How Dentists Can Utilize Teledentistry in their Practice for Increased Efficiency and Profitability

Teledentistry can help dentists “add polish to their practice’” by offering additional consultation options to their patients. In addition to being able to provide continuity of care when patients are more hesitant to make office visits, dentists are also able to maximize their practice’s chair time for their clinical appointments. Teledentistry adds to the uniqueness of a practice, as well as enhances the customer’s overall dental experience.

In this episode of The Art of Dental Finance and Management podcast, Art meets with Cindy Koelbl, Chief Operating Officer of Integrated Telehealth Solutions (ITS) to talk about telehealth and teledentistry. As a subset of telehealth, teledentistry uses a broad variety of telecommunication and information technology to provide and support dental care delivery, diagnosis, consultation, treatment, and even to transfer dental information and provide education. It enables dentists and clinicians to convey advice, perform triage, conduct exams, do screenings and consult.

Art and Cindy discuss how teledentistry has proven extremely beneficial for both dentists and patients this past year especially throughout the COVID-19 pandemic. Specifically, we discuss how teledentistry involves four distinct types of patient care, each with related billing codes:

• Synchronous
• Asynchronous
• Remote Patient Monitoring (RPM), and
• In-health