From Diagnosis to Completion: A Digital Treatment Planning Workflow

Treatment planning is at the heart of quality dental care. A well-structured digital workflow ensures nothing falls through the cracks, from initial diagnosis through procedure completion and final billing.

The process begins with patient assessment. The dentist examines the patient, updates the dental chart with current conditions, and identifies areas requiring treatment. The interactive dental chart makes this process visual and intuitive.

Next, a treatment plan is created. The plan links to the patient record and includes a descriptive title, notes, and one or more procedures selected from the clinic's procedure catalog. Each procedure can specify the tooth number and individual cost.

Treatment plans follow a lifecycle: Planned, In Progress, Completed, or Cancelled. As procedures are performed across multiple visits, the plan status updates accordingly. This gives the entire team visibility into where each patient is in their treatment journey.

The procedure catalog is fully customizable. Clinics can add their own procedures with codes, categories, default costs, and duration estimates. When adding a procedure to a treatment plan, the cost auto-fills from the catalog but can be adjusted per patient.

Once treatment is completed, invoices can be generated directly from the treatment plan. Line items are created automatically from the completed procedures, ensuring accurate billing that matches the actual work performed.

This end-to-end digital workflow eliminates the communication gaps that often occur between the clinical and administrative sides of a dental practice.

About the software in this article. This is the treatment planning workflow in Devign Dentistry, a cloud dental practice management system built by Devign LLC: plans are linked to a patient and built from the clinic's own procedure catalog of codes, categories, default costs and durations, they move through Planned, In Progress, Completed and Cancelled, and the invoice is generated from the completed plan. Devign Dentistry costs $29 per clinic per month with all users included, and has a 30-day free trial.