Do More with Your Dentrix System

Updated 03/01/2022

Over the last several weeks we have talked about the different areas within Dentrix where you can keep notes. Today’s post rounds out the topic of Dentrix notes with treatment notes. Treatment notes help you keep a complete clinical record of each patient’s treatment and include the following:

  • Clinical Notes – Clinical notes allow you to enter notations about medical conditions, treatment recommendations, or descriptions of work completed for a specific patient. You can write both free-form clinical notes, or use clinical note templates. Clinical notes can be signed and locked so that they cannot be changed or deleted. You can also print clinical notes in a report.
  • Health History -A patient’s Health History is where medical conditions, allergies, medications, and prescriptions are recorded. You can add notes to each item and add an “overall” Health History Note that describes other issues that the patient might have. (In past versions of Dentrix, Health History was known as Medical Alerts.)
  • Perio Exam Notes – Perio exam notes are automatically added to a patient’s perio exam and consist of the measurements taken during a general periodontal exam. They include information about gums and teeth, oral hygiene, and X-rays. By default, Dentrix sets the measurement values of perio exam notes to those of a normal healthy mouth.
  • Prescription Notes – You can provide patients with more detailed dosage and usage instructions for a prescription in the Prescription Note field of the New Patient Prescription dialog box. The prescription note appears when you print a patient’s prescription.
  • Procedure Notes – Each time you enter a procedure, you can attach a note to it. Usually, a procedure note is used to document clinical information about the procedure performed. However, that information can also be entered into the clinical notes. Procedure notes are locked when a procedure is moved into history when you close the month. Procedure notes can also be printed from the Progress Notes panel.
  • Progress NotesProgress notes are not text notes. Instead, they list all treatment-planned, completed, referred, and existing treatment for a patient. They can also include conditions, exams, and clinical notes, if desired. You can print the progress notes from the Patient Chart.
  • Treatment Plan Notes – In the Treatment Planner you can add two types of notes—Case Notes and Case Status History Notes. Case notes are text notes that you can add to any individual treatment-plan cases. (You can also set up default case notes if desired that will be automatically assigned to each new case.) Case notes are printed on the Case Presentation report. Case Status History Notes are brief “comments” that you can add when the status of a case changes.
  • Recommendation Notes – Recommendation notes are pre-written notes that can be automatically printed for patients when they have a specific procedure performed. You can also print them on a walkout statement.
  • Referral Recap Notes – The referral recap note allows you to add notes for the referring provider when you generate a Referral Recap report.
  • Referral Slip Notes – The referral slip note allows you to add a note to the referred-to provider when you generate a referral slip for a patient.

And in case you missed them, be sure to read our previous posts concerning Scheduling Notes, Patient Information Notes, Financial Notes, and Insurance Notes.


Have you ever written a patient note and forgotten just where in Dentrix you put it? Read a previous post titled, Where Did I Put That Patient Note? that explains how to use the Patient Note Report.