Visual aids and communication with patients
No matter how well a doctor has done in a medical school, or how many professional summits were attended, besides informational background and professional skills, there is another factor with major influence on treatment results – it is the communication part. Every doctor knows that it is important to develop a trustful relationship with the patient, to ensure a positive connection. Most of the patients need to get at least some insight, before making any important decision. This means that the rate of success in any treatment is strongly codependent with the amount of information the patient is able to understand. For a doctor, it is sometimes hard to explain in plain language complicated medical information, while the patient can feel frustrated to admit that they don’t understand something. Here is that moment of ambiguity when miscommunication appears. If you, as the manager of a dental practice and ever wondered at what point the patients makes the decision to leave your clinic, or quit the treatment – this might be it.
So, there could be two types of complications during a consultation, one of them – is the lack of information, needed to adopt an opinion and make the right decision, and the second one, is even more serious and actually quite dangerous – too much information, everywhere, coming from different sources. Most of the doctor in any branch of medicine, often struggle with patients who show-up to the appointment with a fully formed point of view about their condition and how it should be treated, and all that even before they enter the doctor’s office. Sometimes this kind of patient gets their knowledge from chatty neighbors that might know somebody who has a relative with the same symptoms, but even if they got informed on a professional medical website, it is highly unlikely they could fully comprehend the state of their condition, considering they have no medical education. The issue here is not the fact that people try to get informed, before coming to the doctor, but rather the fact that this particularly type of people are usually most stubborn.
Medical practices and hospital around the globe understood this issue long ago, but there was no really functional solution, until recently. There is one simple, free, but yet effective way to keep your patients informed that any dental clinic should have – Dental Illustrations. This is an app available on play store, supported on iOS and Android, that includes a large database of dental schemes and images. The app can be downloaded on any smartphone, and used as a visual aid during dental appointments. With Dental Illustrations' help, the doctor can explain how a normal and healthy oral cavity looks like. There is a series of very detailed illustration on dental schemes, tooth structure circulation and nerves in the ANATOMY chapter. The doctor will also have the possibility to demonstrate in details, on a wide screen what is the difference between a healthy tooth and an affected one, as the app also provides a complex approach on pathological conditions such as caries, periodontitis or abrasion, at different stages of progression. It is so much easier for a person without medical education, to understand their condition, and how it should be treated, when they can actually see what the problem looks like and what can happen if left untreated. Dental Illustrations is a user-friendly app, with many 3D illustrations, schemes and videos, logically organized in chapters, for a doctor to easily find and inform the patient about the problem and how it should be treated. There are also a wide range of video materials that include step-by-step demonstrations of different treatment procedures, starting cleaning and stone removal – to more complicated ones, that need detailed explanation, and require a higher level of knowledge.
Besides keeping your patient informed, Dental Illustration will also boost the level of trust towards your clinic, and most important, help your patient take a correct decision, based on professional medical information.
