Easy Dental, by Henry Schein ONE, offers a simple way to create a personalized letter for a patient. Quick Letters is a great tool for creating a collection letter, referrals to a specialist, or a thank-you letter.
How It Works
Quick Letters works like this: Easy Dental instructs Microsoft Word to open a prewritten document that contains “merge fields,” which are placeholders left in the letter to be filled in later (for example, a place for the patient’s name, address, or appointment date). Easy Dental also sends Word a file, which contains the selected patient’s information. Behind the scenes, Word uses that data to fill in the blanks and create a personalized document.
Try It Out
(Warning: We do encourage you to follow along and try this out, but be aware that building or printing a Quick Letter will add a note in the patient’s Journal.)
Select a recent new-patient appointment on your schedule, and then click the Quick Letters button.
You’ll see a list of letters. Many of these come already set up, and of course you can create and add your own to this list. Select the New Patient Welcome letter, and choose Build/View.
Microsoft Word will launch, opening the template and customizing it with the selected patient’s information. When that is done, you can add or change the message to personalize it for this patient, and then print it within Microsoft Word.
When you close Microsoft Word, it will sometimes prompt you to save the file. You’ll typically choose ‘No’ – after all, you can generate another letter again if you need to.
Imagine this power! You could select a name in the Collection Manager, click the Quick Letters icon, and spit out the “Collections Notification” letter for the account! Or print the “Patient Information – Consent” letter, print it out, and allow a patient to review their information while they wait to be called back for their appointment.
Customize the Letter Template
If you made edits to the Quick Letter in the above example, know that those changes are only applied to the single patient in the single instance. However, if you make changes to the template (the master copy of the file), those changes will apply to all patients who receive this letter in the future.
To edit the template, in Quick Letters, highlight the letter and click Open Template. Microsoft Word will open and allow you to edit the document. You can change just about anything – add your logo, increase the font size, or alter the message. The merge fields usually appear surrounded in brackets. You can know that you are looking at a merge field if a light shadow appears behind the entire field when you mouse over it. Be careful not to type inside of merge fields. When you select a field, be sure to select the entire field, or your change might break it from linking to the patient’s data.
When you have made your changes to the letter, click Save – just as you would do for any Word document.
Add a New Letter
Now, here is a special treat for being a blog reader! Click HERE to download an “Excuse Note” template. Download the file and save it in Easy Dental’s Letter Template folder. If you don’t know where that folder is, you can look it up in Easy Dental Settings > Maintenance > Preferences, and click the Paths tab. Then click the Open Folder button.
With the file saved in the correct folder, the next step is to add it to Quick Letters.
Return to Quick Letters, click New, and enter a Letter Name that describes the content of the letter (example: Excuse Note for School or Work). Then, in the Merge Letter Template field, enter the document filename (“excuse.doc”). Answer the question about using privacy requests. You can choose the Does not apply for this letter option because you will only be printing this when a patient asks for it. Click OK.
Now when you open Quick Letters for any patient, you will find the new excuse note listed among the letter options. Select it and click Build/View or Print to make a fast way to satisfy a patient request for such notes.
Whether they are the standard letters or your own custom creations, Quick Letters provides you an easy and fast way to personalize a letter for your patients. We encourage you to be creative and explore their potential uses to make your practice more efficient.
