IQ Dental

An application for dental clinics that combines the ability to handle patients, internal processes and treatment plans

About the project

IQ Dental is an extensive (and still growing) project aimed at improving the standards of dental services. It is also a useful tool for doctors, allowing for effective patient service and treatment planning. Although we have not worked with Healtech before, it turned out that IQ Dental is not only a big but also satisfying challenge for both parties.

Task

The IQ Dental team has set itself the goal of introducing a tool that will combine many functions necessary for running a dental clinic, which is primarily user-friendly. Our task was to create software that would take into account the above factors, combining functionality and an attractive appearance.

Challenges

Scope of the project

The biggest challenge of the project was its scale - the application has many individual functionalities that could work as separate applications. The key to successfully solving this problem was to prepare a detailed analysis, which allowed us to break down the entire application into lots of smaller parts and then delegating work on these parts to the right people.

Analyzing needs

The key stage of the work was a thorough analysis of the topic, aimed at taking into account as many variables as possible that could have influenced its later shape. To illustrate its complexity, it may be helpful to know that this stage took us almost six months of hard work. During this time, we tried to identify the scope and method of operation of the program, eliminate erroneous business assumptions and examine the needs of future users. We achieved this thanks to close cooperation with the IQ Dental team and people employed in clinics at all levels, focusing on workshop work. The result was over 650 pages of documentation, which was an important signpost at every stage.

Graphic design

Due to the Dental Health sector, the UX of the IQDental project was a big challenge for us. In order to understand the needs of users and to correctly read the functionalities outlined by the client, we had to hold many meetings, interviews, conduct analyzes and in-depth research. In addition, we had in mind that the application would continue to develop - and to a significant extent. The proposed solutions had to be not only a response to the problems "here and now", but also assume the future development of the application.

Before we moved on to creating the interface and creating a finished product by programmers, we created UX mockups, which at the prototype stage allowed us to test certain assumptions and functionalities. The initial working model helped us evaluate our assumptions, which sometimes turned out to be wrong or insufficient.

One of the larger, but also more satisfying, tasks was to graphically present the diagram of the patient's jaw and propose what the consecutive problems should look like, so that the dentist could create the most realistic representation of the dentition.

We knew from the beginning that the interface should be light and not overloaded with graphics. Due to the multiplicity of the application's complexity, it had to be definitely secondary to its function and usability.

Integrations

In the implementation of such an advanced project, there was of course some integrations, each of which presented our development team with different challenges. So we have:

Integration with X-ray software (Carestream Dental and Vatech EzDent-I) thanks to which patient photos are automatically transferred to patient cards in IQ Dental. Soon we will enrich the list of integrated RTG programs with Sirona and Gendex.
Integrations that allow you to download databases from other programs for operating dental clinics - Estomed and Prodentis.
Integration with the SMS Server application, thanks to which the clinic can manually and automatically communicate with patients via SMS.

Our long-term cooperation with eEngine has been excellent from the very beginning :) Professional approach to every issue, from analyzing, designing, programming and then implementing and improving processes. We are a very demanding customer, and yet their flexible attitude to the challenges we pose, changing priorities and the constant need to improve the software continues to surprise us positively.

I am convinced that the greatest value of eEngine are its people - damn intelligent, competent, experienced, helpful and patient. It is also important that the team has common values and work ethic, which translates into an attitude and unique approach to the client, which is not a common standard these days.

They co-create with us IQ Dental from the very beginning. It is their merit that our application looks modern and works like a Swiss watch. I cannot imagine continuing development work on the application without eEngine!

AREK BUZIEWICZ
IQ DENTAL CO-OWNER

The Future

IQ Dental is a project that, due to the growing interest of customers, is still developing, expanding the group of users with new clinics. In the coming months, we plan to work on:

a dedicated administration panel, the purpose of which is to enable the client's team to conveniently manage, monitor and communicate on an ongoing basis with dental clinics that decide to choose the tool;
integration with third-party systems that will extend the range of software capabilities;
helpdesk development.

This, of course, is not all, because the application we have the pleasure to work on has unlimited development possibilities. It means that there are still many interesting and satisfying challenges ahead of us.