Why your dental clinic does not need five different apps

Most dental clinics did not plan to run on five different tools. It happened slowly, as each new problem was solved with a new tool.

You needed to manage appointments, so you started using an app or a diary. Your accountant wanted clear figures, so billing moved to a separate book or an Excel sheet. Prescriptions stayed on the pad, and lab work was written in a register. Over time, WhatsApp became the place where the staff passed all this information to each other.

Each of these tools solved a real problem when it was added. The difficulty comes from using all of them together, because none of them knows what is written in the others.

The extra work of keeping every tool up to date

When clinic owners think about the cost of these tools, they usually add up the monthly fees. The larger cost is the time your staff spend copying the same information from one place to another. Here are three examples from an ordinary day:

• A patient asks on WhatsApp to change an appointment. Your receptionist changes it in the diary, and then has to remember to reply to the patient.
• A payment comes in by UPI. Your receptionist notes it down, and at closing time she has to find which patient it belongs to.
• The lab calls to say that the PFM crown is ready. Someone writes it in the lab register, and the dentist comes to know only when he or she asks.

None of these steps is difficult, but each one depends on a person remembering to do it on a busy day. When a step is forgotten, a patient does not get a reminder, a payment cannot be traced to a bill, or a crown cannot be found on the day of cementation.

What it means to keep everything in one software

Using one software is useful because everything is kept under the same patient record. The appointment, the tooth chart, the treatment plan, the bill, the prescription and the lab order all belong to one patient, so your staff do not have to copy details from one place to another.

Here is how the same day looks in DentXOS. When your receptionist books an appointment, DentXOS asks her to send the confirmation to the patient on WhatsApp, and she sends it with one tap from the clinic’s WhatsApp. When the dentist records the treatment, the bill is prepared from what was done in the chair. When the crown comes back, the lab order is marked as received, and an order that is late appears in a list of overdue lab work. The dentist can see all of this without asking anyone to check a register.

These are the pages that explain each part in more detail:

• The FDI tooth chart, treatment plans and prescriptions are described under tooth charting.
• Bills, the UPI QR code, part payments and pending dues are described under billing.
• Lab orders, lab dues and overdue lab work are described under lab management.

Where to start

You do not have to change everything on the same day. A sensible way is to begin with the two tools that give your staff the most trouble, which in most clinics are appointments and billing. Once your staff are comfortable with these, you can move prescriptions, lab work and the rest.

If this sounds like your clinic, you can book a demo and we will show you DentXOS with your own treatment price list.