Dental practices across Canada have been grappling with the complications that COVID-19 has brought to their business. While reasonable guidelines that protect patients and staff alike have been put in place for all provinces, the in’s and out’s of tackling recommendations and requirements have been trial and error for most practices.
Reevaluating the best practices of your practice was first a requirement of reopening, but has now turned into cutting out unnecessary inefficiencies during the ongoing pandemic. Most solutions and ideas for tackling COVID requirements have been figuring out how to make screening work with the shape and layout of their office. To help, ClearDent released a new feature, Patient Portal, a secure cloud-based access point for your patients to access and update their records – all accessible within ClearConnect.
Most of the habits that every dental office observes have long felt like time-honored traditions. Plenty of practices that were perfectly comfortable handing over a clipboard and asking for a quick review on paper, are struggling to imagine how they can complete these important tasks. Even as technology slowly rewired how we thought of the waiting room, it was a global pandemic that finally forced us to ask if the approaches we take were ever that great.
Now, in late 2020, the idea of handling paperwork to learn about health history, or to add a plus-one to the dental care of a young family is a logistical nightmare. Routine checkups and first-time visits are creating obstacles for thousands of businesses trying to stay focused on great health outcomes. Care providers, administrative staff, and office managers have been discovering the life hacks that keep their office open, but have only added expense after expense to protect their team and patients from the risks of COVID-19.
By doing away with the requirements that records can only be updated from the waiting room, or during each appointment in a fully-booked day, Patient Portal is simplifying how patients think of their own records, while leaving the baggage of paperwork, tablets, and the nagging question about whether a file was updated correctly.
