Three Paperless Forms Options

Forms and signatures are one of the essentials of record keeping. How then can you have a paperless record? There are three methods to gather the information electronically and totally bypass the paper (paperless forms).

Tablet PC: A tablet PC is a mobile computer in the shape of a slate. The i-Pad is the best known tablet but others using Android are also available and work in the dental office.  Tablets use a touch screen that allows the user to operate the computer with a stylus (a digital pen) or a fingertip, instead of a keyboard or mouse. In other words the user can simply tap the screen to check off a box on a form, and sign directly on the computer screen.

Digital Signature Pad: The tablet PC represents the ultimate computerized version of the brown clipboard. However there is a second way to fill in forms that may be easier and less expensive to implement. That is to simply use existing desktop computers and a signature pad.

Online: The third way to gather data without paper is the Internet. A web based system puts the same digital forms as you would use on the tablet onto a web site. The patient could then fill out the forms from home or office. Once the forms are filled in the data could then transfer to the dental office and eventually to the patient’s electronic record. This is by far the best option however the office needs to have complete paperless records, a PMS that can accept web based information and a well designed web page.

So, paperless solutions transform old and slow paper processes into highly efficient streamlined work flows. What makes it all work is the proprietary software that drives both the Kiosk and Tablet devices. 

Practical Benefits of Paperless: Healthier for the team

Paperless dental office is much fun

We are paperless dental software developers

What we do is eliminate illegible paperwork and provide your clients with a fun interesting way to connect with your practice. When we are not working we like to surf the web, have fun and even more fun.

What Enlive Dental does?

Enlive Dental allows patients to check in for their appointment and fill out all the necessary information for their visit including check-ins, intake, consent forms and much more. Enlive Dental allows patients to connect with their dentist office’s online social media profiles. So they can ‘like”, “follow”, and “share” with their friends and family and give reviews and comments right from your waiting room.

·         Digitize dental forms

·         Integrate with most practice software

·         Automate your marketing automation

How it all works?

1)      Share any form directly to tablet or kiosk.

2)      Patient fills out and signs shared forms.

3)      Imports directly to practice software

Electronic patient records – digitize everything:

·         Check in

·         Medical history

·         Insurance forms

·         Consent forms

·         Treatment authorizations

·         Legal disclosures

·         Lab reports

·         Prescriptions

·         Vendor requests

·         Billing

·         Credit card authorization and much more

Contact us

ENLIVE DENTAL

23276 South Point Dr, #101

Laguna Hills, CA 92653

Toll Free: 800-942-0375

Fax: 714-975-8467

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Join our group to get more use and fun from your medical records.

Here is a compilation of paperless dentistry blogs and resources for our readers:

http://www.dentalproductsreport.com/dental/paperless-series-brought-you-patterson-dental

Stake your claim and get digging!

What I will be discussing here are just a few things offices are now doing — moving past paperless dentistry — to use more "business intelligence." Once a computer-based strategy is set up, it works automatically and pays dividends forever! And being "paperless" is not necessary to start. All we need to do is develop some new computer management techniques. Beyond the "gold rush" of paperless dentistry, there is still a "mother lode" to be mined in dental computing!

We can recommend paperlessdentistry.com as an unbiased, non-commercial website & seminars without any sponsors or products to sell. It's for dentists, by a dentist.

Here's several main thoughts of the latest post by Bruce A. Stephenson from Paperless Dentistry.

Computers have been a boon to dentistry, but using them optimally requires us to rethink some of our pen-and-paper habits. My great-grandfather learned to drive an automobile when he was 50. When things got tense during some of his early driving experiences, he tended to revert to his old horse-and-buggy techniques. His shouting, "Whoa damn it, whoa!" rather than pressing the brake pedal was an ineffective habit he had to relearn. He had the right idea but the wrong method. Similarly, our old paper-based management habits are equally inappropriate for computers. How we use reports is an example.

