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How A Dental Treatment Plan Can Help Achieve Overall Health Goals

Dentists know the value of creating a good dental treatment plan for their patients. They are an important part of the record keeping that must be kept for each patient. A dental treatment plan could also play a key role in any legal inquiries years after the services were rendered. As a part of your management software, a dental treatment plan should offer you the ability to keep detailed notes of the problems, diagnoses, and proposed treatments for a patient. Your dental software should also provide you with reminders of patients with a current dental treatment plan that need to have appointments scheduled.

The overall health of patients is sometimes directly impacted by a good dental treatment plan. I’m reminded of story that a dentist told me a while back of a new patient to his practice. It seems that the patient was a recently retired senior who would never visit a dentist unless he was in pain. However, what spurred on the visit wasn’t any discomfort that he may be having – but an article that he had read on the ABC news website. The article was on ways that poor dental care can make someone sick and the following paragraph really hit home.

“Some research suggests there may be a tie between poor oral health and an increased risk of dementia. One study that followed 118 nuns between the ages of 75 and 98 found that those with the fewest teeth were most likely to suffer dementia. Experts think oral bacteria may spread to the brain through cranial nerves that connect to the jaw or through the bloodstream, and may contribute to the type of plaque that’s been linked to Alzheimer

After the initial exam, the dentist sat down with the patient to review his findings. He asked the patient why he only ever saw a dentist when something was wrong. It seems that because of his crooked teeth the patient was never happy about his smile.  When he was younger his parents couldn’t afford to fix them, so the patient figured as long as he brushed his teeth, the only need he would have for a dentist was if something was wrong.

Dental Treatment Plan

The dentist seized on the opportunity to not only allay the patient’s fear but inspire the patient to a smile that he had always wanted. He created a general dental treatment plan to bring the patient’s oral health back to where it should be. He then also created a separate Orthodontic and Periodontal dental treatment plan. When he went over the plans with the patient, the patient was so happy and encouraged that he followed every bit of advice that the dentist and his hygienists offered to improve his dental health. So much so, that on subsequent appointments the patient’s overall condition was improving faster than expected.

The dentist told me the ease with which his software allowed him to keep track and update the patient’s progress for each dental treatment plan was amazing. He said trying to juggle all three simultaneously on paper would have been much more difficult, especially when arranging to see specialists and keeping track of their results.

How A Dental Treatment Plan Can Help Achieve Overall Health Goals

The ability to create and manage a dental treatment plan is a very important feature in today’s dental software packages. Paperless planning the patients’ objectives of long-term treatments is not only convenient but also is easy to follow through completion. In addition, being able to share each dental treatment plan with all the associated specialists makes the health goals of each patient much easier to reach.

Getting a Bigger Bang for your Buck with your Dental Software

“There’s gold in them thar hills, boys” is a phrase attributed to one of Mark Twain’s characters. In California during its “Gold Rush” period, Twain kept hearing a story from the miners who had come from Georgia. It seems in an attempt to keep the miners in Georgia an assayer of the Dahlonega Mint in Dahlonega, Georgia stood in the town square and proclaimed “Why go to California? In that ridge (as he pointed to the hills surrounding Dahlonega) lies more gold than man ever dreamt of. There’s millions in it.” Now, whether Twain used a writer’s license and deliberately changed the original quote or it was misquoted to him from the beginning makes no difference to the topic at hand. Both, Twain’s quote and the origins for it apply in getting more out of your dental software.

Beneath the routine day to day tasks of billing, scheduling appointments and providing daily reports, lies informational gold. This information allows your office to provide your patients with superior service which in turn strengthens your relationship with them. Stronger relationships mean more referrals and an increase in revenue. Your software should be able to track these referrals and remind you to thank your patients for them. Even better your software should offer you a means to send out these thank you notes either by mail or e-mail.

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Other ways that your dental software can help automate your office and help provide better service thereby increasing your revenue:
  • Following up on uncompleted treatment and unscheduled treatments for which predeterminations have been completed
  • Tracking and reminding the front desk personnel of cancelled appointments which have not been rescheduled
  • Providing reminders of recall appointments whether scheduled or not
  • Confirmation of upcoming appointments either by phone, email or text message
  • Tracking insurance benefits so as to be in a position to provide treatment reminders at appropriate times for your patients’ financial benefit
  • Keeping track of patients with open treatment plans but no appointments
  • Generating a list of patients with balances over 60 days old
  • Sending welcome packages to new patients and birthday wishes to existing ones
  • Sorting patients’ names by relevant information such as employer, date of last treatment, or type of treatment required

In addition to providing you with more revenue through tracking and providing reminders for cancelled and missed appointments, unscheduled recall and predeterminations, as well as increased patient referral, integration of your dental software will reduce administrative errors and provide greater management control with fewer front desk hours.

