Dental Clinic Portal Built with Experience Cloud

Solving the Use Case

Overview

With the right configuration, Salesforce Experience Cloud can be configured to give dental clinics a powerful portal to engage their patients. Portals help patients schedule appointments, manage their dental care, interact with their hygienist, and more.

Let's work towards solving this use case with Salesforce Experience Cloud.

First, we need to define the personas, permissions, and roles who will be using the portal in Experience Cloud. These roles fall into two main categories – clinical and patient. They include:

• Dentists
• Hygienists
• Patients
• Portal Administrator

Roles and permissions depend on the type of dental clinic and the services they offer. For instance, tailored portals could be created for general dentistry, cosmetic, periodontal, or pediatric.

Security Configuration

Dental portals contain sensitive PHI, so we typically set up platform, application, network, and infrastructure controls that ensure security and compliance.

Platform
Salesforce Shield enables event monitoring, platform encryption, and field audit trails

Application Services
Two-factor authentication, single sign on (SSO), user roles, permissions, and field security

Network Services
Encryption, detection of threats, firewalls, and IP restrictions

Infrastructure Services
Backup services, disaster recovery, third-party certifications, and threat audits

Dental Care Data Model

Dental clinics have unique challenges when recruiting patients, delivering care, and engaging post appointments. The object model we configure varies for each model, including general, cosmetic, prosthodontics, or other dentistry types. For the most basic dental portal implementation, we configure a data structure that resembles the relationships between clinical staff, patients, and their dental health histories.

The most basic object model looks something like this:

• Patient Object
  As the name implies, this object stores patient data. This could include insurance details, demographics, appointment history, or information collected during intake. Patient type corresponds to major types of dental services, including preventative care, basic restorative care, or major restorative care.
• Dental Care Plan
  This object stores data related to plans for preventative or restorative dental treatment. We typically configure top-level goals that identify a patient's north star. Along the way, milestones represent the tasks that must be completed. This helps a patient visualize the short-term goals that result in long-term dental health, inspiring them to follow a path to success.
• Dental Care Team
  This object stores data related to care team members. Care teams can included a variety of members from across dental specialities and practices, including hygienists, orthodontists, surgeons, and more. By assembling a patient's care team in this object, patients are able to easily see stakeholders across their dental care journey – and easily find contact information for each one.
• Appointments
  This object stores a variety of dental appointment types. Typically, these high-level categories include introductory cleanings, routine cleanings, restoration, crowns, root canals, or implants.

By creating object relationships between patients, dental care teams, dental care plans, and appointments, we create a variety of self-service functions in the patient facing portal. Features of the dental portal include:

• Secure Messaging with Hygienists
• Pre-Appointment Forms
• Appointment Scheduling
• Top-Level Goals and Milestones
• Payment Management
• Insurance Management

These portal features allow patients to take control of their dental care without burdening administrative staff. This leads to more highly engaged patients, and better oral health.