Quay Dental Practice

Sarah Huxtable is the Practice Manager at Quay Dental Practice, an independent mixed practice that focuses on providing quality general family dentistry. The practice, in common with many practices, suffered from the familiar problem of our staff having to deal with the administration and storage of endless numbers of paper forms and patients’ medical history. Although our patient notes and digital X-ray records were being stored electronically, we were still keeping large numbers of paper copies of medical histories, consent forms and various other essential records.

Our receptionists had a daily routine task of going through filing cabinets to pull out that day’s patient records, and then filing them all away again at the end of each session. Not only was this a time-consuming process but the piles of notes at reception looked messy and unprofessional, and also raised concerns about patient confidentiality and data security, despite the fact they were securely locked away each night.

I realised the benefits of Clinipad were significant and could see it would not only allow us to dispense with our paper records by storing them electronically, but also allow us to remove our filing cabinets, freeing up valuable space in reception, and safely and securely storing all our essential patient data off-site.

Clinipad is now available for our patients on two iPads at our reception desk. Clinipad allows our patients to electronically sign and update their own medical history, conforming to NHS regulations that require these details to be updated each time a patient starts a new course of treatment. One of the innovative features of Clinipad is that it immediately shows if a patient has filled in all the necessary details correctly and flags up to the receptionist if something has been missed.

We thought long and hard about the consequences of moving over to electronic forms, considering how our patients would cope and how they might react. But I can honestly say that any initial concerns have disappeared and we have had absolutely no problem with patient acceptance of the new technology. If anyone needs a bit of encouragement our reception staff are happy to show them how to use the Clinipad touchscreen, how to scroll up and down and how to write onscreen with a stylus pen. In fact, we tell our patients that they can come to Quay Dental Practice for not only quality dentistry, but free IT training as well!