Patients with outstanding invoices and no further appointments scheduled, need to be contacted regularly to make sure that your practice accounts are up to date.
You can do this easily with the Patients Report.
Locate all patients with outstanding debt
For this example, we are going to use the list of active patients. This means the filter Active > Is Active is set, which is the default.
To locate those patients whose account is in debit, use the filter
Account Data > Account Balance is less than 0 (zero)
No future appointments
Patients with a future appointment can be talked to as they enter reception or surgery, but those who have no future appointments cannot.
Set the filter:
Appointment Data > Next Appointment is unknown
Save the segment. You might wish to call the segment something like "Outstanding debt, no future appointment", for example.
If you wish to see the fields Account balance on the screen, you can use the attributes display selector at the top right of the screen.
You may wish to deselect certain fields, and select Account Balance, with the option to select Total invoiced and Total Paid. This might help when you are talking to the patients.
At this stage you might wish to export the report, and print it. However, if you want to contact the patients using email or SMS or letter, this can be done from the next step.
Remember that once you have changed the patient attributes on display, these changes remain for ALL future reports. If you need to, change the attributes back when you have saved your Report.
Contact the patients
Let's assume that you want to send an email to all those patients with an email address, and include an online payment link in the email.
Let's assume that for those patients who do not have an email address, you are going to send them an SMS message, again including the online payment link.
And for those patients without either an email address or a mobile number, you are going to send them letters.
In order to be able to do this, and send each segment only one method of correspondence, you will need to segment the data further.
You will need to segment the data into 3 further segments.
1 - Has an email address
2 - Does not have email but has a mobile number
3 - Does not have an email address or a mobile number
Correspondence templates
In order for the following instructions to work, you will need to have already set up your correspondence templates. If you do not know how to set up correspondence templates, use our correspondence templates web page to help.
Patients with an email address
Use the filter to find all those patients with an email address:
Patient Data > Email address > Has any value
Save this segment as something like "outstanding debt, has email"
Patients without email but with a mobile number
Start with the segment which you called something like "Outstanding debt, no further appointment"
Add the filter Patient data > Email address > is unknown
Add the filter Patient data > Mobile number > has any value
Save this segment as something like "outstanding debt, SMS"
You may like to just keep a note of the number of SMS messages you are going to send.
Patients with no email and no mobile phone
For the patients with no other form of contact, you will need to send letters.
Start with the segment which you called something like "Outstanding debt, no further appointment"
Add the filter Patient data > Email address > is unknown
Add the filter Patient data > Mobile number > is unknown
Save this segment as something like "outstanding debt, letter"
Create correspondence
From the top right of the Patient Report screen, click on the send correspondence icon - it looks like a paper aeroplane.
At the top left of the correspondence screen enter a name for this correspondence.
Until you name the correspondence, it will remain in draft.
You might like to call it "Outstanding balance, emails" for example.
The Segment you were working on will show in the segment section. To change the segment, click Open and select the segment.
Select the correspondence method - for the emails segment, select Email, for example.
Select the email template from your correspondence templates.
Preview and when ready, send the correspondence.
Repeat the steps above until you have sent correspondence to all your segments.
If you do not have Dentally Mail, you will need to export the letters segment and use mail merge or something equivalent, outside of Dentally.
The Patients Report
To learn more about the Patients Report and how you might use it, we have a number of tutorial webpages for you to refer to.