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Private and NHS Dental Practice

Private and NHS Dental Practice

Managing a Mixed Practice: AssistDent Creates the Space and Time for Profitable and Ethical Dentistry

Naturally, you want to be the best performing NHS Practice that you can be.  Of course, this means ethically managing your UDA’s with control:  Focusing taxpayers’ money on the areas where it’s really needed and supporting the patients who most require clinical help and oral health education.  Treating both NHS and private patients and managing lists is a time-consuming, often morale-sapping, balancing act, which requires efficient, ethical treatment and education to build patient’s trust encouraging them to commit to your recommendations.  This takes time – a dentist’s most precious resource. 

What Could More Time Mean For Your Practice?

Increased private income through having more time for communication with patients, giving them the confidence to proceed with high level courses of private treatment – converting interest into uptake.  Adding new treatment pathways to high end courses of treatment while reducing the risk of problems with treatment and enabling the patient to begin their journey sooner.  Communicating your passion for preventive dental health, while balancing day-to-day practice demands, is difficult.  More time for communication is vital, both ethically and for a commercially successful practice.

Together Everyone Achieves More

What Else Could AssistDent Give You and Your patient? 

Using AssistDent, your clinical team will take less time to identify a high needs patient – just eight seconds for an auditable radiograph diagnosis.  Meaning more time available to help educate patients on recommended courses of treatment and – critically – behavioural change.  Surgery time can be allocated and prioritised according to the patient’s needs and dentists are enabled to schedule recalls appropriately, to ensure the practice achieves NHS UDA targets efficiently and consistently.  Using AssistDent to analyse patient radiographs involves minimal expense as an add-on, to help maximise clinical diagnosis capabilities and makes the most of your practice assets. 

Proven Clinical Benefits and What This Means in Practice – Reversible and Remedial Decay Identified

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 Dental Clinicians to identify more early enamel proximal caries.  Diagnosing previously unidentified disease is a significant factor and means that you can offer an improved oral health patient pathway which is demonstrable, reliable and ethical.  For more details: CLICK HERE

[1]BDJ ADEPT Study Peer Reviewed Research

Reversible Decay Management Becomes an Essential Ethical and Viable Part of the NHS Patient Oral Healthcare Journey with the Highly Acclaimed AI Solution; AssistDent

  • First and foremost, it has a positive impact on patients’ oral health and wellbeing.
  • Focus NHS resources appropriately and ethically.
  • De-Risk Practice Acquisitions – Audit/Monitored Neglect.
  • Reduce exposure to Vicarious Liability.
  • Assist with retention and wellbeing of Dentists via clear guidance. 
  • There is increased patient satisfaction and loyalty.
  • It provides a broader scope for clinical choices and staged treatment, in line with ‘Avoidance of Doubt’, backed up with auditable evidence on recommended patient pathways.
  • Opportunities to raise practice revenues, due to extra time created 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 DECAY – and remedy it, thereby avoiding unnecessary complex and expensive re-treatments. 
  • Professional responsibility assured with objective and 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 appears to be judging the patient.  It becomes a shared journey, with delegation of responsibilities to the patient.    

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

Exploring the Traditional System Process and its Impact on NHS Dentists

The challenge to identify the results of poor oral health is a long and time-consuming process and for many years has been a huge stressor. 

Typical indicators of oral health: a bleeding index, a diet sheet, plus context provided by a social history. 

These are all helpful elements in gaining a rounded view of a patient, as you, their dentist, help them embark on their treatment journey and begin to place more responsibility for their oral health on to them, naturally with the support of your practice team. 

Yet all dentists know that this is an inefficient use of time and expertise, as well as detrimental to the patient journey and the delegation of responsibility. 

This ultimately creates excessive paperwork, demoralising and demotivating the Dental Practice team, offering less than optimal patient communication and satisfaction.

The Process with AssistDent – Empowering your Patient to take Responsibility

Viewing the patient radiograph using AssistDent, you receive an analysis of potential 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 remedy: 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 previously hard to diagnose caries, can now have a significant 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 and their loyalty.

The BIG Benefits to Dentists

Demonstrate to your patients that prevention works.  You can show, visually and objectively, the decay lesions that will become cavities.  Over their patient journey, you can gain professional satisfaction in showing to patients how you have prevented, or reversed, their tooth decay.  Diagnosing more early enamel decay will improve the service you give your patients – the simple, demonstrable value in following a preventive journey.  Evidencing an improved capability to diagnose oral health conditions, it will help you to build a strong and trusted dentist-patient relationship.  Visual tools help support patient education, leading to higher uptake rates of recommended preventive and regenerative courses of treatment.  When offering high value treatment, you can include private hygiene services at the beginning and end of the course and focus on ongoing oral health maintenance as the centre of your relationship with the patient – with a demonstrable reason for doing so.  This increases treatment uptake, helping to ethically grow your practice income and reduce your risk from medico-legal claims. 

Meeting UDA targets is simplified as AssistDent helps ensure you are treating those patients who are in genuine need, and those who will take responsibility for their oral health – helping you to confidently offer the restorative work you would have undertaken, but with greater efficiency and a higher likelihood of success for the patient.  As a part of your practice mix, and with preventive dentistry at the forefront, your hygiene department will increase workflow – and practice profit – significantly.

The BIG Benefits for Patients

The Patient’s trust is paramount.  Being able to see how AI assisted diagnosis identifies more previously undiagnosed oral health pathologies, a patient will feel more confident about visiting you, their dentist.  Consequently and crucially, they acknowledge their own responsibility to follow recommended treatment plans.  AssistDent will empower your patient to understand why it is important to have great oral health and the service they have received from you, is likely to be more successful and long-lasting.  Patients will become responsible for their own preventive dental health journey when guided by you, the clinician who has more time for better communication.  

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

The Overall Benefits

Timesaving Efficacy

Saving time in surgery – with a radiograph analysis taking around eight seconds – will have a substantial cumulative beneficial effect, enabling more patients to be seen. 

Hugely beneficial for the dentist, this efficiency is particularly important for the practice, increasing capacity and leading to growth in turnover and greater profitability.  Time to balance meeting your UDA’s with private practice patients, all focused on a preventive journey for your patients which is profitable for you and for your practice.

Ethically Increased Patient Spend

Do you know of a patient who wants to spend money on something that could have been prevented?  Would you? 

The option of spending more now for longer term gain is a logical decision that most willingly commit to. 

AssistDent enables Dental Clinicians to show patients the benefits of a preventive approach to their oral health.  Evidencing the benefit of a preventive approach to dentistry (for both NHS and private patients, plus those that are a blend of the two) Clinicians using AssistDent AI can demonstrate the effects of a patient’s journey towards better oral health. 

Long term cost savings for the patient are a desirable reality, especially when there’s a requirement for a lifespan of potentially expensive cosmetic treatments. 

Meanwhile, Clinicians are empowered to increase their patients’ spend in the full knowledge that they are acting in the best interests of the patient.  All of this is backed up by auditable evidence.  Peace of mind for you, the dentist and for your patient.  

AssistDent helping you to realise your personal dreams and desires.  

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