Your patients leave with a plan. Now they can ask about it.
Chairside answers your patients' questions about their own treatment plan, at home, from your practice's information and nothing else.
What it is
Chairside is an assistant a dental practice attaches to a treatment plan. After the appointment, your patient opens a short link, enters a four-digit code, and asks about their own plan in plain language. It answers from two sources only: your practice's published patient information and that patient's plan.
How it works
Three steps, one link
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You make the link.
From the plan: the items, the stages, fees on or off, and a short note in your own words. It takes under a minute.
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Your patient asks at home.
They open the link, enter the code, and ask what they did not think to ask in the chair. Any time, for as long as the link lasts.
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You read the conversation.
Every exchange with your patients, folded by conversation, with flags for safety, urgency, wanting to book, and topics where the assistant had no answer.
For your patients
What patients get
- Their plan as a list, a tooth chart with their teeth marked, and the stages and timing you set.
- The fees as written in the plan, if you chose to include them.
- Answers in your name, in plain language, that say clearly when something is not covered.
- Suggested follow-up questions after each answer, written the way a patient would ask them.
- A reading list you picked, and a summary of the conversation when they ask for one.
- No account, no app, nothing to install.
For the practice
What the practice gets
- A link in under a minute
- A rough note like "crowns for the cracks, fillings for the decay" is tidied into plain patient wording, in your voice, tied to the plan items.
- Every conversation
- For your own patients, folded by conversation, with flags for safety, urgent, wants to book, and no answer.
- Your content, in your words
- Every page the assistant answers from can be edited a paragraph at a time. Your edits outrank the shipped wording and stay when Chairside updates the defaults.
- Your name on it
- Your practice's name and logo on the reading pages. Roles for dentists, hygienists, practice managers and front desk. One login can belong to more than one practice.
The limits
What it will not do
The refusals are the point. A tool that knows its limits is one you can hand to a patient.
- Diagnose, or suggest treatment that is not in the plan.
- Quote or estimate a cost that is not written in the plan.
- Book, reschedule, or pass a message to the clinic.
- Draft a message or email for the patient to send to anyone.
- Claim that anyone has read what the patient wrote.
- Use anything beyond your published pages and the plan.
Safety and privacy
Said plainly, on the page
- Patients are told plainly that nobody reads the chat as it happens and that it is not a way to reach the clinic.
- Anything that sounds like an emergency or distress is pointed to the clinic, an after-hours service, the emergency department, or 000 and Lifeline, early in the reply.
- Names, dates of birth, phone numbers, emails and addresses are removed before a conversation is stored.
- Links close after 90 days without use and are removed 90 days after that. You can close one at any time.
- Sign-in needs a password and an authenticator app code. Access is by invitation.
From the founder
I am a general dentist. I built Chairside because patients left my room with a plan and came back with the same questions, or emailed them to me at night.
I wanted them to have a way to ask that stayed inside what I had actually told them.
I build it around full-time clinical work and use it with my own patients. It is early, and a small group of practices is testing it with me.
— Dr Will Shield
Early access is by invitation.
Tell us about your practice and we will be in touch.
A patient? Your dentist sends you the link.