Two types of procedures in a specialty clinic
A dental clinic has two distinct categories of procedures needing pricing. First: general services — consultation fees, X-ray fees — that apply regardless of clinical findings. Second: tooth-level procedures — Fillings, Root Canals, Crowns — recorded against a specific tooth in the dental chart.
Getting this distinction right matters for billing accuracy. A patient receiving a consultation plus a root canal on tooth 26 needs an invoice reflecting all charges, ideally auto-populated from the clinical record.
The services catalog: your general pricing list
Every clinic should maintain a services catalog — all procedures and services with standard prices. This catalog feeds into the billing screen for invoice creation and the invoice autocomplete for rapid entry.
Services catalogs should be reviewed regularly. Prices change, new services are added, and deprecated services should be marked inactive. A catalog not reviewed in a year is likely inaccurate.
- Consultation and check-up fees
- Imaging and diagnostic fees
- Treatment and procedure fees
- Package and course pricing
Specialty chart procedures: the clinical layer
For clinics with specialty charts — dental, skin/lesion, joint/body — there is a second procedure layer linked directly to the clinical chart. These procedures are recorded during the encounter at the tooth, lesion, or joint level.
Default procedure lists are provided by the platform, but every clinic has different pricing. Clinics must be able to set their own prices for each specialty chart procedure, not be locked into platform defaults.
- Dental: Filling, Root Canal, Crown, Extraction, Scaling
- Skin/Lesion: Biopsy, Excision, Cryotherapy, Laser
- Joint/Body: Ultrasound Therapy, Manual Therapy, TENS, Exercise Therapy
Connecting procedures to invoices
The ideal workflow: doctor records the procedure in the clinical chart — procedure appears on the invoice automatically with the clinic's price pre-filled — billing staff review and confirm — invoice sent to patient.
This connection between the clinical chart and the billing screen is what separates a real clinic management platform from a billing tool with a patient list attached.