VANCOUVER, Washington – InterDent Service Corporation, a leading provider of dental practice management services, announced today the rollout of the Dental Resource Center (DRC) to its 130 dental practices. The DRC is a part of Gentle Dental University, the company's Web-based learning site. The resource center offers 190 e-learning modules covering not only dentistry, but everything a dental practitioner needs to know to run a successful business, including clinical skills, compliance, office management and patient education. The e-learning modules run eight to 15 minutes long and the dental practice modules are mostly 3D animations providing accurate "movies" of new clinical techniques that dentists or dental hygienists can put to use immediately. Many of the modules have CE credits and manufacturers can also sponsor training modules to educate dentists on new products. Gentle Dental, together with its sister offices, serves the dental needs of thousands of patients throughout eight states.

"This started as a three-month pilot, but after testing it for a month, it was such great success that we decided to roll it out to all 130 offices," said Maureen Winningham, who was responsible for completing the project and is director of education for InterDent. "In the past four months, our offices have earned more than 600 CE units — and I can use CE Tracking in the system to query who's taken which classes. The data-driven system can also provide the management team with current status reports, such as what the most popular modules are."

Besides the 190 e-learning modules, the DRC provides dental offices with an online drug index, 1,300 equipment manuals, dental guidelines, Material Safety Data Sheet (MSDS) guidelines and oral pathology gallery. The oral pathology segment includes information on early diagnosis of oral cancer which is a growing health concern, because doctors normally discover its development late which accounts for its high death rate. Both the drug index and pathology gallery are in both Spanish and English making it easy for dentists to share drug interactions and oral disease information with Hispanic patients.

"It's great to learn about new adhesives, cements and other techniques," said Dr. Raul Amador, a regional clinical director in the Vancouver, Washington area. "The DRC is friendly learning — I can see it, hear it and read along — and it's short enough to hold my attention."

"The DRC really puts each office in control of its continuing education so it can offer the highest quality dental care to patients," said Winningham. "Also, the DRC is always up to date and satisfies OSHA requirements."

Office managers can use the DRC to keep staff members training current and to encourage them to improve their technical skills and deepen their knowledge. An office manager can also track who's completed which modules. Some dentists who've used the DRC so far find it useful to watch the short modules together and discuss what they have learned to reinforce the training. Others ask their staff to work on a module whenever there's any down time.

"It's almost like having someone from the company come here to demo new products for me," said Dr. Amador. "When I'm recruiting new dentists now, now I show them how the Dental Resource Center helps with continuing education."

About InterDent

InterDent Service Corporation is a leading provider of dental practice management services to multi-specialty group dental offices in the United States. InterDent provides business support services to independent dentists, but does not practice dentistry. InterDent is network of affiliated dental groups that includes Gentle Dental and its sister offices which provide comprehensive, convenient and high quality general dentistry as well as dental specialty services including orthodontics, periodontics, endodontics, pedodontics, prosthodontics and oral surgery.

Headquartered in El Segundo, Calif., InterDent provides management services to more than 130 affiliated dental offices employing more than 500 dentists in eight states: Arizona, California, Hawaii, Kansas, Nevada, Oklahoma, Oregon, and Washington.

For more information about InterDent, or its Dental Resource Center, call (310) 765-2400 or visit http://www.interdent.com.

NOTE: Gentle Dental is a service mark of InterDent Service Corporation. All other trademarks are the properties of their respective companies. Gentle Dental University is a copyright of InterDent, Inc.

SOURCE InterDent Service Corporation

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