There is an axiom in software development called the 90/10 rule and it stands for 90% of any software users will only ever use 10% of the software’s capabilities. Although the percentage may vary from software to software, I have found this axiom to be quite true. Even in software as specialized as dental software, I have noticed that most offices do not take full advantage of most of what their dental software has to offer. After learning the basics of entering patient information, billing and booking appointments they get caught up in the day to day operations. They will not take the time to look into other ways that the software can help them not only manage their current patients but get new ones.

Remember to look for the potential untapped value that your software can bring to your dental practice, and find the gold laying just beneath the surface.

How Using Microsoft Word Templates Can Allow You To See More Patients

Writing consultation reports can be a time consuming, daunting task. Most reports are done using Microsoft Word and when using Microsoft Word templates to write them the task becomes every so slightly less onerous. Going a step further, imaging software that has a user-centric design and deep level integration with Microsoft Word can make report writing a breeze. In the case of dentists, this allows them to save time in the writing of referrals or reports so that they may see and spend more time with their patients.

Microsoft Word templates are a great tool for any type of document that has a standard format and is needed often. Microsoft Word templates will have predefined page layouts, fonts, margins and styles. They can have recommended sections or required text as well as content controls such as a predefined drop-down list or a special logo. You can Google and find thousands of different types of templates already created for Microsoft Word.

But what most people don’t know is – how easy it is to create their own Microsoft Word templates.

Microsoft Word Templates

Getting Started with Microsoft Word Templates

The best way to start, is to analyse which documents are created most often, and if there are sections of the document that are always similar in content and/or format. They are good candidates for becoming a template for use in the future. Once you find one, open it in Microsoft Word, go to the File menu and choose the option Save As. Give it an appropriate name and change the Save As type to Document Template.

Congratulations! You have just created your first template if you have never done it before.

Well not exactly, what you’ll want to do next is get rid of all the parts of the document that aren’t always the same, leaving you spaces to fill in as you need for each unique case. You could have areas of empty space that you type into or drop-down boxes with fixed selections or even check boxes. Many great how-to articles can be found on the Internet, on Microsoft’s own Office site or videos on YouTube. Just remember to look for ones that are using the same version of Microsoft Word as the one that you are using, as features both old and new and ways of adding them to the template can change with each version of Microsoft Word.

Would it not be great if you could open a patient file in your dental imaging software, and quickly associate both the patient information and images needed for a particular report or referral in a ready to send document? ADSTRA Imaging does have this ability.

Microsoft Word Templates and ADSTRA Imaging

By directly interfacing with Microsoft Word templates, ADSTRA Imaging allows you to create or modify templates that will import all relevant information like patient name, date of birth, provider’s name, practice name, and practice address, and it will also import specified patient images from ADSTRA Imaging directly into the Microsoft Word templates eliminating even more typing and importing of images into reports or referrals.

This is easily done through ADSTRA Imaging, on the Menu under File there is the Word Template option. This then gives you the option to open a Predefined template, Create New template, or Edit an existing template. The first option is the simplest because all that needs to be done is have the patient for the report selected in ADSTRA Imaging, open and highlight the desired images used in the document, and select the correct template. The only thing left to do is to make any adjustments in the document that are unique to this patient. The second and third options are similar. One allows you to create a new Microsoft Word template from scratch or from an already existing template. The other allows you to edit or modify an already created Microsoft Word template.

The only difference when creating or editing Microsoft Word templates when opened through ADSTRA Imaging, is the availability of a container toolbar that allows you to place the predefined elements that will be received from ADSTRA Imaging into the Microsoft Word templates.

As an example, you have a document that normally requires two images that are coming from a patient file in ADSTRA Imaging. You create the remainder of the template as per normal but, to indicate where the first image will be placed on the document, you click on the Image Container button on the container toolbar. A little window will open indicating the image number one and will have options for you to select for orientation and what image properties you would like to include with the image. Once you click OK, a template with two boxes will appear. The top box is the area where the image will go and the bottom box will be the area that will display any image properties that you selected. Both boxes can be dragged and resized anywhere on your template. You then repeat the above process for the second image. Once completed, whenever you select two images in ADSTRA Imaging and open this template, your document will have the two selected images placed and sized exactly as you wanted when you created the template.

Using Microsoft Word templates through ADSTRA Imaging is extremely beneficial to busy clinicians as it significantly increases the efficiency of preparing consultation reports. A little time spent upfront in creating a template for a document needed often should pay dividends many times over, thus allowing dental providers to spend less time writing referral reports and more time to seeing their patients.

