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From Trisha’s Desk By Trisha E. O’Hehir, RDH, BS, Editorial Director, Hygienetown Magazine

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The Paperless Process

 
Trisha E. O’Hehir,
RDH, BS
Editorial Director,
Hygienetown Magazine		 Going paperless is fun and at the same time challenging for clinicians. I worked in clinical practice for 30 of my 40 years in dental hygiene, and have experienced some of the transitions of going paperless myself.

In the early 1980s, while working in a general practice in Tucson, Arizona, I purchased my first Apple Macintosh computer. Our schedules never seemed to be full, and being paid on commission was my incentive to use the computer to solve the problem. We had 3,000 charts, so we should have been very busy. Patients were falling through the cracks but I didn’t know how to solve the problem until I learned about computer databases. If we entered all the patients into my computer, we could find out who was overdue for their dental hygiene visit. The dentists weren’t convinced that a computer would solve the problem. They were afraid it would cause more problems and take more time, so I proposed an experiment.

The only consolidated way we had to look at our patient pool was the ledger cards that tracked payments. Rather than entering patient information from the charts into the computer, I entered information from the ledger cards, since these were the most current patients. I took home a stack of ledger cards each night, something you can’t do today, and entered the patients’ names, addresses and dates of their last dental hygiene visit, based on the payment recorded on the ledger card. At least that way we would have all the most recent patients entered into the computer and we could see if it helped with the dental hygiene schedule. When I finished, I could sort the names by a variety of fields, finding all the people whose last dental hygiene visits were six months ago. Labels were printed and postcards were sent asking them to call the office for an appointment.

The phone began ringing as soon as the postcards were delivered and the dental hygiene schedules were full every day after that. The next month, the associate dentist told me he had produced more dentistry that month than ever before. The experiment worked and he was ready for a computer system in the office.

Integrating technology and going paperless is a process that takes time and energy, but the rewards are worth the effort. But don’t worry, we will continue to print Hygienetown Magazine so you can enjoy reading it wherever you want. If you decide to go paperless when it comes to storing magazines at home, you will always have the computer version filed for you on www.hygienetown.com.
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