Computers and dentistry

The use of computers in dental office and in dental education has become the standard of practice. Mobile and miniature devices habe replaced standard textbook, paper databases, even live lectures and redefined the learning process itself.

The digital dental office :
The concept of high tech electronic and fully digitized systems to manage a dental office and integrated clinical tasks is becoming the standard model of current practice. A rapidly developing management product is the internet based software provided by an application service provider (ASP). This product exists in two different platforms :

web-hosting
web-based

The history of the development of the dental software is brief. For the first time the computers have been used in the dental medicine in the 1960s[1]. Since then computers and information technologies spread progressively in the dental practice. According to Atkinson, J. in the year of 2000 85,1% of all dentists in the United States use computers

There are many kind of dental software, which depends on specific task, that they do to help the dental practice. One classification is given from Schleyer and Kirsher. They categorize three main categories of dental software: administrative, clinical, and for internet. The clinical category from other side is categorized in: electronic dental records, electronic dental designs, dental imaging software, and software used for diagnostics and treatment

Zimmerman recognizes the following types of computer software, depending from their task: administration and management of patients documentation. electronic archives of the documentation. telecommunication computer - aided education computerizing instruments and techniques in the dental office software helping the clinical decision making. All classifications of dental software are relative, since there are software products, designed for realizing more than one task. A larger classification based on the specific task shows more types of tasks and software.

This classification of dental software is:

Dental administration management
Dental practitioners records management
Dental schedules and dental scheduling
Patient dental records management
Dental billing
Dental imaging processing
Dental diagnostics
Dental treatment helping
Computer aided dental education
Software for usage of dental instruments and other techniques used in the dental practice

Free dental software
There are several types of free dental software: shareware, freeware and open source dental software. Most frequently the free dental software is provided as shareware. This means, that the dental software license allows its usage only for evaluation purposes.