What Softwares Do Dental Offices Use | Merged Dental Marketing

BLOG

What Software Do Dental Offices Use?

November 21, 2023

Dental practices have a lot of valuable patient information – both clinical and administrative. Situationally, with the devoted time and effort needed to boost the number of patients, it becomes more complex for dental professionals to handle all of the administrative tasks and operations that must be conducted regularly. This is an even more difficult task with insufficient personnel available. Therefore, acquiring the help of the right dental software allows offices to manage their operations efficiently and concentrate on patient care.

But, you need to know the kind of management software that will help your practice feel more structured and benefit you in the long run. Nowadays, dentists use different software depending on their particular needs. So, if you’re wondering which dental software programs you need in order to operate a booming dental office, here are different types of software available to assist you.

What Is Dental Software?

Dental practice software is a unique dental assistant with the fundamental purpose of providing you and your team with software tools adequate for your particular practice, therefore, they’re not all the same. They help you simplify your processes (like important notes, storing patient records, treatment plans, payment processing, document management, electronic claims, collections, and financial reporting), establish an outstanding patient experience, and ensure that you’ll grow with your practice for years to come.

The more patients you acquire and the more your office grows, it can become difficult to handle these adjustments and maintain data, significantly affecting the time spent tending to your patient delivering quality care. This is why many turn to dental software to help them feel more organized while also being able to dedicate more time to their patients’ needs.

Types of Dental Management Software & Their Key Features

Practice Management Software (PMS)

Dental practice management software is utilized in both the front and back-office sections. For the most part, both clinical employees and office supervisors monitor patients’ electronic dental health records and finances. The accurate practice management software is an uncomplicated, user-friendly software that offers in-depth support so you can get the required help anytime you encounter any problems.

Online Booking and Patient Scheduling Software

An online booking tool allows patients to fill out their information at a time or place that suits them, whether that’s reducing paperwork when they arrive or enabling them to book on their phone or computer. Almost 70% of patients choose to book an appointment online.

A good patient scheduling tool will make your patient registration process easier since patients can schedule their appointments without calling during office hours or traveling to have an appointment confirmation. It provides an easy form for your patients to request an appointment the way they want.

Dental Appointment Software

An effective appointment scheduling tool must help you design a plan for patients who require additional procedures or follow-up appointments with the doctor. It also helps monitor your patients’ scheduled cleanings. Additionally, it keeps tabs on no-shows and allows you to keep your schedule organized by identifying which patients may need an advance arrangement.

Other appointment scheduling programs are automated appointment reminders, messages, surveys, and patient recalls automating all demanding and clockwork tasks, like treatment plans and progress notes.

Dental appointment software helps you categorize new and current patients and chart your team’s working day. This can be very helpful in coordinating dental providers’ and hygienists’ schedules. Also, it can adjust arrangements to their availability and fully harness the best time to do specific operations by designating the schedule.

Dental Inventory Management Software

Managing inventory at a dental office can suggest the difference between misspending the budget and sticking to the budget. Paper trash, delayed materials, or lack of tools and equiptment can all interupt the flow of a busy dental office. Every office must have an inventory control system, and some offices are still updating their inventory systems, from old paper systems to electronic ones. If you honestly need to have a productive dental office, dental inventory management software is necessary.

Dental Accounting Software

Dental accounting software helps dental professionals keep track of expenses, payroll, and purchases from vendors.

As part of a DHR, it helps you manage accounting functions more quickly and competently and allows for maximizing revenues through practical coding support, which streamlines billing in the best way possible.

Furthermore, it also provides valuable data and dashboards that show profit and loss, income, and other key metrics regarding the financial health of your practice. It will presumably contain only those codes required or used by dentists and can help group operations that typically happen simultaneously.

Billing and Collection Software

Fully integrated payment systems can help simplify your whole payments processes process by permitting you to add helpful add-ons, such as a shopping cart and payment portal on your website, automated transaction reports, accounting software, etc.

Collecting payments via cash, card, or check will automatically be posted in your ledger. And this is essential for limiting human error on your posting and maintaining the accounting updated in your dental software.

Likewise, this software solution helps dental offices generate insurance claims to shorten reimbursement time as the claims are automatically validated and electronically sent to their insurance carriers.

Electronic Statements

With electronic statements software integrated into your dental practice management system, you can eliminate the cost of printing and mailing. Dental practices can generate patient statements anytime and send direct statements to their patient’s email safely and competently.

Besides saving on high-cost delivery and using staff time to things and mail envelopes, allowing patients to check their statements online helps secure their immediate attention to their balance.

Patient Recall / Appointment Reminders

The principal significance of patient communication systems is their capability to promote patient retention. To diminish no-shows and cancellations rates, this software operates by connecting to your practice management software so they can send automated reminders to patients who need appointment confirmations or are overdue for appointments. By messaging these patients, you can help stop them from forgetting and guarantee that they receive the treatment they need.

Newsletters

Newsletters are an essential factor in keeping a solid relationship with your patients. They help maintain your practice foremost in your patient’s thoughts so that you’ll be their preference when the time comes. Aside from that, newsletters can be a great way to help spruce up patient education, ultimately bettering case acceptance.

Reputation Management / Patient Reviews

Incorporating dental reputation and review management tools in management software makes it more manageable for healthcare providers to track patient satisfaction and social media mentions to certify their practices have seamless online reputations.

Patient reviews are also valuable marketing tools. When the patient or marketing manager posts favorable reviews to their website, more people read the feedback, and you take advantage of positive second-hand information.

Patient portal

Enables patients to supply information about their dental history, update their contact details or even receive or send bills, X-rays, and other documents through a web browser or mobile apps, saving time and facilitating office efficiency. They can also confirm appointments and contact the dentist using the portal.

