What the weekly list does
How does patient balance outreach work in MyDentalForce?
MyDentalForce Balance Outreach gives each office a separate weekly list of patients who carry a balance. The balances come from the practice management system; MyDentalForce integrates with OpenDental today, so the amount on the list is the patient-portion balance recorded on the account. The list is worked the way the daily call list is worked: someone opens it, calls the patients on it, and logs an outcome on every attempt. Paid, promised, left a voicemail, disputed: each attempt ends with a result, a name and a date, so no balance sits in a state nobody can explain.
That is the accountability the daily call list already has, applied to dental accounts receivable. Managers see per-office activity and results: how many patients were on the list, how many were reached, and what the attempts produced, office by office. In a single office, the office manager and the owner read one list and one set of results. In a multi-office group, an owner or operations lead sees every office side by side.
Two related views sit next to the list. Production and collections are shown per office and rolled up, so the gap between produced and collected is visible for each location and for the whole practice. For practices with a billing team, a cross-office billing worklist tracks claims, unsent claims and accounts that need billing. That worklist supports the billing team; it does not replace claims processing, coding or payer follow-up. MyDentalForce handles patient balance outreach and its accountability, and it is not full revenue cycle management.
Most offices run two lists on the same engine. They share the logging and the manager's view and differ in almost everything else.
| The two lists | Daily call list | Weekly balance list |
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| Who is on it | Patients who are due for recall, overdue, or have unscheduled treatment. | Patients with a patient-portion balance recorded in the practice management system. |
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| What sets the order | A ranking built from the office's own OpenDental; the list is worked from the top. | The size and age of the balance, as recorded in the practice management system. |
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| Who works it | Whoever owns outreach in the office, every morning. | Usually a different person, often the office manager or a billing lead, once a week. |
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| What gets logged | An outcome on every attempt, and any booking that results, verified in OpenDental. | An outcome on every attempt: paid, promised, left a voicemail, disputed. |
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| What the manager sees | Per-office activity, plus booked and produced value attributed to the list. | Per-office activity and results on balances, next to production and collections for that office. |
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The companion article, A dental balance outreach workflow from list to resolved outcome, walks through the weekly list one step at a time, from the first attempt to the outcome that closes it. For why the collected number and the produced number are not the same number, read the production vs. collections glossary entry, and for the daily list the balance list is modeled on, see Patient Outreach.
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