Here’s How You Can Use Technology To Improve Your Dental Practice

Finding ways and means to improve your dental practice is tricky. Overall, dentist methods only change gradually, so finding significant improvements in your business model and daily practices can be few and far between.

This could be about to change.

Thanks to various technological innovations, the way in which you practice dentistry has the potential to change considerably. These innovations are coming (and in some cases, have already arrived) whether you like it or not, so it is crucial to embrace the change and implement it into your dental practice. By being one of the early adopters of this technology, you will have the potential to overtake your competitors, expand your business and increase the number of patients you can help.

Here’s how you can use technology to improve your dental practice:

You never have to run low on dental supplies

Starting with the most fundamental uses first, it is critical to establish a cost-effective, efficient, and reliable supply chain. This equipment is what you build your practice upon, so finding a simple and inexpensive way to source everything from face masks to inspection tools and uniforms is paramount.

By using online dental equipment wholesalers like Kent Express, you can buy in bulk and avoid the headache of delivery delays, complications, and spiralling costs.

You can make medical records more detailed and efficient

Admin is the bane of any business, and it carries an added responsibility in a dental practice. A patient’s dental records are important to keep safe and secure, both for the patient’s privacy and the dentist’s ability to refer to them on demand.

By storing data on cloud-based software, your dental practice can ensure important medical records are kept safe while making them far easier to input, order, and retrieve than in physical form. Dentists can access them instantly, without needing to wait for the admin team to source them.

This has the potential to make your practice far more efficient and safeguarded from the threat of data theft.

Remote consultations cut down on wasted time 

Another useful innovation is the rise of remote consultations. The process is simple. Instead of travelling to your practice, patients can use their smartphones to video the trouble spot in their mouths and send it over to you – or simply do it on a video conferencing service.

While it can never provide the same level of accuracy, it can be useful for less urgent consultations and those with mild concerns about their teeth or gums. This creates time and space for the most serious patients to be attended to in person.

VR makes training more effective and, potentially, faster

The use of virtual reality and augmented reality technology in dentistry would have seemed far-fetched just a few years ago. While promising technologies, they have long been a gimmick in the gaming community and have never found use in other industries.

This is beginning to change.

In fact, virtual reality is already being adopted as a dentist training tool. By allowing trainees to practice on virtual patients, their learning curve can skyrocket without risking the health of a real person. As a result, training periods could be made shorter, granting you qualified dental staff at a faster rate.

Augmented reality can also be a powerful dentistry tool. By using 3D simulations of a tooth or mouth, a dentist can study and analyse the problem far more easily and quickly. The benefits of this technology do not need emphasising. It could change the way dentists perform even basic tasks and techniques and make your practice more efficient and successful as a result.