Dental Industry Wide Focus

Dental Industry Wide Focus

How Quickly Can You Accurately Identify a High Needs Patient? Is This Important for Today’s Busy Dental Practices?

Release previously tied up precious time in your practice diary; critically for the betterment of yours and your patient’s wellbeing. AssistDent allows you more time to communicate the benefits of maintaining good oral health to your patients and thus see an increase in treatment uptake and your course of treatment recommendations.

Using AssistDent in your practice will enable your clinical team to spend less time identifying a high needs patient and more time educating them on the recommended course of treatment, giving them the reassurance of knowing that you are embarking on a joint journey to improve their oral health.

Creating more time for you, the clinician, AssistDent provides the evidence to underpin a step-change in behavioural habits for high needs patients. Increasing the time and quality of communication that is vital for an ethically driven commercially successful practice.

Using AssistDent to analyse patient radiographs incurs minimal expense and can be used as an add-on to already present software to improve clinical diagnosis capabilities and maximise existing assets.

Proven Clinical Benefits and What This Means For Dental Practices – Timely Reversible Decay

Using AssistDent in your practice will enable your clinical team to more quickly and accurately assess patients’ oral health. Peer-reviewed research[1] shows that dentists miss around 30-40% of early enamel decay and proves that AssistDent enables clinicians to identify more early enamel proximal caries. Diagnosing previously unidentified disease means you can offer an improved oral health patient pathway that is demonstrable and ethical. For more details: CLICK HERE

[1]BDJ ADEPT Study Peer Reviewed Research

Together Everyone Achieves More

Reversible Decay Management Becomes a Viable, Essential and Ethical Part of the Patient Oral Health Journey with AssistDent

First and foremost, it has a positive impact on your patients’ oral health.
Increased patient satisfaction.
Broader scope for clinical choices and staged treatment, in line with ‘Avoidance of Doubt’, with auditable evidence to back up recommended patient pathways.
Increased practice revenues, given the extra time for dentist-patient communication: Do you want whiter teeth? How can we help you cosmetically as well as clinically?
De-risking of the expensive cosmetic treatments that can lead to legal cases. With AssistDent, you can identify early decay – reversible and remedial decay – and proactively address it, thereby negating unnecessary complex and expensive treatments.
Objective, demonstrable, evidence from AssistDent empowers the clinician as well as the patient. Perception is key; as a dentist, you will no longer be the gatekeeper who seems to be judging the patient. It becomes a shared journey, with a mutual delegation of responsibility between dentist and patient.
Ultimately, with agreed actions and treatment protocols in place, results in improved oral health care for the patient and means that you may be better positioned to offer complex treatment on the NHS, further improving high needs patients’ oral health while also increasing patient satisfaction. All of this with supporting and auditable evidence courtesy of AssistDent.

Improved Oral Health | Increased Patient Satisfaction | Greater Clinical Choice | Increased Practice Revenue | Legal Peace of Mind | Happy Practice

How Do You Normally Identify a High Needs Patient?

Historically, diagnosing a high needs patient would often be a judgement call on the part of the dentist.

Scrutinising the patient’s diet sheet, their oral health, measuring the decay, charting restorations.

Traditional radiograph analysis involves taking two bitewings for each patient.

You then analyse and study each radiograph to detect visible abnormalities.

Enamel-only inter-proximal lesions are difficult to detect in radiographs with typically only 40% detected in chairside conditions. AssistDent increases the detection rate to 75% [1]

For a full day of new patient appointments, this means you must study and analyse around 20 radiographs, applying a consistent level of focused concentration to ensure accuracy, as there is no margin for error.

Naturally this creates massive pressure on a Dentist, for a number of reasons; it has a major impact on the patient journey and it takes time to do it properly which affects your recommended treatment pathway. This all changes with AssistDent.

The Process with AssistDent – Empowering your Patient to take Responsibility

Viewing the patient radiograph using AssistDent, you receive a diagnosis of early enamel inter-proximal caries within about eight seconds. Clinical studies have proven that, using AssistDent, clinicians find more early enamel inter-proximal caries. If a radiograph shows regions of interest that it has detected with E1/E2 carious lesions then you will have rapidly and confidently identified a high needs patient. These are the lesions that can come and go, the ones that you can heal: meaning true preventive dentistry once you have the AI tools and the time to talk to patients about their responsibility for their own oral health. Identifying these hard to diagnose caries can now have a positive impact on the treatments you offer. Providing a patient with additional oral health hygiene services and remineralisation products can improve both the longevity of your clinical work while increasing patient satisfaction.