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Road to Recovery: Strategies for Reopening Your Practice

Posted July 16, 2020 by Beth

Road to Recovery : Strategies for Reopening Your Dental Practice

Patient health has always been your primary goal. As you reopen your dental practice for nonemergency procedures, you are likely to expand safety precautions for your staff and yourself. The American Dental Association (ADA) has issued useful guidelines to consider when reopening your practice. Along with these critical clinical and procedural guidelines for public health, you may also benefit from strategies to prioritize your practice’s operational health. XLDent would like to offer a few essential tips for reopening and remind you that we are here to support you. Your satisfaction continues to be our priority.

 

Clinical Charting Considerations

Due to the delays in routine care that patients endured during COVID quarantining, the need for professional maintenance in dental care may be higher than during a more typical season. Patients may have also had less self-maintenance and be more prone to increased bruxism due to increased stress during the challenges of last spring.

Electronic Dental Record systems that provide paperless charting like XLDent can be a valuable part of your reopening workflow. They allow you to customize your workflow and digitize your forms without any paper. XLDent’s “Ink on Chart” tool enables you to make quick notes, educate your patient, and engage them in their dental health without any extra tools or contamination points. 

 

Preparing your Dental Practice  

Given our current knowledge of the transmission of Coronavirus, dentists are likely to reassess and optimize their use of Personal Protection Equipment, especially where the risk of airborne droplet transmission becomes the most extreme. The ADA has recommended that you consider having all of your staff complete OSHA Infection Control Training. The ADA has also suggested that practices provide multiple hand-sanitizing stations in the waiting area and consistently clean and restock bathrooms with soap and paper towels. Supporting hygiene for employees and patients is a crucial element to the ADA’s advice for reopening practices

 

Team Communication

Maintaining reliable communication can be a challenge for the reopening dental office. Many practices will have a dispersed team, with some of the staff onsite and others working from home. Investments in tools like XLDent Interoffice Communication pay for themselves as they simplify instant messaging. For example, XLDent Interoffice Communication allows you to easily send messages to specific people, groups of people, or even each member of your staff. Efficient dental office communication will help you keep in touch even when social distancing is a part of your reopening strategy. XLNotify is compatible with all Dental Practice Management systems, and you do not need to do an entire implementation of XLDent to get started using this tool as part of your safety protocols.

 

Consistent Messaging

No matter what policies and procedures your practice has decided upon, keeping patients informed means providing consistent messaging in all your communications. For example, the sign on the door should match the office hold message. The Coronavirus procedures on your website should match the messaging on your social media accounts.

 

Tools like XLDent’s Secure Mail allow you to keep in touch with patients using a simple to install, HIPAA-compliant solution that secures sensitive patient information. SecureMail is a cost-effective, cloud-based subscription service. This service is available to any practice, regardless of the dental practice management system that they choose to use.

 

Another strategy for patient communication and engagement are patient portals like XLPortal from XLDent. This web-based solution allows you to conveniently build relationships and improve your efficiency when patient demand for online tools is high. XLPortal is directly integrated with your XLDent dental practice management system to provide your patients with electronic dental record information in real-time.

 

XLDent’s Continued Commitment 

At XLDent, our mission to enhance the standard of patient care for improved patient outcomes remains steadfast during this trying time. We continue to design all of our products and eSolutions around the customizable workflows dentists need, even as those challenges change. Our efficient mobile and tablet friendly solutions will continue to cater to the patient/doctor experience. We will always provide seamless integration, training, and staff education to make your practice the most profitable and successful that it can be.

 

Posted in: Dental Practice Management Software, Dental Technology, Dental Web-based Solutions, Electronic Dental Records, Re-opening, Leave a comment/ No Comments »
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SCDI Meetings in Denver

Posted October 19, 2016 by Dawn

The second meeting of the ADA Standards Committee on Dental Informatics this year was held at the Hyatt Regency Hotel in Denver, Colorado. XLDent continues to participate in Working Group 11.1 Standard Architecture and Working Group 11.9 Core Reference Data. This year we were invited to participate as a voting member and happily accepted the invitation.

