Before you welcome patients to your office for an appointment, it’s a good idea to ask them a few screening questions about COVID-19 symptoms and history. That way you can discover whether patients have any symptoms that may require them to reschedule their appointments before they arrive at the office.
You can create a new screening form for these questions or you can add them to your current medical history forms. From the Dentrix Questionnaires module click Edit > Questionnaire Setup.
If you want to create a new form, click the New Form button, then select Start with Blank Form. Enter a name for the questionnaire. Remember that patients will see this name when they select the form online from a list online, so give it a patient-friendly description.
If you want to add questions to an existing medical history form, select the form you want to add the question to, click Edit Form, select the option to make a new version of the form, and click OK.
Set up the questionnaire as desired with patient information, signature requirements, and other information. See the Questionnaires section of the online Dentrix help files for more information.
To add the COVID-19 screening questions, click New Question. Refer to the Return to Work Interim Guidance Toolkit provided by the ADA for guidance about screening questions to ask. Type the question text, and select the answer type you want the patient to respond with for this question (for example, do you want them to respond with a note, to select yes or no, or to select from a list of possible answers, etc). Follow the prompts that pertain to this question type. Check Require response for this field to require a response to these questions so that patients cannot skip them as they fill out the form.
At any time, you can click Preview Form to see how it will look when presented to the patient. When you have finished creating the questionnaire, click Close to save the form.
Uploading the Patient Forms to the Patient Portal
In order to collect the medical history information prior to patients’ appointments, you can upload the forms using Patient Engage so that patients can access them in their Patient Portal and fill them out online.
IMPORTANT: After creating or editing a questionnaire form, wait at least 15 minutes for the Practice Data Sync service to load these changes in the background. Then proceed to these steps:
To upload the new form, click the DXWeb button on the toolbar of any Dentrix module. Click Settings > WebSync Wizard. Then, on the left sidebar, click Questionnaire Upload.
You will see two headings – Questionnaire Settings for Patients of Record and Questionnaire Settings for New Patients. While holding the CTRL key on your keyboard, select the new form under either or both headings (depending on if you want the form to be available to new and/or current patient.)
On the left menu, click FINISH, and then click the Finish button to save the changes.
The form will be uploaded at the next regularly scheduled WebSync, which typically happens once per day. If you would like to upload these changes right away, from the DXWeb toolbar, click WebSync, WebSync Override, and follow the prompts.
The forms you created and selected will now be available for all patients to complete through their Patient Portal link on your website. If patient’s haven’t set up a Patient Portal account, they can request one through the same link.
Viewing Patient Responses Online win the Dentrix Hub
Once patients have filled out their forms online, you can view the patient’s responses in the Dentrix Hub under the Communications, Online Forms section. Review the answers here to decide if the patient has any symptoms or risk factors that would require them to reschedule their appointment.
Select View to see the patient’s responses to the form.
In the Form Response Details window, scroll through and read the responses. The form may be broken up into Sections (or pages); if so, click each section header to review that detail.
Creating and posting online forms with COVID-19 screening questions is part of the virtual waiting room you can set up with Dentrix and other integrated tools like Patient Engage and QuickBill eStatements. Visit https://magazine.dentrix.com/setting-up-a-virtual-waiting-room-with-patient-engage/ to read the article and get other ideas.