Tekessence Inc

Practice Management system for Orthodontists

The application enables Orthodontic Manufacturer and their clients to seamlessly link all aspects of the Orthodontic Office right from New Patient Entry to the Appointment scheduling and Monetary transaction entries and automated Purchase Order processing to Shipment of goods and its subsequent inventory adjustments.

Customer Profile

The client is a leading manufacturer of orthodontic equipment with over 60 years of experience whose mission is to provide high quality products and services to the orthodontic community and was committed to partnering with doctors and providing "Business Solutions for the Orthodontic Practice". By providing practice management solutions including patient records, word processing, insurance, scheduling, treatment charting, patient tracking, seamless image integration, web-based patient registration and Inventory management the client aimed to be the leading Business Solutions provider for the orthodontic community.

Business Challenge

One of the major offerings of the client was Business Solutions for the Orthodontic Practice, through which it aimed to enable its customers in the orthodontic community to maintain local inventory, web-based patient registration, automatically raise purchase orders and Electronic Data Interchange through the Internet.

Orthodontic practices are complex involving a large number of patients with specific needs and treatment procedures. The orthodontist practice was faced with the task of maintaining patient records, patient appointments, treatment schedules, payments, insurance, treatment charts and patient tracking.

The other problem faced by the orthodontist practices was the large number of orthodontic products available in the market and the specific use of selected products in orthodontic procedures resulting in large inventories of orthodontic materials and problems associated with managing those inventories.

However the customers cannot give the complete control of their inventory to the Manufacturer and hence they planned to bundle up a Patient Management Tool along with the Materials Inventory Management system.

Even though many tools were available in the market currently for managing the Patient Information, Our tool has an added advantage of purchase order automation and the subsequent material inventory management system built into a single tool.

To achieve Electronic Data Interchange through the Internet the client’s AS/400 based applications had to be interfaced with a multitude of windows based applications that was used by orthodontists spread across geographic locations. The Patient Management System should facilitate ease of use and reduce the work burden of the customer. The orthodontist should have minimum involvement with the application, as it could be cumbersome on the orthodontist to keep entering information about each and every patient.

Hence the major requirement of the Orthodontic Manufacturer and the task for TekEssence's team had become quite clear. They needed a Technology partner to develop a Product, that would allow their customers for seamless inter-and intra-enterprise integration, support rapid growth, require a minimum of operational support and would also help in automating their mundane office processes.

Here emerged the challenge for TekEssence to deliver a wholesome product solution that would have the web as well as client/server based application model and would seamlessly integrate the data from various clients with that of the existing legacy system of the Manufacturer, built on the latest technology that would be easily scalable to meet the rapid technological developments and that of the modern days business scenarios.

These well defined challenges of the business requirements, made TekEssence to bet on nothing less than Microsoft's latest technology, MS .NET. The following illustration would give a very clear picture of the intricate business challenges involved in the application involving three players namely the Manufacturer, Orthodontist, and the Patient:

TekEssence Solution

Orthodontic Manufacturer needed the operations of its Inventory management and Shipment and Purchase Order system to be fully automated. Specifically, Orthodontic Manufacturer wanted TekEssence's Product to make the process from customer order (Purchase Order) to shipment to be fast, flexible and seamlessly linked.

The process itself seems straightforward, at first. It begins with the Orthodontic Manufacturer's customers (Orthodontists) submitting purchase orders to them and the manufacturer sending back the shipment to their customer. Inorder to automate this process, the manufacturer needs access to the Inventory database of their customers.

In order to avoid this situation sounding as a lob-sided one, TekEssence came up with a product that would have additional features for managing the Patients information, scheduling patient appointments, their contract and Insurance details and the transactions of the Customer's clients along with the features for material inventory management and treatment procedures.

Upon closer inspection, however, the complexities behind automating the process became more obvious. To begin, the process spaned multiple entities, from Customers to the Orthodontic Manufacturer, who have a totally different kind of setup. The sync between both the system was brought about using a scheduled task of creating a text file with all the details regarding the purchase order from the clients end and pushing the file into a commonly created MQ. Another scheduled task would automatically read all these text files and update the AS/400 system of the Orthodontic manufacturer.

TekEssence’s application enables Orthodontic Manufacturer and their clients to seamlessly link all aspects of the Orthodontic Office right from New Patient Entry to the Appointment scheduling and Monetary transaction entries and automated Purchase Order processing to Shipment of goods and its subsequent inventory adjustments.

Product Features

“Special features in the Orthodontic Tool”