Our working group Chairman, Dr. Mark Diehl, unexpectedly passed away last April. Dr. Diehl’s most notable accomplishment is the work he had done to produce numerous standards and technical reports related to the architecture, data structure, and open implementation of the electronic health record. Most notable are the following:

  • ANSI/ADA Standard No. 1000,Standard Clinical Data Architecture (2001, revised 2010);
  • ANSI/ADA Standard No. 1027, Implementation Guide for Standard No. 1000 (2010);
  • ANSI/ADA Standard No. 1039, Clinical Conceptual Data Model (2006);
  • ANSI/ADA Standard No. 1067, Electronic Dental Record System Standard Functional Requirements (2013).

He was recognized as an expert in the science of clinical informatics and I was proud to have served with him on WG 11.1, 11.9; and, the recent progress we made on ADA Technical Report No. 1091 for Cloud Computing and Data Storage. Dr. Diehl will be missed and we will do our best to continue the work he started. During the Plenary session today, Dr. Amit Acharya was nominated as Chairman of the Subcommittee on Clinical Informatics and Dr. Terry O’Toole as Vice Chairman.

During our session, WG 11.9, which will define a core set of data to support the Implementation Guide for TR 1067, focused on narrowing the scope of the project because the group was not able to make much progress given the expanse of the undertaking. Dr. Mark Jurkovich proposed that we focus on the exchange of information based on current standards that already exist (i.e. X12 835, 837D, 270, etc.) and are successfully in practice to exchandawn-no-backgroundge objects of data, versus focusing on the monumental scope of interoperability. It was concluded that the working group will take a “bottom-up” approach in that we will start with a focus on establishing a standard core set of data that is typically exchanged during a referral between a general dentist and a specialist, for example. All of this will be done with the ultimate goal of achieving interoperability at some point in the future. Keeping this ultimate goal in our sights means that we will need to decide on the standard document or transport mechanism (i.e. HL7 CCDA format) so that we can begin populating it with this first core dataset.

With these meetings wrapping up, I’m on my way to meet up with Duane at the ADMC meeting….and tomorrow the ADA 2016 Exhibit Hall opens!

Posted in: Dental Conference, Dental Software, Electronic Dental Records, XLDent Company, Leave a comment/ No Comments »
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See You There! 2015 Chicago Midwinter Meeting!

Posted February 16, 2015 by Dawn

This year at the Chicago Midwinter meeting, XLDent will again be participating in ADA Standards Committee meetings.  As co-chair of the 11.1 working group, we hope to make progress on moving the Electronic Dental Record standard forward.  As it stands now, dentists participating in the EHR Medicare/Medicaid Incentive Program have to demonstrate Meaningful Use based largely on medically relevant criteria.

The workflow disruption and additional labor time required to capture information that is not mission critical in the delivery of dental care has made the prospect of receiving incentive dollars less and less attractive.  We are working hard to establish a meaningful standard for the dental specialties.

For the dental patient care industry, this translates into implementation of a standard through which electronic information about a patient’s treatment and need for treatment will be shared between specialties and primary care givers.  This prospect is very exciting for XLDent, as our mission focuses on creating efficiencies for our clients and on enhancing the standard of patient care for improved patient outcomes.

Posted in: Dental Practice Management Software, Dental Technology, Electronic Dental Records,
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XLDent Attends DQA Meeting

Posted December 6, 2013 by Dawn

Today XLDent is at ADA Headquarters in Chicago, IL attending the Dental Quality Alliance (DQA) meeting.  The DQA’s mission is to advance the field of performance measurement to improve oral health, patient care, and safety through a consensus building process.

XLDent was invited to attend the DQA meeting to provide its perspective on where XLDent and the industry are positioned regarding use of diagnostic codes and implementing automated reports for quality measures.  All-in-all it was a very informative meeting and the group was very appreciative of our attendance.   The meeting was a great opportunity for us to gain insight on how we might develop XLDent’s Electronic Dental Health Record with performance measurements in mind.

Posted in: Dental Practice Management Software, Dental Technology, Electronic Dental Records, XLDent Company,
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Blog from ADMC

Posted October 31, 2013 by Andre M

XLDent is attending the ADMC (The Academy of Dental Management Consultants) in conjunction with the ADA meeting in New Orleans.  This is a group of dental consultants from all over the USA that come together for continuing education. Many of them came by excited about XLDent’s mobile wireless technology and our electronic dental record. They also like how the workflow makes running a practice much easier.  We want to thank ADMC for your inspiration, commitment to excellence and looking for the best possible software for your clients.

Posted in: Dental Practice Management Software, Dental Technology, Dental Web-based Solutions, Electronic Dental Records, XLDent Company,
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