How does your school book pt appointments?

[BoyRusho]

Just wondering how your dental school books (or allows you to book) pt appointments. I know there are tons of different ways to do it, and I'm curious how many schools book for their students vs have the students book their own. Also, can you book pt appointments online?

For example, at my school we have to get up rather early every week on a certain day when the school opens up the 'new week' for booking. Everyone is allowed to book 3-4 appointments that day, and every subsequent day after until every chair is taken. The system works okay but I'm sure in this day and age there must be a better way. So I'm curious about how other dental schools are doing it..... thanks for the input.

---

Members don't see this ad.

 

[I'mFillingFine]

We are given a list of patients (our "patient family") and those people are only assigned to us. We start with a comprehensive exam and then treatment plan anything they need and do it. We can schedule them whenever we have an open spot in clinic.

And we have our own chairs, so the appointment automatically gets assigned to our chairs. When an appt is made, the dispensary takes out our instruments (and the assistants wheel them to our operatories), the paperwork is printed, and the chart room pulls the chart and puts them in a stack in each clinic.

The only time a patient will be assigned to us for specific treatment is for certain endo cases (so that everyone gets one), if a hygienist in the hygiene clinic finds some decay that we need to restore, or if it's something rare like a perio surgery.

Works out pretty well! We're responsible for our patient families so it's good practice in balancing the different people and scheduling accordingly.

(This is at Univ. at Buffalo)

 

[armorshell]

UoP:

Patient's are assigned (ostensibly by needy) to individual students to create a pool of patients for whom the students will give comprehensive care. Chairs are booked by department (Restorative, oral diagnosis and treatment planning, endo, perio) using an online webtool. Certain numbers of chairs are assigned to each department depending on the faculty load during that time and day with a 9 person waitlist tagged onto the end. It works decently well for scheduling patients far in advance, but I have suspicions that there is a healthy amount of 'ghost booking'.

Mandatory blocks and rotations are automatically assigned at the beginning of the year so they are blocked out of your schedule before you ever call your first patient, and some implant experiences are automatically scheduled by the secretaries (often to students chagrin).

Instruments are handled via a newly installed central sterilization process which hasn't figured out how to guarantee correct instrument kit levels yet 100% of the time. This method of booking will likely change with the schools complete conversion to Axium over this year. Students are responsible for all patient contact and scheduling.

 

[Cold Front]

Just wondering how your dental school books (or allows you to book) pt appointments. I know there are tons of different ways to do it, and I'm curious how many schools book for their students vs have the students book their own. Also, can you book pt appointments online?

For example, at my school we have to get up rather early every week on a certain day when the school opens up the 'new week' for booking. Everyone is allowed to book 3-4 appointments that day, and every subsequent day after until every chair is taken. The system works okay but I'm sure in this day and age there must be a better way. So I'm curious about how other dental schools are doing it..... thanks for the input.

That's the BU system.

 

[BoyRusho]

Yes, that's the BU system, which is about to change. Any other students want to describe how they book appointments for their patients? Tufts, USC, Harvard, NYU, Columbia, UF, Nova.... anyone? Thanks for the couple who have responded!

 

[vasco]

At CASE you have your own patient pool and you provide comprehensive care for them. You have your own chair and the clinic is divided into group practices with two preceptors and a patient care coordinator. The patient care coordinator is in charge of scheduling your appointments and keeping your schedule full. They use a stupid system called SOE on an intranet to schedule patients and chart your treatment plans and completed work electronically. They also keep your charts and organize them for you.

 

[BoyRusho]

Let me expand the question to include: Is anyone booking 100% electronically right now? If so, how do you like it and what is the name of the system you use? Much thanks again to all!

 

[phremius]

Booking at NYU:

We book our appointments via Dentrix, every clinic has a couple of dentrix-loaded computers. These appointments during the specified times would have the charts pulled. All in all can't complain about the system.

 

[Cold Front]

Yes, that's the BU system, which is about to change.

to what? it's funny I hear something like this on a public forum, and not directly from the school! 🙄

 

[1992Corolla]

Temple uses an electronic system called CMS. Every evening at 4:30-4:45 a day 7 days in advance opens up and everyone who needs a chair books it in the respective department. Because we are all fairly new to the clinics and everyone has to go through tx plan and perio these chairs usually get snagged first and a bottle neck occurs. The perio chairs are also short staffed at the moment so only a few chairs are open on certain days. Basically we use a JAVA system to book chairs anytime within a week in advance with the new chair opening up every evening. It isn't too bad because our last appointment of the day is over at 4:30 when the calendar updates.

We have our own instruments in a black cart that we roll around. We are in charge of making sure our patients pay or that insurance is verified (not a big deal and we are not responsible anymore for footing the bill as in previous years). we are in charge of scheduling our own patients as well.

 

[BoyRusho]

Anyone else? Thanks to all who have responded!

 

[TucsonDDS]

More on Buffalo,

We are generally allowed to book about 4 weeks in advance and it is a totally internet based program that was developed at the school. Works reasonably well. We always use our own operatory except for the rare occasions that were mentioned previously (endo, periosurg, rotations). In the clinic the faculty roam around (or hang out BS'ing) to our operatories. It is very nice that we always have our own ops which we can keep our crap in and we don't have to worry about someone else using it. Another nice thing is if we are scheduled to be in the clinic we never have to worry about getting a chair, but getting faculty can be another story.

 

[PlaqueAttack]

U Mich

We work with the "patient family" idea as well. You are in charge of calling ALL patients and booking the appts in an Axium computer format. External rotations are booked out of your schedule and D4s have 6/10 clinic half days a week and D3s have 4/10 (a D3 and D4 share a cube) but there are also lots of override chairs available for the days your not scheduled and it usually (9 times out of 10) is not a problem to get a chair if you book out a week or so ahead. Endo and OS are scheduled in a different manner and they can be booked up (especially OS). You get your pt's charts in the morning from the basement and you can pre-order your instruments or wait in line for them at the dispensing window before clinic starts.

 

[TucsonDDS]

Well, we may get some snow but so far Buffalo sounds the best

 

[mokie]

At Louisville, we are each assigned in one of 6 groups. Each group has it's own schedule of faculty and staff (1-2 assistants, schedulers, office manager, ect.) We have patient families of about 20-30 patients each. We are responisble for comprehensive care for the patients in our families, though there is some sharing among students to make sure everyone gets their requirements done. We pick up patients either by doing screenings and choosing to keep that patient in our family or sometimes you will have a patient assigned to you that is known to have requirements you need.
We each have our own chair and appointments are generally booked in 3 hour blocks- 1 in the morning and 1 in the afternoon (sometimes we split the appointments if we are doing something we know won't take the full three hours). Each clinic is a comprehensive care clinic, so most procedures are done on the regular clinic floor (restorative, perio, pros, ect.) We do have speciality clinics for endo, TMD, OS, ect, that you schedule a chair in if you are doing one of those procedures. Each group has a scheduler and they call patients and book appointments for you. We sometimes call our own patients, but they schedulers or other staff are the only ones that can access the scheduling module of axium, so we can't schedule our own appointments. So you have to let the scheduler know when you want a specific patient to come in. The scheduler in my group is a former dental assistant, so she is pretty good about knowing things like how much lab time to allow between appointments. The schedule opens up for the whole semester about a month or two before the end of the previous semester. We each have a one week rotation in oral surgery and pedo each semester and these rotations are blocked out in your schedule as soon as it opens up for the semester. You can't schedule appointments with your regular patients on days you are on rotation unless you find another student from your group to cover your rotation for you.
Judging from what I have read in this thread, we have it pretty good with our scheduling system.