Dentrix Treatment Planner: Cases, Visits, and What the Patient Never Sees

Of the major practice management systems, Dentrix has the most serious treatment planning structure, and credit where it is due. It is the only one of the four with real objects rather than labels. If you have been fighting it, the odds are good you are using half of it.

Cases and visits are actual containers

A treatment plan Case is a real thing in Dentrix. It holds procedures and carries its own case status, case severity, notes, a fee expiration date, and financing status. Inside a case, procedures group into numbered Visits.

You build visits in Treatment Plan Case Setup: select the procedures, click Create Visit, and a visit number appears in front of each procedure code. Right-click to move a procedure to a different visit.

That fee expiration date is the feature nobody uses and everybody needs. It puts a date on the quote, in the software, so a patient returning fourteen months later is not holding you to last year's number.

Print Subtotals by Visit

This is the one most people miss. When you print a treatment case there is an option called Print Subtotals by Visit, and it does exactly what it says: a figure per visit instead of one total at the bottom. It requires that you have actually assigned visits first.

You can also choose which visits print. Leave it blank for all of them, or enter a range like 1-4, a list like 1, 3, 5, or both together. Useful when a patient only wants to commit to the first stretch.

Severity applies to the whole case, which is a problem

Case severity is immediate, eventual or optional, and it applies to the entire case rather than to individual procedures. So a plan that mixes an urgent molar with elective cosmetic work cannot express both.

Dentrix's own guidance is to split that into separate cases. Which works, and also means a patient with mixed needs ends up holding two or three documents that are really one plan. Worth knowing before you build it, not after.

The estimate is only as good as three places you probably forgot

The primary estimate is the fee times the coverage percentage, unless the procedure appears in the Payment Table, in which case Dentrix uses what that plan actually paid last time. Deductibles, annual maximums, secondary coverage and allowed amounts all feed in.

The accuracy problem is that the numbers behind it live in three separate locations: Family File, Dental Insurance Plan Information, and Provider Information. When an estimate looks wrong, it is usually one of the three drifting out of sync with the other two.

What the patient does not get

Here is a detail worth knowing before your next case presentation. Dentrix shows your team the reasoning behind an estimate, why a deductible applied, whether the payment table was used, on screen in the Treatment Planner. That explanation does not print on any report.

So your treatment coordinator can see why the number is what it is, and the patient's copy shows the number with none of the reasoning. Every question they think of in the car is a question your printed page cannot answer.

What none of it tells you

Cases, visits, subtotals, expiration dates. Dentrix gives you more structure than anything else on the market, and it is genuinely good at presenting a number.

But follow that number back to its source and it is the same source as everyone else's: a procedure code, times a fee schedule, adjusted for insurance. The Payment Table makes the insurance estimate sharper. It does nothing about the other half of the question.

Take twelve crowns across two cases. Six in the posterior on one patient, six across the anterior of another with a high lip line. Same codes, same fees. On the posterior six the margins can sit where the tissue makes it easy and the shade has room to breathe. On the anterior six the smile line decides the margins, the shade has to hold across six units side by side, and the case means shade photographs, extra try-ins, a much larger lab bill, and a patient who inspects the result in the mirror every morning. Dentrix prices the two cases identically, because the codes are identical. That is the number that matters to you and the one no case or visit structure will produce: what the case costs you to deliver, in chair time, lab and the appointments that never bill. Dentrix has no field for any of that, and no arrangement of cases and visits will produce it.

Dentrix has no field for it, but a spreadsheet does. Our free dental treatment plan template lays a case out the way Dentrix lays out visits, and adds the two columns Dentrix cannot: what each phase costs you, and what it should be priced at. There is a column for the Dentrix fee too, less your average write-off, so you can put the two numbers side by side.