Introduction  

A Dental Services Clinic will have a wide variety of services for the patients which includes registration of the patient, booking of appointments, collection of Consents prior to treatment, complete record entry/updates of patient, X-Ray/dental scan reports, treatment procedure advise, follow up treatments, billing, payment processing, etc., Managing all these manually will be a very difficult task even for a small clinic with less than 50 patients on a daily visit.

However, with the abundance of technology availability, using Low Code platforms like Zoho Creator make the whole chain of operations relatively easier and allow the management and Dental practitioners to make a proactive mode of treatments and actions.

Challenges

Below listed points are some of the challenges we have in a Dental Clinic.

Long Registration Process

Given, the patient has to fill up lengthy application forms to register, which involves collecting demographic information along with medical specific details; filling them up manually will be time-consuming and cause the operation team to be busy in dealing with multiple patients at the same time.

Manual Consent Forms and Historical Reports Collection

Also, getting the consent from the patient involves filling out another form and Sign. If you get this form in a simple webform, the patient can simply tick the consent and can even Sign in the screen itself. The stored information can be a permanent record kept in his/her file.

Likewise, the periodic reports can be scanned and uploaded in the patient file and stored in the system. Even if the patient does not bring his old records, the storage can give the complete picture of the patient data since on boarded in the system.

Appointment Booking

Even at this information age, most of the clinics still maintain a paper/excel sheet to manage appointments. Any updates/reschedules/removals will cause further confusion, and the maintenance of the same will be a nightmare. By having a proper Appointment Booking form, we should be able to fill up fresh data for new patients who called for an appointment, and we will be able to auto populate the data for the registered patients in the system. Even we can link the Patient Record file in the appointment report itself for the doctors to view what was done before and others.

Along with Email/SMS/WhatsApp integration, the patient can be notified real time once the appointment is booked. Likewise, a reminder email/SMS/WhatsApp notification can be sent to the patient a day before their scheduled appointments. With specific reports like current day and next day appointments, the operations team can also manage the data and update/notify both patients and doctors quite easily.

Laboratory Reports and samples status

In most of the dental procedures, the dental service provider refers the patients to a specific lab for their reports to be done. In some of the cases, the labs which deal with the procedure, at times, make an incorrect procedure due to a wrong patient prescription. By unifying the data of the patients with the Laboratory department/company, where the relevant person accesses the prescription via a customer portal, it reduces the mistakes and improves accuracy. Even the doctors have the data view even before the patient arrives and can even let the lab to redo the procedures if the reports are not clear/incorrect.

Feedback of Patients

The final feedback of patients of the overall procedure and services of the clinic has to be captured for improving the service has to be made easy. Again, asking the paper form to fill up feedback may not be effective. 

How does Zoho Creator Low Code Platform Help here?

As you see, the above challenges are very much of basic nature if not taken seriously will cause severe issues for both the clinic, patient, and servicing doctors. Zoho Creator, a low code platform, will help in completely digitizing the operations in a very smooth manner. Some of the below features can be added advantages along with Zoho Creator application.

• Zoho Creator Customized application development allows you to have a quick development of forms, reports, and pages based on the need.

• Generation of QR code of Unique ID (UHID) of patients and scan the same UHID for multiple actions by Doctors, Front Desk and Lab technicians ensure accuracy and improve productivity. You can refer the link for generating QR Codes. 

• Integration of Finance applications like Zoho Books help in pushing the Billing actions easy to manage for accountants who do not have to worry about the application logic.

• Dedicated Profiles setup for Doctors, Patients, Technicians, and Operations team will ensure the subset of data is visible and  relevant to their roles. This is achieved by using the Customer Portal with simple configuration in Zoho Creator. For managing profiles, customer portals, you can refer this link

• Email Notifications and SMS/WhatsApp Integrations help real-time and scheduled alerting easy for application management team.

• Dashboards with Zoho Analytics Integration give us good insight of data for the Management Team

 

Conclusion

As the Low Code Zoho Creator application simplifies the operations of a clinic/hospital, digitalization will be very valuable for a long-term perspective.