If care providers have forms, guidelines, or financial applications that they want accessible by all current patients, they can also upload those to the patient portal. Thus, you don’t need to announce your practice’s confidential documents on your public website.

Dental Imaging Software

An oral examination is insufficient for dentists to accurately work out the patient’s dental health. Dental surgeons have to detect any problematic conditions hidden from their view, like bone lone, extra/impacted teeth, hidden cavities, and the growth of tumors, abscesses, or cysts.

And that’s where digital imaging comes in. It allows professionals to get more precise and in-depth images of teeth, nerves, soft tissues, and bone within the mouth. This software must efficiently lay out all digital images, whether these pictures are from digital photography, digital x-ray capture, intraoral camera capture, or cosmetic imaging. These pictures can then be analyzed, stored, and compared in the long run to observe improvements or determine worsening infections.

Tooth charting – Dentist software must have an accessible graphical report of each tooth and gum, making it easy to pinpoint dental decay, periodontitis, missing teeth, crowns, veneers, fillings, and other applicable problems.
Dental-specific templates – Customize or employ available templates for dental procedures, like crowning, root canals, fillings, regular examinations, and tooth extraction.

Electronic Prescriptions Software

Electronic prescription software is the mode of electronically generating and transmitting a prescription order so that dentists and other health professionals can send an electronic prescription to a pharmacy straight from the point of care. It promotes accuracy and increases patient safety and service quality because there is no penmanship for the pharmacist to understand or call in a prescription.

With electronic prescribing, health professionals can monitor controlled substance prescriptions issued by all dentists in their practice, lowering the chance of over-prescribing or doctor shopping.

Another essential godsend of e-prescribing is that it can help your dental practice operate more productively, saving you and your staff time, energy, and resources while guaranteeing that your patients get the medications they need.

Business Intelligence Software

Business intelligence software can help deliver actionable insights into the most critical financial and operational aspects that help you construct data-driven resolutions to boost your practice’s performance. This software monitors different key performance indicators (KPIs), which can help determine departments for improvement in your office.

This software generally connects to your practice management software and your accounting software to help give a complete overview of your office’s financial status.

Server-Based or Cloud-Based Practice Management Software

Server Based Dental Practice Management Software

Server Based PMS is connected to a network, and data is stored and managed at your office premises. The server is fixed on your location and delivers the entire healthcare dental management software process. If you use server-based PMS, you have to administrate your data internally on local servers, and your staff has to conduct software, hardware, and security upgrades and maintenance.

Keeping your records stored on-site may improve your data management; however, it also risks data loss if the server’s hard drive crashes or the data gets corrupted. This indicates that to guarantee the security of their records, practices with server-based systems must have an IT staff or IT security personnel to protect patient data and sustain continuous operations in case of potential data breaches.

Cloud-Based Practice Management System

Cloud-based software delivers the same functionality as a client-based server, but all the data is stored in the cloud and accessed remotely via an Internet browser or application interface.

Cloud dental solutions are now more in-demand because it eliminates the requirement of having an IT. The software prevents start-up expenses for all computing infrastructure, like data servers and hardware, and lowers the costs of maintaining and backing software applications because the cloud vendor manages the updates and upgrades.

When a dental practice is utterly managed from the cloud, patient data backup becomes automated. If an accident occurs, you can still get hold of your records from any Internet-enabled computer. The practice’s data can simply be generated and restored.

Another significant benefit to cloud-based dental is observed in multi-location practices – it avoids the necessity to invest in a pricey and slow VPN.

Top Dental Practice Management Software

Curve Dental Software

Curve Dental is a great cloud-based dental practice management platform with user-friendly features from scheduling and reporting to charting and imaging. They are very straightforward regarding what you get and let you pay as you go. Supplementary to the traditional practice management software, you gain cloud-based data backup, and you can access your patient records from anywhere at any time using your mobile devices.

DentiMax Dental Software

DentiMax management software has been successfully utilized for years in hygiene and dental clinics and mobile clinics. DentiMax dental practice management software is understandable, versatile, and robust. It has features like appointment scheduling, employee time tracking, electronic insurance claims management, payment processing, maintaining detailed accounting, electronically sending prescriptions, and patient communications.

Open Dental Software

Open Dental is an open-source dental practice management solution utilized by numerous dental practices. It offers most of the streamlined and paperless aspects (e.g., digital charting and e-prescribing) that users often seek in dental practice management software. One feature that differentiates Open Dental from the rest is that this software solution enables users to have complete access to their practice’s database to produce adequate custom reports and requests.

ABELDent Dental Software

ABELDent offers a modern, secure, full-featured & easy-to-use practice management solution for dental practices that can be used locally or in the cloud. Involving appointment scheduling, treatment management, electronic claims, and an advanced reporting suite makes your practice more manageable. The charting function includes an odontogram display and custom clinical note templates and integrates with administrative functions and automated data entries.

Adstra Dental Software

ADSTRA is a software company that offers an integrated dental software solution that has a built-in, user-friendly program with tools for addressing all facets of patient care, from delivering essential practice management to an entirely paperless system. With built-in dental digital imaging software within ADSTRA Dental Software, it offers easy image capture from all types of dental imaging devices.

Choosing the Right Dental Software

We understand your need for a practice management solution that suits your practice. Not all dental offices are the same, so it’s terrific that there are several options for dentists to opt for. With the proper software keeping your practice operating synchronously, you’ll have time to concentrate on growing your practice and taking care of your patients.

Merged Dental Marketing can help you determine the suitable dental software for your practice. Call us today at 866-636-9650, or fill out this form for more details on getting started.