Enhancing Specialist-Dentist Communication-Update

A few weeks ago, I wrote a post titled “Looking into How General Dental Practices Communicate with Specialist Offices”. Over the past month or so I have collaborated over several cases utilizing a tool called Basecamp. Basecamp is a project management piece software that is hosted completely online. Therefore, there is no software to download, no need to worry whether there are both Macs and PC’s in the group and the data is secure because it’s stored in either Rackspace or Amazon’s Cloud(More on the cloud another day, but basically the data isn’t stuck on one server that can fail, it’s hosted over thousands of computers comprising the Cloud.)  So how does it work?

I have created a Project in my Basecamp account for the periodontists office, I can then determine who has access to that project. So I set it up for the the two doctors and a staff member(front office) from each office.

I see a patient that is a potential referral, so I go into Basecamp and create a message for the Periodontist, I can add pertinent health info and current findings and potential treatment plans. I can also attach photos, xrays and perio charting in PDF format. When I post the message I can determine who has access to the note and who should get email notification that its there, so I click on the periodontists name. Now that it’s uploaded, the software sends the periodontist a note letting him know it’s there for his review. He can review it on his terms and make necessary comments and the two doctors can collaborate on the best course of action. When that action is ready to be put in place we can click on the office coordinator’s from each office and they can go into Basecamp and review the discussion between docs and get the patient scheduled.

So far it has worked really well, it will be interesting to see how it progresses, we have two patients in treatment, and this has been a great help moving the treatment along. Would anyone like to see an video demonstration of how this works? If so, let me know in the Comments below…

Full disclosure, I don’t receive anything from Basecamp or 37Signals.com unless you decide to sign up with the affiliate link that will provide me a small referral fee for their service. You can find that link at the top right of any page on this site, just click the Basecamp logo.