How Canadian Dentists Can Transform Their Practices with Custom Dental Software

As patients return to dental offices after the pandemic, the pressure on the practices to successfully accommodate the increased workload grows – without sacrificing patient experiences.

Patients reportedly like technology and the convenience it can bring – and appreciate prompt digital communications and secure and accurate records. In fact, two out of three patients would consider switching to a dentist who uses more advanced technology.

Custom dental software enters the stage as a solution for facilitating dentists’ work, increasing efficiency, and improving patient experiences and outcomes. Let’s break down how its adoption has evolved over the past decades, how it can transform your practice, and when to opt for custom software instead of ready-made solutions.

A Brief History of Dental Software Adoption in Canada

Even a decade ago, paper charts were still widespread among Canadian dental practices despite their numerous downsides. After all, filling them out can take hours, they take up a lot of space, and they can be easily lost or destroyed.

Why weren’t dentists switching to digital systems? Reason number one: off-the-shelf systems for digital patient charts still took longer to fill out than their paper predecessors. Developing a custom system that would be more convenient was still prohibitively expensive for most dentist offices.

Since then, however, several more convenient off-the-shelf systems appeared. Software development costs, in their turn, declined, facilitating access to custom solutions.

A Look Back in Time: 1990s-2000s

Other processes like appointment scheduling and billing started tentatively getting digitized in the 1990s, but the adoption remained limited due to high software costs.

Although slow-going, dental software continued evolving throughout the 2000s, adding clinical features to its common functionality. In that decade, the Canadian government also started incentivizing dental practices to adopt software systems.

For instance, in 2000, the government announced the creation of Canada Health Infoway, a not-for-profit organization that is still around to this day. Its mission is to help healthcare professionals develop and implement digital health solutions.

The Current State of Dental Software Adoption in Canada

From the 2010s onward, a number of technologies integral to modern dental software emerged, such as:

• Cloud

• Video conferencing

• Low-code/no-code development

• Artificial intelligence and machine learning

Some of these technologies enabled teledentistry and digital dentistry. Others facilitated integrations and reduced the costs of software development solutions for dentist offices.

At the same time, new regulations cropped up to protect the security and privacy of patient data. They include, most notably, the PIPEDA across the country and provincial health privacy laws like Ontario’s Personal Health Information Protection Act (PHIPA).

6 Ways Custom Dental Software Can Transform Practices

The term “custom dental software” can refer to a variety of solutions, such as:

• Customer relationship management (CRM) systems

• Practice management systems

• Teledentistry platforms

• Patient and doctor portals

• Electronic health record (EHR) systems

Here’s how these solutions can help your practice become better.

Streamlined Workflow Integration

Custom dental software can be integrated with multiple other systems to streamline or automate tasks, such as sharing patient information securely. For example, you can incorporate it with diagnostic tools so that the patient’s CT scans get automatically added to the EHR system and shared with the patient.

By integrating it with systems you’re already using, a custom solution can be more easily adapted to your existing workflows than its off-the-shelf counterparts. For example, if you’re using a legacy billing solution, a custom practice management system can exchange data with it to automate billing requests and reminders.

Enhanced Patient Experience

Less than 40% of Canadians (excluding Quebec) access their health records digitally. Yet, 9 out of 10 healthcare professionals agree that improving patient record sharing will improve the quality of care and enhance patient experiences.

Making patient records securely accessible is only one way to improve patient experiences and outcomes, however. For instance, teledentistry solutions remove travel barriers to dental care, allowing more patients to seek it. One rural dental clinic in Alberta saw a 40% increase in consultations following the implementation of the teledentistry program.

In turn, dental practice management systems, CRMs, and patient portals allow dental offices to mitigate the risk of appointment mix-ups and facilitate onboarding and communication. Combined with AI-powered personalization, these systems can also help you offer more personalized care recommendations and treatment plans.

Improved Regulatory Compliance

Dentists, like other healthcare professionals, must hold on to patients’ records for years after their last visit. At the same time, patients have the right to get copies of those records, and you must share them with other dental offices if requested.

Enabling patients to exercise their rights – and fulfilling your legal obligations – can be labor-intensive if you have to do it manually. This is where dental record systems can come in to facilitate record retrieval and sharing, all while maintaining security and privacy.

Increased Operational Efficiency

Streamlining regulatory compliance, automating appointment scheduling and billing, and facilitating secure data sharing all allow you to do more with fewer resources. For example, custom software can optimize insurance claim submission and tracking with built-in support for the CDAnet and CDA ITRANS claims service.

Improving operational efficiency also allows you to reap multiple other benefits, including:

• Increased employee productivity

• Enhanced patient experience and care quality

• Reduced operational costs

• Increased profitability

Better Data Security and Privacy

Dental office or not, any for-profit organization that wants to collect and process personal data has to comply with the PIPEDA. But, of course, dental offices deal with highly sensitive health records. So, besides the PIPEDA, you have to ensure data security and privacy in line with applicable provincial laws, such as the Personal Health Information Act in Newfoundland and Labrador.