Cloud Technology Helps Dental Clinics Provide Better Care

Because of better education about the benefit of good oral health when it comes to their overall physical well being, regular visits to dental clinics have become a way of life for North Americans over the past several decades. Patient demand and growing customer expectations from sectors outside of healthcare has led to a change in the way dentists do business. As a result, they are expanding their once modest clinics into large, modern, consumer-friendly facilities, and using the most advanced technological equipment available. Competition among practices is strong, and the pressure is on to present an appealing storefront while adopting cutting edge technology in order to attract clients. To complement the superior level of care dentists now strive to provide for their patients, many are turning to cloud-based technologies that streamline and modernize office procedures, unify multi-locations and reduce cost and complexity of delivering better customer service.

Cloud Technology

Since the 80s, the focus of dental care has changed to hygiene and oral health screening – in other words, preventive medicine – resulting in a markedly decreased need for extractions, fillings and dentures. This, however, has not led to fewer visits to the dentist, but rather increased demand for enhanced procedures. Canadians are well aware of the health and social impacts of neglecting their teeth and gums, and are willing to invest time and money to ensure the best treatment plans possible, including cosmetic dentistry, implants, orthodontics, and geriatric dentistry. Practitioners have responded by diversifying and expanding, which allows them to offer a comprehensive range of services to their patients. As a result, dental clinics – with a full complement of hygienists, general practitioners, periodontists, oral and maxillofacial radiologists, etc. – are busier than ever before.

INVESTING IN THE OVERALL GOOD HEALTH OF CLINICAL PRACTICES

With the cost of opening a new practice costing well in excess of half-a-million dollars, savvy practitioners are pooling their resources to equip and staff large clinics instead, enabling them to provide the greatest range of procedures and services to the greatest number of people. Instead of having to refer patients to outside resources, specialists are located within the practice, providing a convenient service to customers as well as keeping business in-house, even if at a different physical location. Patients are comfortable knowing that their care is under the supervision of one practitioner, and that they can rely on established standards of practice across all clinics.

TREND TO DIGITAL MEETS PATIENT DEMAND

Of necessity, there has been a significant shift in the way clinics handle business. Today’s modern multi-location clinics require an integrated system that enables them to operate as a single entity with multiple branches in order to run effectively.

This is a trend that has grown beyond dentistry and is now seen across all medical professionals who are replacing single location solutions or paper-based operations with comprehensive digital platforms. It enables more streamlined workflow processes, shared information, and at-a-glance analytics which help keep their respective businesses strong and successful.

In the past, accomplishing a successful integration was not an easy task. Essentially, a software solution and a very powerful hardware infrastructure requiring significant IT manpower and budget had to be custom built. Now, utilizing the most powerful cloud service platform in the world – Microsoft Azure ADSTRA is able to deliver a total integrated solution designed specifically for dental clinics.

Microsoft Azure is being used by thousands of companies around the world, including Fortune 500 companies as well as medical records companies, which are putting actionable data in the hands of clinicians and healthcare providers.

Dental clinics across North America have relied on ADSTRA since 1994 for managing their day-to-day operations.  For more than a decade, one large branch of government, with over 100,000 employees, has been using ADSTRA to manage more than 30 dental clinics around the world, making it simple and easy to treat any employee from any location. All patient records, x-rays and other pertinent information are available to every clinic, saving time, reducing costs and, more importantly, enhancing the level of patient care for this agency.

PAPERLESS, MULTI-LOCATION DENTAL PRACTICES UTILIZE MICROSOFT AZURE CLOUD PLATFORM

ADSTRA has a proven solution that provides dental professionals with efficient, paperless patient management, appointment scheduling, charting, imaging, financials, and communications.

Intuitive and easy to use, the colourful graphic interface allows users to:

  • Easily schedule appointments at any location, administer patient records, set up billing and payments, and prepare reports across all locations;
  • Create odontogrammes for existing conditions as well as perform and plan treatment;
  • Capture, organize and enhance images from digital equipment such as cameras and radiographic devices, and share with branch clinics and specialists;
  • Communicate with other departments/locations via messaging or text;
  • Access data from multiple locations using computers, tablets, or mobile devices.

An all-inclusive maintenance service is another strength of ADSTRA’s Cloud offering. The software is pre-installed and configured, interactive software training and support is provided on-demand, and all software updates are automatically applied.

“Because it is flexible and scalable and adheres to the most stringent privacy and security regulations, the Microsoft Azure cloud infrastructure is ideally suited for multi-location practices that previously had no commercial product available to them,” says Viviana Bardea, Director of Software Development. “And it is incredibly cost efficient. With no upfront capital outlay and dramatically reduced licensing costs, money otherwise spent on servers, networking, software and support can be rolled back into the business instead.”

Trends in dental care are changing. It’s time to start the conversation about how the infinite power of the Microsoft Azure cloud combined with ADSTRA’s proven expertise in information management systems for oral healthcare can help your dental clinics face the future.