A proper dental treatment plan is essential to providing quality and holistic dental care to patients. It’s the very first process that begins as early as a patient’s first appointment. So what’re the stages, and how can your organization effectively create dental treatment plans?

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What This Article Covers:

• Stages
• Additional Requirements
• Next Steps

Stages

To be successful, a treatment plan must consist of short-term, medium-term and long-term goals to offer a holistic view of the treatment and outcomes. A clear and concise treatment plan helps patients better understand and make informed decisions about their available care options.

Dental treatment plans consist of several ‌stages. Let’s have a look at them.

Acute Phase

First and foremost, it’s important to ask patients what exactly brought them to your clinic. Start with a simple question — “how can we help you?” Make sure patients know your team is there to offer services and only proceed with what the patient wants.

Start by taking care of emergency treatments the patient requires. These problems might be severe dental pain, swelling, oral-systemic health issues, or trauma to the face or jaw.

The acute phase helps your organization build a good relationship with patients. You can build patient trust, in turn attracting more patients to your clinic and increasing retention rates.

You may end up skipping the acute phase, if a patient doesn’t require emergency care.

Prevention

Post-emergency care comes the prevention stage. Every dental treatment plan must include prevention, which may include advising patients to use mouth wash or dental floss and other oral health care tips.

This phase of care aims to stop minor dental caries or other problems through daily routine — using mouthwash, floss and fluoride and brushing properly. Prevention is especially important to ensure patients’ teeth are ready for future periodontal treatments

Stabilization

Connected with the preventive phase, the stabilization step is all about taking care of existing dental problems before moving to advanced treatments. You need to monitor diseases, such as tooth decay or periodontal, pulpal and periapical conditions, and perform tooth extractions with immediate gap replacement first.

At this stage, you’ll take images using hardware such as dental X-rays, intraoral scanners and more. Dental imaging software helps you store, view and manage images to provide proper diagnoses.

There are steps in the stabilization phase that you must follow to ensure maximum improvement in a patient’s dental health.

• First comes periodontitis treatment — look for tooth decay, plaque accumulation and more.
• Next up is caries treatment — here you’ll focus on individual teeth and note the stages of infections.
• Finally, wrap up with pulpal and periapical tissue treatment followed by tooth extractions.

It’s important to note that you can’t execute all these treatments at once. Oftentimes, it’s best to work in quadrants. You can address all issues in one portion of the mouth before moving to another.

It’s beneficial for patients as well, especially when they require or opt for local anesthetics. They only have to deal with numbness in a portion of their mouths after each visit, rather than the whole thing.

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Definitive

In the definitive phase, you’ll execute teeth restorations and other treatments. Some treatments include placing crowns and filling spaces with dental bridges, dentures or dental implants.

In the definitive phase, it’s essential to sit with patients and discuss ‌the issues and treatment recommendations, including direct and indirect restorations. Upon agreeing, you can set up a complete dental treatment plan with all the remaining treatments and overall costs.

Typical direct restorations include:

• Glass ionomer cement— short-term
• Composite restoration — mid- to long-term
• Amalgam restoration — mid- to long-term.

Direct restorations usually consist of anterior fillings and posterior fillings using various kinds of cement. It’s important to discuss filling options with patients. An amalgam filling is silver in color due to mercury content, but it may last longer than glass ionemer cement.

Next comes indirect restorations that include inlays and onlays or dental crowns. They’re typically used for teeth coverings and root canal treatments. Indirect restoration materials are usually higher quality than composite materials. However, patients do require more chair time for indirect restorations.

Apart from direct and indirect restorations, patients may require dental gap replacement. There can be many reasons for gaps — usually, one or more teeth are absent altogether. Discuss using bridges, dentures and implants to close gaps.

Maintenance

In this phase, patients come back for periodic checkups to ensure the treatments are working properly. Usually, you’ll check the oral structure and tissue replacements at regular intervals.

In some cases, damage can reoccur or you may need to replace a crown. In addition, you may also suggest extra oral hygiene tips to ensure the mouth gets the care it needs.

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Additional Requirements

Apart from the aforementioned stages of treatment there are some additional considerations you need to make during your dental treatment planning.

Documentation

Even in today’s well connected and digital medical industry, documentation remains vital. Your documentation should include a record of every drug and treatment you provide to a patient. These records come in handy during audits.

Use quality dental software to streamline documentation and store information securely.

While documenting with dental systems, you must keep in mind some key requirements, including:

• Documentation should be concise, brief and thorough.
• It should provide a gateway for quick data entry and retrieval.
• It must be flexible so you can convey information clearly by using data.
• It should abide by diagnostic and treatment planning standards.

Charting

When it comes to charting, it’s better to follow conventional standards. Dental charts should be comprehensive, uncomplicated, accessible and updated to improve their use during consultations. Dental EMR software can come in handy for organizing patient files and improving accessibility.

Conservative charting is also an option for recording caries and restorations. These charts represent a graphic description of the conditions in a patient’s mouth. You can use them to understand and probe the level of periodontal disease in patients.

Interdisciplinary Considerations

There are some interdisciplinary considerations to address while planning a holistic treatment regimen for patients as well.

Endodontics

Execute a detailed oral examination to determine the extent of pulpal/periapical diseases, if any. Suggest endodontic treatment to patients during the restoration phase. Keep in mind to check for any fluid discharge from the teeth before initiating restoration.

Periodontics

Periodontic check ups and treatments precede the operative care phase. Look for any irregularities in tooth growth before placing the final restorations. Detecting encroachments and treating them creates a suitable environment for final crown placings.

Orthodontics and Oral Surgery

Look for the presence of caries, gum bleeding and tissue infections before starting restorations. On finding a decaying tooth, consult the patient on removal to ease operative care. Remove or treat all tissue infections or caries before final restorations.

Occlusion

Look for signs of malocclusion. If a restored tooth shows irregularity and prevents oral functions from working properly, provide necessary adjustments before proceeding to the restoration phase.

Prosthodontics

There are two kinds of prosthodontic treatments — fixed and removable. Fixed prosthodontics entails complete restoration before cast placement. On the other hand, removable prosthodontics allows for the design of removable partial dentures.

Treatment Plan Approval

Patient approval is paramount. Patients must understand a dental treatment plan and provide written consent before treatment begins.

It usually happens in multiple stages:

• Gauge the oral and dental issues and provide all the treatment plans available.
• Make sure patients understand each of the advantages and disadvantages of a treatment.
• Discuss all treatment risks (side effects, durability, etc.) with patients.
• Provide an entire summary of the cost associated with each treatment option, including out-of-pocket and insurance options.
• Start treatment only after patients give written consent.

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Next Steps

Dental treatment plans are an essential part of dentistry. Not every patient will require an elaborate treatment plan. However, even patients with the healthiest mouths require treatement plans to maintain outstanding dental health.

Treatment plans provide a solid foundation and a guide for you and your staff to execute care delivery. It also helps you keep your patients updated with the progress and estimated time left for their treatments.

If you’re looking to streamline your dental treatment plans, implementing appropriate software is essential. To that end, we invite you to go through our free comparison guide to learn about the major players in the market.

How do you structure your dental treatment plans? Leave comments below!