Custom software can be built with all these security and privacy requirements in mind, provided you find the right security specialists for your dental software development project. Ensuring data security and privacy, in turn, protects you from malicious attacks and subsequent reputational and financial losses.

Scalability for Growing Practices

Relying on manual processes is a recipe for bottlenecks when patients increase. And increase it may: the Canadian dental industry is showing a strong upward trend in output as it’s recovering from a pandemic-fueled decline.

Automation is key to sustaining the rising number of appointment requests and reminders, follow-ups, and billing volumes. With as many tasks automated as possible, your employees can focus on more value-adding tasks that require human touch.

While both custom and off-the-shelf solutions offer automation capabilities, opting for custom dental software eliminates the possibility of vendor lock-in. With the proper architectural choices, it can also be highly scalable – and you won’t be forced to move to more expensive plans as your practice grows.

Custom vs. Ready-Made Dental Software: Recommendations for Canadian Dental Practices

Of course, custom dental software development isn’t suitable for every dental practice out there. Its alternative – ready-made platforms typically distributed under the SaaS model – have their advantages, mostly in cost and implementation time.

On the other hand, custom dental software provides the ultimate control over the platform’s functionality, security, and compliance.

Let’s compare the two approaches:

How to Develop Custom Dental Software

As a custom software development partner with 20+ years of experience, we know the ins and outs of delivering custom dental IT solutions to Canadian practices. Here’s what to expect from it, based on our experience with 200+ projects.

Assessing Needs

First, zero in on the business problems your custom solution will address. To get a full picture of your needs, discuss the purpose and value of your future solution with both the top and middle management and end users.

As a result of this stage, you should have a clear idea of your solution’s concept and the business goals behind it. The latter can include automating certain tasks (e.g., appointment reminders) or improving patient experience, for instance.

Custom development projects often fail to achieve the stated goals if the client doesn’t assess their needs correctly. To avoid this scenario, ensure you have someone with technical expertise handling this stage – or consider hiring an IT consulting services provider.

Choosing a Partner

With the general concept fleshed out, it’s time to find a development partner to build your system. Before scouting for potential partners, however:

• Define your development budget and time constraints if there are any

• Decide whether you’ll need your partner to take care of your future maintenance needs

• Understand how the future solution will fit in with the rest of your IT infrastructure

• Determine where you’ll be looking for the partner (in Canada or abroad)

When browsing and comparing development companies, pay attention to their:

• Technology expertise

• Portfolio, references, and testimonials

• Experience with similar projects and the dental or healthcare industry

• Experience with building solutions for the Canadian market

• Understanding of your security and compliance requirements

• Communication during the pre-sale process (request for proposal)

Designing for Scalability

The dental software development partner will work closely with you to define specific requirements, which can be broadly divided into two categories:

• Functional: What the solution should do

• Non-functional: All other requirements regarding user experience, security, performance, compliance, etc.

Once the requirements are documented, the partner will move on to system design. During this process, software architects map out the solution architecture, and engineers flesh out the implementation details. The team also determines potential risks and how to address them.

Then, UI/UX designers create wireframes and mockups that will determine how your solution will look and how users will interact with it.

Development and Testing

This is the longest project phase, during which developers write the code based on the created system design and UI/UX design. They also implement all the integrations and security measures required.

Most testing takes place parallel to development to avoid costly reworking late in the project. To ensure product quality and reliability, the team conducts functionality, performance, security, and other tests. QA engineers also develop internal, regression, and user acceptance tests.

Based on the testing results, the development team addresses the revealed defects until the product meets all requirements.

Once your solution is ready to be deployed, your partner will roll it out to your infrastructure. After the deployment, you should also receive detailed documentation that:

• Describes the system’s functionality and operation features

• Outlines instructions for the maintenance team and other developers

Once your system is up and running, you’ll need to maintain and update it. That can include bug fixing, security and feature updates, and scalability adjustments. There are three ways you can go about it:

• Continue collaborating with the development partner

• Hire another company to maintain the system

• Mandate in-house specialists with maintenance

Final Thoughts

Navigating the rebounding Canadian dental market can pose substantial operational efficiency challenges to dental practices of all sizes. Custom dental software can be the key to overcoming this hurdle – all while improving patient care and experiences, security, and compliance.

However, developing custom dental software isn’t a task any development partner would be up to. To deliver a reliable solution, your development partner needs experience with the Canadian regulatory framework and the healthcare industry.

Integrio Systems has the said experience, as proven by our 20+ years in the Canadian market. Discover how we help private dentists adapt to changing market conditions by developing management software for producing custom orthodontics devices.