Dentrix Ascend Paves the Way for Better Patient Care

Everyone has days when it seems like managing a dental practice is akin to a challenging trek up a very steep mountain. After all, typical days are chock full of restoring patients’ oral health, along with a healthy dose of managing appointment cancellations, unpaid balances, and patient records. Multiple locations? Those same issues are even more demanding. But these challenges can be made easier—especially for multilocation practices—with a trio of solutions from Henry Schein One.

Scan Pile, Be Gone!

“Three seems to be the magic number—the minute you have 3 locations, it becomes just too much to try and juggle multiple software packages, and anything else that’s server-based,” said Jill Nesbitt of Optimize Dental Consulting. “When you’re no longer able to keep up with appointment cancellations or insurance, or when the scan pile for patient forms becomes overwhelming, Dentrix Ascend allows you to standardize workflows across all your locations. With Ascend, you can create multi-location and highly accurate reporting that can easily be outsourced—whether it’s for insurance, payroll, or even administrative tasks, such as digital patient forms.”

A centralized hub that enables efficient day-to-day practice management, Dentrix Ascend allows users to customize daily to-do lists, monitor business and financial metrics, submit and track insurance claims, create treatment plans, and access patient data across practice locations.

Best of all, this wealth of information can be accessed anywhere, at any time. The software enables 2-way text messaging with patients, online appointment scheduling and confirmation, digital billing statements, and online payment. Additionally, Dentrix Ascend eliminates paper consent forms—and the burgeoning scan pile that always accompanies them—and can be customized to automatically access the correct patient postop instructions and consent forms based on the procedure code that’s included.

Online Text to Pay

In addition to saving time for both dental staff as well as patients by digitizing and streamlining a host of administrative tasks, Dentrix Ascend can also significantly reduce practice costs by eliminating the need for outside billing agencies.

“We had a 100-location group that no longer wanted to use an outside billing company for printed billing statements,” explained Nesbitt. “What they really wanted was to have a simple text message sent to patients that allowed them to pay their bill online right from that text message. Dentrix Ascend enabled them to do that, and it saved the practice a lot of money because they no longer needed to pay the outside billing company. It also made the back and forth of patient communication about billing more efficient and easier for patients.”

Dentrix Ascend Detect AI

Powered and manufactured by VideaHealth, Dentrix Ascend Detect AI uses AI technology to scan x-rays for caries and bone loss. An easy-to-use system, Detect AI is integrated directly into the Dentrix and Dentrix Ascend imaging workflows, which means it’s on the same software platform and there’s no additional windows to open.

Nesbitt pointed out that many other systems require users to log in separately, enter patient names, and search for data while toggling back and forth between 2 software systems, a situation that can be an additional time burden and a drain on workflow efficiency. Instead, Detect AI is an all-in-one solution that runs on the Dentrix Ascend platform and uses unique AI algorithms to help clinicians, in conjunction with other data and symptoms, make a diagnosis, educate patients about treatment plans, and improve case acceptance and patient confidence in their diagnosis. The software instantly analyzes patient x-rays and highlights detected decay and interproximal radiographic bone level measurements in an easy-to-read format, serving as a second objective opinion that clinicians can use to help communicate their comprehensive diagnosis to patients.

“Detect AI is support for the doctor—it’s providing more data in addition to the x-rays themselves, which can enable more confident diagnoses,” Nesbitt explained. “It’s also very helpful for patient communication because patients can see the images and brightly colored boxes right before their eyes. Busy practices and clinicians don’t have time for training to learn yet another system; practices are hectic and we just need our systems to do the work for us. Detect AI works on the Dentrix Ascend platform, so there’s no toggling back and forth between systems and almost no learning curve.”

Dentrix Ascend Voice

In another nod toward making daily workflows easier despite the hectic pace many practices experience each day, Henry Schein One offers Voice powered by Bola AI. It uses AI technology, along with recording devices, to enable clinicians to verbally record clinical results into Dentrix Ascend’s cloud-based practice management software.

“Voice is really intended to save time,” Nesbitt explained. “During a perio exam, the clinician can simply call out the recession measurements and Voice will record the information into the patient’s chart.”

99.9% Accurate Transcriptions

Voice uses intuitive commands to record speech with 99.9% accuracy, eliminating the need to manually key in each number, thereby saving time and reducing the chance of potential errors associated with manual data entry. In addition to minimizing hand and wrist fatigue, the touchless recording reduces the need for infection control procedures which can be time-consuming for office staff. Voice screens out background noise for clearer recording, and the system transcribes dental terminology with ease.

The Bottom Line

“Everyone is looking for ways that technology can help automate and support clinicians, dental staff, and office teams,” Nesbitt said. “We don’t want our office teams on the phone with insurance companies, scanning in patient forms, or manually typing in perio notes. We want everyone to be working at the top of their license, talking with patients, helping them understand treatment plans, and doing their part to ensure a positive patient experience. This trio of products—Dentrix Ascend, Dentrix Ascend Detect AI, and Dentrix Ascend Voice—can certainly do that.”