Patients in your practice will often have medical conditions, allergies, and/or medications that you should be aware of. For instance, a patient might have heart disease, be allergic to latex, and be taking digitalis for their heart problem. Dentrix allows you to create a record of these in the Health History module. In addition, you can assign these items to display as “critical” and/or have pop-up alerts appear to remind you of the patient’s medical situation.
Watch this video to learn how to assign items to a patient’s Health History. (Duration 2:16)
Additional Tips
- After adding multiple items, if you need to add a note, change the dates, or choose an alert, select the item in the Description list, click the View/Edit button (or double-click the item), edit the item, and then click OK.
- When adding multiple items, you can select several items by holding down the Control Key, as you select other items.
- The Health History icon (a cross), which displays in all patient-specific modules, is white when a patient doesn’t have an assigned item in their Health History. If at least one item is assigned with a pop-up alert, the icon is yellow. And when at least one item is assigned with “Show as Critical,” the icon is red. Prescriptions which are prescribed by your office do not affect the color of the icon.
- When you assign an item to a patient, it is listed in their Health History module in its allotted Description list. You can access or edit the details of any item by selecting it and clicking the View/Edit button, or by double-clicking the item itself.
- You can delete an item by selecting it in the Description list and then clicking the Delete button. Once done, this operation cannot be undone. To maintain accurate records, you should only delete an item if it was entered in error.
- By default, Show as Critical and Display Pop-up Alert for this Patient are pre-selected in Dentrix for all items; therefore, if you don’t want these functions to be active, you must deselect them when you add or edit the items. You can also remove these options as defaults by editing the item in Health History Setup. To do so, review the Mastery Tracks topic, Managing Health History Items.
- In the Patient Chart, a red “Alert!” button will display whenever a pop-up alert is selected for any item. Clicking on the button will display the patient’s pop-up alert, from which you can also open the patient’s Health History. This option is useful if you have closed the pop-up alert and you want to view it again, without having to open the patient’s Health History. If the alert button is in the way, click and drag it to another position on the screen.
- You can create and store a patient’s Health History Note at any time. To do so, refer to Creating Health History Notes in Dentrix Help. This note is intended to describe the patient’s general health and can be viewed in other areas of Dentrix, such as Appointment Book notes and the Patient Notes Report.
- The “Patient Profile” box helps to ensure that you are assigning Health History items to the correct patient. You can also click the Family File icon (within this box) to open the patient’s Family File.
- Health History can be accessed from any Dentrix module except the Office Journal and eDex.
- To learn more about assigning items to a patient’s Health History, read Assigning Medical Conditions to Patients, Assigning Allergies to Patients, and Adding Multiple Conditions or Allergies to Patients in Dentrix Help.
Check Your Knowledge
If you have access to Dentrix, check your knowledge with this exercise.
- Switch to the Dentrix demo database.
(Skip this step if you are using the Dentrix Learning Edition software) - Elisabeth Reeves disclosed on her Health History form that she has high blood pressure and is allergic to penicillin. Add this medical condition and allergy to her Health History. (If these items are not on their respective Health History lists, refer to the Mastery Tracks topic, Updating a Patient’s Health History Items to add them.)