HCD Headlines 7-23-2025
- Rachael
- Jul 23
- 3 min read
Good reminder for our agreement to "Choose my attitude." Let's go through our announcements this month:
August Schedule
Assistants, please remember to submit times for being out of office when your doctor is out. If not, we will count on you to be here to help cover other schedules or help with other projects. If you don't want to use PTO or don't have PTO, please still submit a request using Unpaid Leave. Thank you!
Health History Protocol
After reviewing previous discussions, I was reminded of our previous agreement regarding the HH date in the HH module. This is our official standard for HH and when to fill out a completely new form.
A complete HH form will be completed at the time of NPEX or every 3 years when full x-rays/pano are taken. This will be a new form on NexHealth that reviews ALL HH questions.
The Health History Note will look like this:
- Date Stamp - Initials
BP:
HR:
A1c (if known)
***Comfort needs***
We will no longer have a HH date line showing when the last full HH was completed. This information is found in the Doc Center as needed. If the patient is due for an FMX/pano, they are due for a new HH form.
Planning Continuing Care
Only plan for 1 year for continuing care needs. Treatment plan what is recommended as a provider, not what the patient wants to do for the year.
For example: The patient has periodontal disease and only wants to come 2x a year. Treatment plan 3-4x as needed and present to the patient. They need to be reminded that periodontal disease requires more times than is typically approved by insurance. One of the ways to remind them is a visual treatment plan showing everything you recommend as their provider.
If your patient needs 3 prophy appointments, treatment plan 3x.
DO NOT treatment plan more than is needed in one calendar year! When too much is treatment planned, it will skew our reports and can be confusing when scheduling their next appointment.
Some of us are scheduling into the next year.
If this is the last continuing care appointment for the patient for this year, please add next year's continuing care to the existing treatment plan.
If you are being proactive, create a new folder for 2026 to hold all the new continuing care codes. Link this to the current year to prevent skewing reports.
Cleaning the Airflow 3.0 Handpiece
A reminder of how to clear the Airflow handpieces from debris.
And how to reprocess the Airflow Handpiece
Expiration Dates on Dentrix
After research into finding the expiration date for treatment plans, I found it! And it's kind of complicated to update. With that in mind, I have added this task to my to-do list to update the expiration date once a month. This doesn't resolve everything 100%, but it will remove the really old dates from our printed treatment plans.
Sometimes one action doesn't happen in every patient chart. If that's the case, here is how you update the expiration date for your patient.
Select "Supporting Information" in the Treatment Plan Case Setup.
Select the expiration date 3 months from the current date or the date treatment was recommended.
React vs. Respond
This video continues our discussion from our last meeting. We have power to choose to respond versus giving into our usual reactions. We can learn new thinking habits that will help us avoid conflict and help us become who we truly want to be. We have the power to "choose our attitude" and thereby, choose our destiny.
We are going to work on this as a team tomorrow as we learn to block schedule for our personal schedules, so please make sure you watch the video. It's about 9 minutes long.
Lastly, we are not going to have the bike ride on Saturday since most of our team will be involved in other activities. No worries! Enjoy time this weekend and recharge yourself in whatever way works best for you.
Clock-in for your time reading today and watching the video. Send your team your new funny name to show you read the headlines!
Comments