Dentalcompare
Clinical Director
We have been “paperless” in our office for a while now. In some ways, the concept is a little tough to be 100% on the side of having no paper. We still get reports from specialists, Explanation of Benefits from insurance companies, and correspondence from patients. For all those, we scan in the paper to the Document Center in Dentrix which stores everything in a particular patients’ digital chart.
The one thing that has been tough to get around is the health history forms. We have them fill out the paper, and then scan it in to the Document Center. The difficulty comes one year later when we want to update their information. Do we have them fill out a brand new one? Most patients are annoyed by that, especially the ones that have been in the practice a long time. The only other solution has been to re-print the health history, have them look over it making changes, and then re-scan that document.
For those of you still using paper charts, you might say that this is one of the benefits of having that un-scanned static piece of paper. Trust me. The convenience of the rest of the paperless practice by far outweighs this hassle. Besides, we now have a better solution.
We are now using the Kiosk program with Dentrix. It is a simple user interface for the patients to fill in their information. If they are already a patient of record, they can see what information they had previously entered, and make any necessary changes. They can either do this off a link from our website in the comfort of their own home or office. The best part though is that it is formatted well to run as a web app on an iPad. I don’t care how nice your clipboard is. There is no way it is as cool as handing the patient a slick little iPad 2.
Once all the information is in, the PC at the front desk pulls down the information. The front office people can then verify the info, and pull any proper changes right into the Dentrix program. There has been zero data entry on her part at this point.
Now I realize this is complete overkill for an iPad. For all the amazing things that device can do, this is the tip of the iceberg. You can always use it to load Patient Education Software like Guru on their as well, or check out the newest products on Dentalcompare. Either way, it is still cheaper than buying a separate computer for the front, and much more efficient than having all that paper around.