As a dentist, you know that patients play a vital role in promoting positive outcomes. Engaging your patients is key to helping them make informed decisions and accepting your recommended treatment plans. The more patients can see and understand their dental health, the more engaged they’re likely to be in your care.
Routine oral hygiene visits present the ideal opportunity to educate and engage patients. To support enhanced patient engagement and case acceptance, a growing number of practices are incorporating a digital workflow into regular hygiene appointments. For many practices, DEXIS provides a complete digital workflow solution that supports a collaborative approach to dental care between the clinician and the patient.
Engagement Starts with the Scan
The DEXIS digital workflow for hygiene visits begins with the DEXIS™ IS 3800W intraoral scanner and DEXIS IS ScanFlow, which work together to equip you with an effective oral hygiene assessment tool. Compact, lightweight, and portable, the IS 3800W is an easy-to-use intraoral scanner your hygienists can use at the start of each oral hygiene appointment to set you up for successful patient engagement.
In approximately two minutes, the IS 3800W captures both arches and the patient’s bite in a continuous, smooth pattern for viewing in the IS ScanFlow software. Using the scanner’s embedded sensor and innovative gesture recognition, your hygienist can easily orient the digital model of the patient’s teeth and switch from upper to lower arch views on the screen by simply rotating the scanner. This gesture motion control capability eliminates the need to touch the mouse or keyboard, promoting infection prevention while allowing your staff to stay focused on the patient.
For added patient engagement, your hygienist and staff also have the option to use the mobile DEXIS IS Voyager trolley and All in One Computer to scan and display on-screen images right at the patient’s chair. With the IS Voyager, clinicians have the flexibility to manipulate scans using either the touchscreen or the wand for hands-free operation and now the ability to move the Voyager system freely from room to room without interrupting your workflow with the new UPS mounting box.
Quick, Clean Images
Once the scans have been captured, your hygienist can leverage IS ScanFlow’s AI-powered features to automatically remove soft tissue such as cheeks, lips, gloves, and tongue. This feature saves staff the time-consuming task of manually trimming those structures while allowing you to show your patient clean images without delay.
When it’s time to consult with your patient, you’ll have those clean scans ready to share with your patient chair-side on a screen — the ideal starting point for treatment planning. Within IS ScanFlow, you can show patients’ upper and lower arches together or individually, from multiple angles and perspectives, and zoom in on details you want to draw attention to. You can even measure gum-line recession and share this visual information with your patients.
Seeing is Believing
For many patients, seeing is believing — the first critical step to case acceptance. While sharing screen views of scans, you can reinforce your diagnosis by employing physical mirrors in real-time to point out specific areas in your patients’ oral environment. This enables patients to compare what they see with their own eyes, inside their mouths, with the compelling visual evidence presented by the on-screen scans.
Once the intraoral scans are captured, cleaned, and stored in IS ScanFlow, you and your team can easily access and review them with your patient at their oral hygiene appointment. This enables you and the patient to monitor any changes that indicate wear, tear, occlusion, receding gum lines, crowding of teeth, and other potential conditions over time.
Capturing the Complete Picture
Showing your patients visible changes in their teeth is an effective way to engage them. With the complete picture, including what is happening beneath the surface. The DEXIS digital workflow delivers this level of visibility.
As part of the DEXIS digital workflow, the IS 3800W intraoral scanner and IS ScanFlow software integrate seamlessly with DTX Studio™ Clinic software to provide a broad range of diagnostic tools. This integration enables you and your team to store, access, view, and share all patient images — 2D, 3D, CBCT, intraoral scans, and clinical photos — on a single screen for a complete picture of the patient’s dental hygiene.
An integrated, single-screen view of all patient images provides an advantage for a wide range of procedures and specialties. For instance, say you have a patient who grinds his or her teeth but is reluctant to use a night guard. Within DTX Studio Clinic, you can show the progression of wear on their teeth caused by bruxism and discuss the possibility of future damage, allowing the patient to understand better and accept the need for treatment.
DTX Studio Clinic offers a powerful solution for showcasing changes in your patient’s oral health and tracking the shifting of teeth over time. By utilizing the images stored in this software, you can efficiently demonstrate to your patients the changes occurring and present a treatment plan that effectively addresses these concerns, providing patients with the evidence they need to make informed decisions and actively engage in their treatment options.
Easy Use with Every Oral Hygiene Visit
While making it easier for patients to understand and accept their diagnosis and treatment plan with visual clarity and confi dence, the IS 3800W, IS ScanFlow, and DTX Studio Clinic software make it easier for your team to provide an exceptional level of patient care. Intuitive features and minimal training requirements mean your staff can start accessing the efficiencies of an AI-enabled digital workflow right away for every patient hygiene visit to reveal the complete picture, enhance patient engagement, and empower patients to improve outcomes.
For more information, contact your Patterson representative.
You must be logged in to post a comment.