SARAL DENTAL SOFT

 Good to see u on the site rajeshji. What new features have you added of late in your software ? 

Regards,

veeren

Take these three steps to make your transition to a paperless office smooth and easy from the very start:

1. Define your transition timeline.

Going paperless is a process, not an event. Just because you now have digital radiographs and a scanner does not mean you can be paperless by Monday. You need to strategize each step and create a timeline for the entire transition. Six to 18 months is a good starting point depending on the size of your practice, number of staff members, number of patients, and how much your office is already using the computer.

2. Identify how and where your information will be stored.

Think about the information you now have in your patients’ charts and decide where that will be located in the computer and how it will get there. Remember to include all patient information, from personal notes to medical alerts. Identify where each piece will be located when you are no longer using paper charts. When deciding what information will be scanned, consider the amount of time it will take to scan documents and/or radiographs and store them in a digital chart. I recommend timing how long it will take to scan one patient’s chart and multiply that by your total number of patients. Use this information when deciding how much history you would like to include in the digital chart and if you will be employing additional help for scanning.

3. With each step, consider what will be best for the office.

Just because you are going paperless does not mean you need to have everything stored the computer. The objective of this process is to make your office more efficient and productive. If your new system is not doing that for your office, then create another way. For example, lab slips could be scanned into the patient’s chart, entered into the patient’s clinical notes, or filed in an accordion file. When deciding what to do with your lab slips, consider what information you need from the slips and how often you may refer back to it. Think about the time needed to scan the lab slip, compared to typing the information you need into clinical notes. What will work best for your office?

With proper planning, going paperless can be a fun and exciting time for your practice. Take the first step in the paperless process, and plan your meeting to discuss the transition to a more efficient, productive practice.

Author bio
Jennifer Schultz is the owner of Productive Practice, a practice-management consulting company specializing in strategic planning workshops.

Two start-ups new to the dental field are leveraging their expertise in software development and cloud computing to create online tools for secure data and image sharing.

Dental Sharing and RecordLinc both offer Web-based services that they say can streamline and improve the way dental practices handle consultations and referrals and ensure HIPAA compliance in the process.

Dental Sharing was founded in June 2010 by Glenn Godart, DMD; Anthony Bonanno, a 40-year veteran of the financial industry; and Peter Macnee, who has 25 years of experience in the Internet and telecom industries, specializing in Web-based consumer imaging services.

In 2008, Dr. Godart identified “an inconsistency in the dental community’s move to digital radiography while maintaining many of the analog practices, resulting in inefficiencies and extraneous costs related to the handling and sharing of digital images,” according to the company website. This prompted him to develop a method for dentists to safely share and store digital dental images.

“We are trying to satisfy, in a HIPAA-compliant manner, how the dental community shares digital x-rays.”
— Anthony Bonanno, Dental Sharing
“For years I struggled in my practice with a convenient means to transfer digital x-rays to colleagues and specialists needing x-rays of my patients,” Dr. Godart said. “My administrators spent an untold amount of time [on this], taking them away from revenue-producing activities. Knowing that pressure is mounting to manage patient information in compliance with HIPAA, I knew with good technology we could find an efficient and easy solution to this problem.”

Dental Sharing launched its proprietary digital image sharing service in October 2010. The service allows dentists to store, share, and manage digital dental x-rays and photographic images in a secure, user friendly format. The company ensures HIPAA compliance by using 128-bit SSL connection, automatic timeout features, unique user names with password protection, data encryption, cloud storage with multiple data backups, and extensive user audit trails.

“We are trying to satisfy, in a HIPAA-compliant manner, how the dental community shares digital x-rays,” Bonanno said. “In today’s world, the dental field shares x-rays in a variety of ways, primarily through email, which is not HIPAA-compliant.”

Dental Sharing uses a subscriber-based model, eliminating the need for any additional hardware or software beyond the subscriber’s current office environment, he added. The following are the system requirements:

Windows 2000 or later
Mac OS 10.4 or later
Internet Explorer 7 or later
Firefox 3.x and up
Safari 2.4 and up
Adobe Flash Player 10.1 or higher preferred, but not required
“Our service allows the subscriber to upload a digital x-ray into our website and then share with the desired recipient,” Bonanno said. “For the share to take place, the person initiating the share must be a paid subscriber, but the recipient doesn’t need to be a subscriber. They can receive the image, they just can’t reshare it.”

