Digital Diagnostic Skills for Teledentistry

Part 1: Building Bricks: Teledental Skills

In the first of a 2-part series on Teledental Skills, OralEye shares three helpful tips on the digital diagnosis of your patients through teledentistry.

The limits of teledentistry are known; it cannot wholly replace a visit to the dental office. However, it is increasingly complementary to physical dentistry.

For treatment planning — teledental contact can provide
additional information to improve patient understanding and
acceptance. It is a new step in their path to better oral health.

For patient expectations — in advance of arriving in the office,
patients can be triaged through teledentistry. This allows for
better chair-planning and manages patient expectations of
what can be achieved in the chair.

For emergencies — teledentistry can be used for limited visual
assessments if a patient faces an emergency situation.
While everyone will have their own style when it comes to making
diagnoses over teledentistry, there are a number of tips you can
use to make your method as effective as possible.

Tip 1: Have a comprehensive workflow.

• It’s essential for you to have a comprehensive workflow when approaching teledental cases. This will ensure you don’t miss anything important.
• Your workflow is best matched to your in-office approach.
• We suggest a quick visual scan of the image/ video, followed by a more comprehensive review.
• In a diagnostic or preventative teledental case, you’ll need to view as much of the oral cavity as possible. In a problem-focused assessment, you’ll need to get as clear a view of the problem site as possible.
• In the former case, we suggest mimicking a physical workflow of moving systematically through the teeth, from the upper left to the upper right, down to the lower right and back to the lower left. It’s important to check soft tissue as well.
• In the latter case, we suggest that in addition to reviewing the problem-site, you review all other areas of the oral cavity visible in the image/video.

Tip 2: Know your medium

• As we know from our previous series, An Introduction to Teledentistry, teledentistry comes in many forms. Most of the time, there’s a visual element included.
• It’s important to know the limitations of the medium your visual elements are recorded in.
• If you’re engaging in synchronous teledentistry, you’ll need to guide the patient through the capturing of images or video to yield the best diagnostic results.
• If you’re using asynchronous teledentistry, it will be important to ensure your teledental solution sufficiently guides the patient through the image/ video capture.
• Know the limits of your medium. If the problem site is not well captured or if the images provided are not of sufficient quality, you should ask the patient to try again. There’s no use in squinting and guessing.

Tip 3: Err on the side of caution

• At the end of the day, you’re responsible for the advice you give a patient over teledentistry so it’s advisable to err on the side of caution.
• You can do this by using cautionary language and adding explanations and conditions to your assessment, e.g., “This could be X, so I’d advise getting an X-ray to be certain.”
• We don’t want to scare patients, but we do want to give them the most accurate feedback given the available information.

Did you find this piece useful? What more would you like to know? Let us know in the comments how your experience has been with social media and get in touch with us if you need any more advice.