If you’re like me, you find it annoying to have to scroll through a long list of patients to find the one you want to select, and you want to find the patient you need without having to type their full name. With this shortcut, you can find a patient by typing only four characters!

Here’s how to do it. Once you’re in the Select Patient dialog box, instead of typing out the whole last name of the patient you are searching for, just type the first two letters of the last name, then a comma, and then the first letter of the first name.

For example, if you wanted to select a patient named Carla Orbach, just type “Or,C” in the Search field. Dentrix will look through your patient database and find all patients with a last name starting with the letters “Or” and a first name starting with “C”. Then you can select the patient you want from this much shorter list of results.

Additional Tips

• If you want to be even more specific, type the second letter of the first name as well. It will make your list of results even shorter.
• You don’t have to worry about capitalization or spacing within your search. Use all caps, all lowercase, or a mixture of the two. Spacing between the letters and commas doesn’t matter either. You’ll still get the same list of results whether you search “OR, C” or “or,c” or “Or , c”.