Avoid Implant Recall Stress With Help From An Inventory Management System

As dental professionals, it is your legal and ethical duty to ensure that patient safety is of utmost importance. With more and more dental implants being placed every year, it is imperative to play a vital role in the care and maintenance of implants, as it is critical to optimizing long-term success. 

But in the unfortunate circumstance that a placed implant is recalled, is your practice prepared to handle the situation? 

In the event of a recall, dentists would be made aware of the situation through notification from the manufacturers, Health Canada, or the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) in the United States. There are several different levels of recall, and not all will require revision surgery for the affected patient. With the help of a cutting-edge implant inventory management system, it can easily trace back recalls to patients once you’ve confirmed the device’s failure.

Keeping track of your implant inventory, and streamlining how you manage the flow of implants in and out of your practice, is essential for not only the safety of your patients but treating implant-related cases more efficiently. 

Depending on the size of your practice, there could be anywhere from one to five implant-related surgeries a day, if not more. Each office stores multiple different kinds of implants in various sizes, and different sizes may be reserved for just one patient. Additionally, each implant lot number, reference number, expiration date, and size must be officially recorded for patient records, which is highly beneficial when it comes to managing recalls and developing an action plan.

To be blunt — you must be prepared and organized, and manually tracking these protocols should be a thing of the past.

By implementing an implant inventory management system, your dental team has the capabilities to reserve inventory products for patients, label consignment items from manufacturers, and quickly search placed implants by lot number to find treated patients. Automatically identifying an implant enables the user to move seamlessly into their desired action of either adding or removing the implant from the centralized inventory location. Team members can quickly scan reference codes on the supply boxes with a mobile bar-code scanner to add, remove, or locate implant-related products. 

These user-friendly and straightforward software solutions offer the opportunity for more efficient protocols and provide practical solutions to keep your office operating successfully.