There’s no question that significant time, money, and hard work are required to run a successful dental practice. Not only must you maintain a suite of expensive equipment, you have recordkeeping requirements that can be substantial as well. Efficiency is an absolute necessity if you are to make your dental practice profitable for the long term.
Online forms have helped dentists improve the efficiency of their practices because of the time and resources they save. In fact, you can use form software to provide a number of online forms to your patients, making their experience more convenient and allowing your staff to focus more fully on the provision of dental services rather than administrative tasks.
Forms to Complete Online or Bring In
Dentists, particularly those with older patients who may not be comfortable with completing and submitting forms online, can still offer online forms that can be printed out and completed by hand at a patient’s convenience. That way, a patient can still complete forms at home and not have to worry about doing so in the office.
Most people today, however, are comfortable submitting online forms as long as they know they are handled with utmost attention to online security. That’s why it’s important for your website to make its security credentials clear and to work with your web designer to ensure that all correspondence through your site is secure.
New Patient Registration
Filling out new patient registration forms in the office isn’t an appealing prospect. It’s not easy to fill out forms on a clipboard on your lap, particularly if you’re a parent trying to mind a young child at the same time. When you use your online form software to create your new patient registration forms and allow new patients to complete them online, the experience will be better for everyone. Your staff will have the information in their IT systems in advance, there are no worries about ambiguous handwriting, and patients can take the time they need to get the information right.
Dental Health History
It’s not easy to remember your entire dental health history and record it on a form in the office, particularly if you have some degree of dental anxiety. Online forms for dental health history can help because patients can take their time completing them, so they’re less likely to forget important procedures they’ve had or medical conditions that may affect their dental care choices.
Online form software that automatically takes the information submitted on electronic forms and enters it into the appropriate recordkeeping or database software can save your staff a tremendous amount of time and effort.
HIPAA Forms
Complying with the HIPAA privacy rules generally requires that patients complete a handful of critical forms. They’ll need to attest that they have seen and read the Notice of Privacy Practices, and complete an Authorization Form if their private health information may be released for reasons other than routine disclosure (such as those related to treatment or payment).
If situations arise in your practice that may require special authorization to share private health information, you’ll need to offer patients an authorization form to read and sign. While a Patient Consent Form isn’t necessarily required by HIPAA, many practices have them anyway for protection should a privacy rights complaint arise. Electronic signature of HIPAA forms is acceptable as long as security and other requirements are met.
Customized, Secure, Efficient
Online forms can offer your dental practice tremendous efficiency gains over the use of traditional paper forms. Not only can data entry requirements be cut significantly, accuracy will improve, and patients will avoid having to fill out forms in the waiting room. The right online form software will allow you to make customized, aesthetically pleasing, secure forms that are easy to access and submit right over your practice website.
PerfectApps is a form creation software designed so that non-programmers can create fully customized online forms without having to know how to program. It’s easy to create forms with the right colors, fonts, logos, and other brand identifiers you use for your practice and, if you want, you can create electronic forms that look exactly like the paper forms your patients are used to. PerfectApps automatically integrates with web forms, so collecting information from them is seamless and exact. We encourage you to watch the PerfectApps demo video to see for yourself how online forms can transform the way you do business, improving it in every way.
