Patients don’t complete all treatment you diagnose right away, and that’s especially true of cosmetic treatment. What usually happens when you present cosmetic work is that the patient doesn’t reject the treatment outright, but they also don’t accept it right away.

They say they want to wait on it, so the treatment case sits in the Treatment Planner with a “Proposed” status getting older and older. Then when you diagnose additional cosmetic treatment that you add to the case the case still has that old date on it and doesn’t look like it’s treatment the patient currently needs.

Did you know you can use treatment statuses to keep that date current? All you have to do is change the case status to “Proposed” again.

Select the case and click the Update Case Status button. In the Update Current Case Status dialog box, make sure today’s date is in the date field and add a note saying you’re updating the status to keep the case date current. Then click OK.

The case will be updated with the same status it had before, but now it will have a current date so you know that the treatment is still valid and you need to keep asking the patient about that case.

Note: The procedure date on the actual procedures in the case is only updated when you complete a case. If you update the case with any other status it will only change the case date, not the treatment plan date of the procedures in the case.

Learn More

To learn more about treatment case statuses, read Updating Case Status in Dentrix Help.

For ideas about new ways to talk to your patients about treatment, read Communication and Customer Service Skills for the Clinical Team in Dentrix Magazine.