The cost for this service is $399 per year, although a first-year discount of $299 is available that is good until December 31, 2011, and a 30-day free trial period. To register, users go to the Dental Sharing website and fill out the registration form; registration requires the subscriber’s name, dental practice name, address, phone number, and email address.

Users can sign up as an individual, a network (such as a specialist working with 15 dentists in a referral network), or through one of Dental Sharing’s alliances, such as the company’s new relationship with Suni Medical Imaging, announced last month. The company is now working to create similar partnerships with other imaging equipment vendors, according to Bonanno.

“What our relationship with Suni and other imaging companies allows us to do is create larger networks,” he said. “We have allowed Suni to embed our system in their software. So a Suni client signs up, pays the fee, and they have on their desktop a ‘share’ button.”

More sharing, with a twist

RecordLinc is taking a slightly different approach to digital data sharing for dentists, adding a professional social component that the developers say sets the service apart.

The company was actually founded seven years ago by Gregory Burnett, DDS, an orthodontist practicing in Los Gatos, CA; William Bohannan, DDS, MD, an oral surgeon practicing in San Jose and Burlingame, CA; Travis Rodgers, an entrepreneur with nearly two decades of experience working with software and technology firms; and Joe Rodgers, who has spent the last 15 years doing venture investing in prepublic companies that are focused on telecommunications, Internet, and software.

The company resurfaced earlier this year with an electronic dental record system for patient file sharing, dentist-to-dentist communication, and dental practitioner collaboration. RecordLinc enables dental specialists, patient coordinators, and dental labs to share and collaborate on patients’ files through a HIPAA-compliant application. The software can be accessed anywhere with an Internet connection and enables real-time discussions and patient file sharing, according to the company.

Registered users can also do the following using RecordLinc:
Add colleagues to patient files that they create
Transfer ownership of a patient file to another user
Create preset and custom montages for other colleagues to view and print
Receive online notification for patient records that have been updated by participating dental professionals
Backup patient images offsite
Share patient images in real-time
Write real-time messages to other RecordLinc users
Receive messages and letters from other RecordLinc users
View and print images added to the patient file by associated colleagues
Search for other colleagues that use RecordLinc
The system already integrates with several practice management systems, including Dentrix, EagleSoft, IMS, and Windent OMS, according to Travis. Other services, such as BrightSquid and eDossea, allow users to share patient records but are not integrated with practice management systems and don’t have the social collaboration aspect to them, Travis noted.

“Our software tool combines the collaboration of an experts exchange by utilizing the profile and networking components of LinkedIn and Facebook, creating a community specifically designed for dental practitioners,” Travis said. “We are integrating all of the major practice management and imaging systems to provide a common language to exchange records between dentists. It’s social media meets HIPAA compliance.”

The next phase of the product rollout will include the ability to collect patient information prior to when they come into the office, then the ability for patients to have a single point of record and access to their file.

“A ‘living patient file,’ for when they go from one doctor to the next,” Travis said.

The RecordLinc service, which is also subscription-based, is expected to cost $160 per month, although it is currently free to early adopters, which the company is actively seeking, Travis noted. It has already been beta-tested and received very positive feedback, he added.

“We just want to build the best tool out there,” he said. “We have purposely held back because releasing a product until it’s fully developed and working end to end can backfire. It’s all about integrating and making it easier for dentists to share data.”

More U.S. dentists are incorporating electronic dental records (EDRs) into their practices, creating new opportunities to utilize EDR data in evidence-based research projects, according to a new study in the Journal of the American Dental Association (January 1, 2013, Vol. 144:1, pp. 49-58).

However, relatively little is known so far about what clinical patient information practitioners keep on their computers and how they utilize it.

“A key consideration in determining whether it is feasible to reuse dental patient record data for practice-based research is the type and proportion of clinical information that practitioners manage electronically,” wrote the study authors, who are from multiple U.S. academic and research centers.

To address this question, they conducted a Web-based survey of 991 U.S. and Scandinavian practitioner-investigators (P-Is) in the Dental Practice-Based Research Network (DPBRN) to determine how much they use computers to manage clinical information; the type of patient information they keep on paper, on a computer, or both; and their willingness to reuse EDR data for research.

