Notes and Alerts – Highly Important Aspect of Patient’s Electronic Dental Record
Patients can have many pre-existing health conditions that you, as their dentist, need to be aware of. It is important to ask your patients for their full medical history, the previous procedures they have had as well as any medications they are taking. Knowing your patient’s medications or anything they have been prescribed is extremely important because if for example they are on blood thinners, that could be detrimental, even during a basic cleaning. Moreover, it is necessary to know of pre-existing medical conditions such as diabetes, oral cancer, TMD, HIV/AIDS, thyroid problems, iron deficiency/anemia, leukemia, and eating disorders such as bulimia and anorexia as they can affect patients’ oral health.
When dealing with numerous patients, it is extremely important to keep good track of their medical history, thus having a software system like ADSTRA Clinical would be a great solution. The software contains various tabs such as Alerts & Notes, Forms, Tx (Treatment) Plans, Clinical Notes, and Prescriptions that allows you to compartmentalize your patients’ medical history, making it easier to organize and find when needed.
Alerts
Alerts can be set for notes you create and are automatically displayed on a prominent position on the screen as soon as you open the patient’s file, making anything that is of concern or of utmost importance highly visible. In addition, can you configure the alerts to have an expiry date so they are not to last indefinitely, as well as you can categorize them by type. These categories include medical, pre-medication, social, financial, marketing, and correspondence.
Medical and Pre-medication Notes
The medical and pre-medication notes contain pertinent information regarding your patients’ medical records or you may record information such as patient’s fears while at the dentist and some of the tactics you can use to keep them calm. They are immediately visible when booking appointments so all the staff involved in patient’s care are automatically made aware of any important information.
Finanical Notes
Financial notes are commonly used to document any payment information or details for a patient and marketing notes are used to denote any newsletters or promotional materials sent to a patient.
Correspondence Notes
Correspondence notes automatically record any communications between you and a patient and give you a quick look at the history of interactions between your office and the patient.
Social Notes
Social notes are helpful as this is where you could keep notes about your patient’s social activities such as planned vacation or information on favorite sports team or clubs and other affiliations that allow you to show that you care about them, on a personal level.
Privacy
A very important feature of the Alerts & Notes tab in ADSTRA Clinical is that it allows you to decide whether you would like to make a note public or private. In making a note private, the information included will not be visible when you see the list of notes; it will only be visible when you go to edit the note. On the other hand, a public note will be visible at all times. Having the option to make a note public or private is valuable as there may be information your patient has shared with you, that they will not want to accidentally become visible.
These features in ADSTRA Clinical allow you to provide your patients with the best care possible, and they could potentially save their lives. As a health care provider, you want to ensure you are doing everything possible to keep your patients healthy, happy, and safe, and ADSTRA Clinical’s alerts and notes provide the means to do just that. The multiple tabs yield a quick and simple way to organize imperative information for patient care, as well as an easy way to get a hold of such information. Furthermore, the ability to attach an alert to a note provides yet another way to make such crucial information noticeable and easily accessible, increasing your chances of executing treatment safely for your patients.
