For years it’s been no question: dentistry has lagged far behind the rest of medicine in terms of innovation and technological advancement.
Some estimate that dental offices are an average of 10-15 years behind the standard medical practice. However, although many dental offices continue to resist change, there are leaders in the dental space that are not only catching up, but in some areas surpassing medical practices in innovations and technological adoption. This digital transformation is incredibly exciting from a tech perspective but is also promising from a patient perspective, as their dental experiences are improving dramatically.
Playing Catch-Up
The digital revolution came slowly to dentistry, but leaders in dentistry are aggressively closing the gap between themselves and other medical practice leaders in terms of digitizing dental records/scans as well as the CRM and automated/digital communication process. The move to digital has created huge convenience for both providers and patients. On the patient and financial records front, providers and staff find the process more efficient. Notes can be taken quickly and patient paperwork and large attachments captured from an iPhone or Tablet, reducing administrative time and increasing time with patients. Referencing a patient’s history is seamless and reliable. From a CRM perspective, leading dental providers are now offering scheduling capabilities, appointment reminders, and electric billing that are commonplace in most medical practices today. Patients can now schedule, reschedule, and pay for visits without any face-to-face interaction, if that is their preference. They can also obtain copies of their records and scans when they need them.
Where Dentistry Is Pulling Ahead
While the dental profession has largely been playing catch up, there are several spaces that dental innovation has outpaced medicine. Leaders, like those at Sage Dental, are leveraging technology to improve not only the patient experience, but patient safety as well.
For the patient experience, dental innovation is happening at an infrastructure level and revolves around diagnostics, remote monitoring, and billing. Patient convenience is at the heart of it all.
Diagnostics: Patients want to know that they are receiving the best, most accurate care, but diagnostic disparities between dental providers can undermine patient confidence. To combat this, dentists are leveraging AI support tools during appointments to reassure patients, as researchers have found that AI can improve diagnostic accuracy by almost 95%. While AI-powered diagnostic tools are still being debated and researched for medical application, dentists have taken the plunge and are providing valuable diagnostic insights for dentists during their consultations with technology.
Remote Monitoring: Teledentistry exploded during the pandemic. Despite the misconception that dentists are unable to do their jobs over the phone, it has become an integral part of dental care. The most significant use-case for teledentistry is orthodonture monitoring. If a grade-school age patient has braces and needs regular check-ins to confirm the teeth are moving and/or ready for an adjustment, with remote monitoring, orthodontists can cut the average 22 appointments to less than eight—saving patients (and their parents) time and effort getting to the office. Other applications include an initial screening for a dental issue that’s just come up, to save patients the commute and any potential exposure to COVID-19 by coming into the office.
Billing: Billing is perhaps the most frustrating experience for patients. It is also where medicine and dentistry differ the most. In medicine, patients don’t expect to know how much a visit or procedure will cost until after they’ve received care, whereas in dentistry, patients prefer to receive a price estimate upfront. Understanding this patient need, Sage Dental developed a platform that synthesizes thousands of contracts, aggregating huge data sets to create an intelligent engine that provides estimates with over 90% accuracy, up from 47% accuracy with previous methods. Leaders that implement systems like this one are helping to eliminate surprise billing in dentistry and significantly increasing patient satisfaction as a result.
Cybersecurity: Patients’ safety is another area where leaders in dentistry are moving ahead of medicine, and it’s an area that needs everyone’s immediate attention. Stories on ransomware and viruses are often shown on broadcast news stations, but not enough is being done across the average medical practice to combat these dangers. Leaders in dentistry on the other hand are actively engaged in preventative measures. From end-user awareness, to filtering systems, to fake-phishing email practice drills, dentists are taking the security of their patients’ private and financial information seriously. They are implementing strategies that stop the ransomware before it ever gets in and have robust security plans in place in case the worst should happen.
In some ways, dentistry has resisted change for several decades, however, that no longer holds true across the board. Leaders in dentistry are making changes to catch up to their peers in other branches of medicine and observers can clearly see the parallel conveniences being offered by both medical and dental IT. In an exciting turn of events, dental innovations have ramped up the pace to lap their medical counterparts, providing better patient experiences and safety measures than ever before. In the coming years, these innovative practices and adoptions will continue and leaders in dentistry will deliver on even more significant upgrades to improve the healthcare experience of their patients.