When your schedule is a bit on the slow side, you can set your office up for future success by putting some time-savers and resources in place. In this post, we’ll share some of our favorite productivity-enhancing, efficiency-boosting tools.

Learn how to use tasks!

See our Tasks playlist for helpful videos.

At Open Dental HQ, we use tasks to help us manage calls, remind us of recurring or future to-do’s, and so much more. To date, we have created over 3,800,000 tasks! Most of us are subscribed to at least 6 task lists, helping us monitor activity in our various areas of responsibility.

We love tasks because:

• We can notify a group of people at once about a topic or something that needs to be done.
• Readers can comment on the task, and the same group will see the comment.
• We can set reminders for things that need to be done once at a specific date/time, or on a recurring basis (daily, weekly, monthly, yearly).
• We can categorize tasks using color-coding for easy visible identification – we use them for priorities (red tasks are urgent, etc). Color-coded tasks show up at the top of our task lists for even better visibility.
• They are searchable, so we can find and reference old tasks when needed.

Set up some super-speedy charting

See our blog post, Feature Highlight: Speedy Charting for efficiency boosters that will make you smile!

Evaluate and improve what’s in your appointment views

We have added new Appointment View fields in recent versions. Review your appointment views to see if you have all the relevant information you need, or remove information you don’t need to see. Here’s a great webinar that will help show you how you can create various views for different parts of your practice so people see what’s most helpful.

Create categories or color code features

Many features in Open Dental can be customized to your needs. Much of this is done in Setup > Definitions.

Here are some examples of what you can do with definitions:

• Customize the colors of line-items of the Account Module in Definitions: Account Colors.
• Update your confirmation status in Definitions: Appt Confirmed. Hide un-used statuses or add more options.
• Customize the color scheme of your Tooth Chart in Definitions: Chart Graphic Colors.
• Track the status of claims with Definitions: Claim Custom Tracking. This also keeps your Outstanding Insurance Claims report cleaned up.
• Add or edit the folders in the Imaging Module with Definitions: Image Categories.
• Customize miscellaneous colors throughout Open Dental with Definitions: Misc Colors. For example, you can change the title bar to match your office colors, or update colors in the graphical perio chart.
• Update the colors of your Progress Notes in the Chart Module (commlogs, procedures, appointments, etc). See Definitions: Prog Note Colors.
• Add task priorities so tasks can be organized in a list. See Definitions: Task Priorities.

See our blog post on Using Definitions in Open Dental.

Optimizing your operations during slow times can really help set you up for success down the road. Our Support Team is poised and ready to help you on your road to success. Reach out when you need us.