Athena Consulting: Dental Practice Solutions

With the state of our world and global warming, the dental community needs to do their part. Athena Dental Consulting is going “green” with all its new start practices. Thanks to new technology, we can rid dental offices of many poisonous materials and tremendous amounts of paper.

When choosing your equipment you’ll find all kinds of marvelous options. Most important is discerning which equipment is necessary to the operation and success of the new practice – and which ones are expensive toys that won’t be utilized once the newness wears off.

Digital radiography is a “must have” these days because it exposes the patient to much less radiation than do traditional x-rays. This is a tremendous marketing tool for your practice, and your money is well spent on digital equipment. The educated public expects it. Digital x-rays are the first step to having electronic medical records. Our government has mandated that all physicians have electronic medical records within the next few years. I’ve heard dates of compliance being 2010 and 2014, but at any rate, we don’t have much time. Dental insurance is becoming more and more electronic driven in an effort to get rid of paper claims. I feel the government will follow and include dental records in their new mandate at some point in the near future.

Many doctors are requesting “paperless offices” and we call these “as paperless as possible” because there will always be areas in which we need paper, but the less of it needed, the better. Athena Dental Consulting has been doing green offices for the past three years and that’s the only way we do new starts these days.

There is wonderful dental practice software now available that allows for electronic dental records. All charting is done in the patient’s electronic chart as well as all doctor notes and treatment plans. This allows us to no longer need those bulky paper charts that are costly and take up large amounts of space. All patient forms such as health histories and consent forms can be scanned into their electronic dental chart.

We are now putting computers in every treatment room and the reasons are several. With digital radiographs, you can pull them up on the patient screen, enlarge them and allow the patient to see their problem areas. Also, intra oral cameras have become small and compact and many are mobile by using USB ports so they can be moved from room to room. We all agree that a picture speaks a thousand words, and the ability to see that broken tooth or large, fractured filling will help the patient gain trust in you quicker which leads to higher patient acceptance of the treatment plan presented. This one thing builds new practices quicker than anything else we have available to us.

By going green, not only do you save storage space for patient charts, you also save space in that you no longer require a darkroom. Say goodbye to poisonous developer and fixer and the worry over proper disposal of these chemicals.

Not only will you save space in your new office, your staff will be spending their time on more productive tasks rather than pulling and filing patient records and other patient paperwork. There’s nothing worse than wasting an hour looking for a “lost chart.”

Going green is the only way to go from now on when starting your new practice!