“What was surprising was that such a high percentage had computers chairside.”
— Titus Schleyer, DMD, PhD, Center for
Dental Informatics
The DPBRN practices included in the survey were located in Alabama, Mississippi, Florida, Georgia, Minnesota, and Oregon, as well as in the Scandinavian countries of Denmark, Norway, and Sweden.

“We’ve done these studies for many years, looking at EDRs and where computing [in dentistry] is going,” said lead author Titus Schleyer, DMD, PhD, associate professor and director of the Center for Dental Informatics at the University of Pittsburgh School of Dental Medicine. “So when we had the chance to do this with the DPBRN, we jumped at it. It is a really good way to get studies done at a much lower cost and effort.”

The survey sent to the DPBRN practices posed a series of questions addressing whether participants used a computer to manage clinical or administrative patient data and, if not, how likely they were to do so within the next two years. Participants were also asked whether they stored information for 13 clinical information categories on paper, a computer, or both. Finally, they were asked whether they would be willing to reuse data from their EDRs for research and use electronic, rather than paper, forms to collect research data.

A total of 729 P-Is (73.6%) responded to the survey. The results were reported separately for solo private practice, group private practice, HealthPartners Dental Group, Permanente Dental Associates, and other practice types by region, according to the researchers, “because both the region and the organizational structure influence adoption of EDRs significantly.”

Adoption on the rise

Overall, the findings were consistent with previous research (Journal of the American Medical Informatics Association, May/June 2006, Vol. 13:3, pp. 344-352), Dr. Schleyer noted, although there were some encouraging trends with regard to adoption of computers and EDRs in the U.S.

“Looking at the results, more than 70% of the participants have chairside computing, and 100% are likely to have a computer in their office,” he said. “What was surprising was that such a high percentage had computers chairside, and even more surprising was how many are paperless.”

In 2004 and 2005, the Center for Dental Informatics surveyed a national random sample of general dentists in the U.S. and found that 25% used a computer at chairside and 1.8% were completely paperless. In this new study, 74% of solo practitioners and 79% of group practitioners used a computer at chairside, and 15% managed all patient information on a computer, representing “a high penetration of clinical computing,” according to the study authors.

Among U.S. participants, 30.5% of solo practitioners and 58.3% of group practitioners who reported not using a computer clinically said they were “very likely” or “somewhat likely” to start doing so within the next two years.

The survey also found that four major EDR systems are used in 71% of U.S. practices that employ computers: Dentrix (Henry Schein), Eaglesoft (Patterson), SoftDent (Carestream), and PracticeWorks (Carestream).

With regard to the distribution of patient information stored on computers and on paper, Dr. Schleyer and his co-authors found that U.S. practitioners stored appointments, treatment plans, completed treatment, and images most frequently, and periodontal charting, diagnosis, medical history, progress notes, and chief complaint least frequently. But nearly 100% of the Scandinavian practitioners stored all information electronically.

“Whether to adopt an EDR is still a practice-by-practice, very individualized discussion,” Dr. Schleyer said. “But the general trend over the past few years, with the government investing in health IT, all of these things have an effect. And if you look at the computing adoption curve in the study, I think we will see a very rapid rise in adoption of EDRs in the next few years.”

Reusing clinical data

The jury is still out on the question of reusing EDR data for clinical research, however.

“The response patterns regarding reusing data from EDRs and using electronic forms for research reflect uncertainty among P-Is,” the researchers wrote. The fact that only 44.4% of U.S. solo and group practitioners were willing to reuse EDR data for research “could be viewed with concern,” they added.

“The idea there was whether the practitioners would be willing to use the data for quality improvement and research, and judging from the survey, people weren’t quite so sure about that,” Dr. Schleyer said. “But it was good to see that almost 50% said they would. There is a lot of knowledge and wisdom in the data, and we need to find good ways to mine that data.”

The findings of this study correspond with where medical electronic health records (EHRs) are going as well, noted Mike Uretz, executive director of the EHR Group and editor-in-chief of DentalSoftwareAdvisor.com.

“The past couple of years, EHR developers have been integrating more robust tools for the capture, aggregation, and analysis of patient visit data for purposes of research and quality improvement,” he told DrBicuspid.com. “In fact, this is a long-term goal of the federal meaningful use program: to get more population patient data to analyze various clinical measures for quality improvement and ultimately improving outcomes.”