Dental School Patient Administration System (PAS)

The University’s new Dental School is aiming to open by September 2022. The Bristol Dental School is currently integrated and collocated with the Bristol Dental Hospital, which is run by the Universities Hospitals Bristol & Weston NHS Foundation Trust. As such, the IT systems currently used by the Dental School to facilitate clinical practice are those used by, and provided by, the NHS Trust.

The intention of the New Dental School project is to separate the University’s Dental School both physically and operationally from the Dental Hospital and the NHS Trust, creating a separate and independent Dental School and clinical facility based at a new dedicated location within Bristol.

In conjunction with this move, the Dental School’s operating model will be redefined to deliver enhancements to the quality of clinical education along with significant improvements to student, staff and patient experience.

By separating from the NHS Trust, and the Dental Hospital, the New Dental School will need to procure a number of new IT systems to support the clinical practice elements of the school.

This procurement is specifically for the provision of Patient Administration System (PAS) software.

The new system must ensure that the Dental School can manage all interactions with patients digitally, on the system, including a full record of all interaction / engagement with the patient, treatment plan, booking of appointments and clinics and digital access to scans, images, patient letters and other documents associated with the patient or their treatment.

It is expected that the system will manage:

• Patient records and associated data (charts, treatment plans, scans & image files, patient letters etc.)
• A process for clinical supervisors to review and approve student updates to patient records (e.g. patient notes, treatment plans)
• A mechanism for managing patient referrals to and from other care providers (including sharing of relevant patient details, notes and scans, X-rays and image files)
• Functionality to support onboarding of new patients (referrals and self-referral requests, triage of referral requests)
• Appointment management, including the scheduling and resourcing of clinics
• Patient communications (e.g. paper, email and ideally SMS)

The solution should also provide data analytics and insights that can be used to help maintain and improve clinical practice and patient experience.

Note: vendors also refer to this type of system as a 'Practice Management' system.