Reports: your untapped gold mine

›Who owes you money?
In our paper-based days, reports were often difficult to get. An aged accounts receivable from a ledger tray (remember those?) was a very labor-intensive and time-consuming job. As a result, we didn't do it very often. Unfortunately, many offices still do not run this valuable report often enough. In our office, we run it at least weekly and include it in our Wednesday "5 Minute Manager" meeting with our administrative staff. Because this report takes no human time or effort, we create several different views of this information. The "oldest balance first" and "largest balance first" views call our attention to accounts that are of greatest concern. Because we are looking at these weekly, the staff knows they will be asked about the steps they're taking to collect our fees. We can spot trends and take action much earlier than we could with only monthly reports. We can also take advantage of the "Hawthorne Effect" from industrial psychology that says just monitoring performance causes it to improve.

› Automatic patient recare reminders 
At our Wednesday meetings, we also look at projected production for each provider for the next month. If the hygiene schedule looks sparse, for example, we can dedicate some of our human resources to reactivating overdue patients. This is much more profitable than simply waiting for the bad news in the end-of-month report telling us what we should have done! We also have an automated recare system set up. It not only sends out recare reminders for patients due but without a prebooked appointment, it continues to send out follow-up cards every three months for a year unless an appointment is made. If there is still no appointment at the end of the year, it sends our patient the "dusty chart" letter. This letter says we are going to put their "dusty old chart" in storage if we don't hear from them. (Actually, all their "charts" are stored as electrons and they stay right in our computer system. But we do quit bugging them with recare postcards.) A follow-up recare system like this makes our computers work harder and uses data we already have. It is simple and very effective. It is not dependent on being paperless. It is just an example of modern computerized practice management.

› Referrals and marketing performance
At our "5 Minute Manager" meetings, we also look at our weekly, monthly, and yearly referral source reports. Are we doing enough, and in a timely enough manner, to thank those people who are referring new patients to our office? Has someone suddenly stopped referring to our office? If we don't know about it we can't fix it. Paper-based reports were valuable but difficult to maintain, especially if you wanted to know the total amount you produced from all the patients for each referral source. With computers, this information takes no effort to acquire. For practices that spend money on external marketing, it is imperative to closely monitor the results and reallocate spending to the most productive areas while discontinuing spending for those things that are not working. Not paperless, just sound modern management.

› Track your patients!
We also have a report we call "Where Are They Now?" We have the computer generate a list of all the patients who had initial exams 12 months ago. The report is configured to show their referral source, e-mail address, last appointment date and, most important, next appointment date. Of all the new patients who walk in our front doors, how many just keep walking right out the back doors? Are we getting better or worse at patient retention? Do we lose more patients referred by our external (costly) marketing when compared to our internal (free) marketing? We share this information with our entire staff, both to get their input for possible improvements but also to get the benefits of the Hawthorne Effect. We persistently nagged our staff for two years about the importance of collecting e-mail addresses, but with little success. But when we started sharing the information in this report with them every month, compliance increased from about 70 percent to virtually 100 percent! Information is power! And it's free!

› Newsletters and e-mail broadcasts
Like a lot of offices, we send out a patient newsletter "once in a while." As they require a fair amount of work to write, edit, print, and mail, newsletters tend not to happen as often as we would like. Recently, we've started supplementing them with "e-mail broadcasts," which are short, timely, much easier to do, and very inexpensive. The service we use charges about $20 for 1,500 e-mails, and reports back information such as wrong addresses. It also automatically removes the e-mail addresses from our list for the few patients who ask to be removed. An example where we could get the information out quickly and answer many questions before patients came back to the office is the recent changes in the American Heart Association recommendations for antibiotic premedication. (We also directed them to a link on our Web site where we posted the actual AHA article and invited them to have their physicians go there for the latest information directly from the source.)
We continue to send out the longer printed version of our newsletters and we recently had a "contest" that asked patients to identify baby pictures of our staff members. (Patients loved it!) Interestingly, when we sent the "contest" as an e-mail broadcast, we got almost triple the response — and virtually for free!

› E-confirmations
For the last few years we have used an e-mail confirmation service that automatically collects information from our computer about appointments, patients, and e-mail addresses. It then sends up to three e-mail confirmations automatically. We do absolutely no work. It costs about $200 per month — much less than the average cost of even one failed appointment. Because some of our patients do not yet have e-mail, we continue to mail appointment confirmation postcards to patients with prebooked hygiene appointments. Of course, this is also automatically handled by our computers, but postage and postcards cost money!