Status Code Essentials

Hello to the New Year!

2023 is here and it’s time to make sure your status codes are on point! Status codes are essential for tracking your patients in your Cloud 9 software and can specify your patient’s relationship with your practice. There are five status codes you should prioritize: active patient, pending patient, growth and development patient, retention patient, and inactive patient. When a new patient comes in for their initial consultation, their status code needs to be changed to an active treatment, a pending treatment, or a growth and development treatment status code. Knowing status codes allow you to properly track and schedule your patients in the practice. If you don’t assign status codes accordingly, your practice loses money. Your status codes provide you a map toward new starts, follow through and prioritizing treatments your practice has already started, and avoiding negligence of active patients. It’s important that all your active patients have appointments set, pending patients get follow-ups for new starts, phase one retention patients get follow-ups about phase two starts, and full retention patients get follow-ups about the stability of their results.

With an active status code, there is full treatment, phase one treatment, and phase two treatment in either braces or aligners. A pending status code is someone who you’ve already presented treatment to and are eligible to begin treatment but are either waiting for dental work or waiting to commit to treatment. The growth and development status code is to indicate that the patient is still growing until they are treatment ready. A retention status code consists of phase one retention patients that have completed their first phase of treatment, meaning they have future treatment for phase two before completing their comprehensive treatment plan; or full retention, meaning they finished a complete treatment and are in retention for one to two years before being placed in an inactive status code. An inactive status code means the patient finished their treatment and follow-ups, or they decided to not move forward with treatment at all.

Start the new year right! Embrace your Practice is a consulting service for all your orthodontic needs– such as clinical, treatment coordinating and financials. Our motto is “You don’t know what you don’t know, but we know what you don’t know, that’s why you need our services!” Visit our website at embraceyourpractice.com to schedule a consultation with us and let us design a plan specialized for your practice.