3 must-have features for your CHC’s dental solution

It’s common for dental leaders to begin evaluating technology by asking whether the solution supports dental charting, treatment planning, and other essential workflows. These questions are important, but for an integrated health center, they are just the beginning.

Community Health Centers (CHCs)

• 5,000+ CHCs
• 16,600+ service sites
• Located in all 50 states, U.S. territories, and Washington, D.C.
• 32.7+ million patients served in 2025
• 80%+ provide dental care, serving 7 million+ patients annually^{1, 2}

Dental teams in CHCs don’t run standalone practices. They’re part of an integrated care model that bridges the historical divide between oral and medical health, and they work in a setting where they’re part of a team—and where care coordination can be critical.

In a typical CHC, patient visits for dental care may reveal chronic conditions like high blood pressure, diabetes, or oral cancer. A connected care model helps the dental team coordinate appropriate follow-up care with physicians, pharmacists, and others who may be important to their overall health. The same is true for medical patients found to need dental services, who move through the organization in the opposite direction.

The technology supporting this model must connect dental and medical teams—not create another information barrier. If a dental platform can’t integrate with the health center’s broader electronic health record (EHR) or exchange information with external providers, coordinating care becomes much more difficult.

Disconnected systems can also lead to operational inefficiencies that may not be as obvious as poor patient handoffs. Each new technology requires more staff training, additional logins, and interface maintenance. Duplicate data entry and reconciliation errors can slow administrative processes, while fragmented reporting and scheduling inefficiency can be frustrating for office staff and patients alike.

With tight margins and persistent staffing challenges remaining ongoing problems in the industry, dental programs operating in these settings need systems that help them do more with less.³ With that in mind, when choosing between options, it’s important to consider how the technology supports whole-person care and their business as well. Here are three must-have capabilities every CHC should prioritize when evaluating a dental technology solution.

1. The technology should integrate with the CHC’s broader EHR ecosystem

It’s clear what happens when dental technologies operate separately from the rest of the health center: Clinicians must provide care with incomplete patient health data. Staff may also have to enter the same information in multiple systems, reconcile conflicting records, or move between applications to complete routine tasks.

A far better approach is to do away with the silos and find a solution that provides deep integration with your EHR, revenue cycle management, and patient engagement platform. There are four clear benefits delivered by technologies that come with this kind of built-in connectivity:

• Shared patient records: Medical and dental providers see the same chart and the same history rather than working with incomplete information.
• Unified patient experience: One portal and one billing experience reduce confusion and friction for patients navigating their care.
• Better cross-team coordination: Dental providers can flag or see medical risk factors, while medical providers can do the same in reverse.
• Streamlined administrative workflows: Less duplicate data entry means fewer reconciliation errors for billing and revenue cycle staff.

Dental programs can identify their best options by presenting EHR vendors with a list of questions. Does the solution maintain one shared medical and dental patient record? Which demographic, medication, allergy, and clinical fields actually sync between the two? Can staff coordinate medical and dental appointments from the same scheduling view? And are dental billing, patient engagement, and revenue cycle workflows natively integrated or connected through separate interfaces?

To avoid the need for manual workarounds on every dental claim, it’s also important to ask whether the technology supports FQHC-specific reimbursement workflows. Ensure the solution is appropriate for CHCs, not one that’s going to cause headaches for administrative staff.

2. The technology should support interoperability with outside providers

While internal integration enables coordination within your own organization, interoperability is the key to data exchange between dental providers and outside providers. Whether patients seek care from specialists, referral partners, hospitals, or other health systems, a lack of connectivity can limit coordination.

As the Healthcare Information and Management Systems Society (HIMSS) explains, technologies are interoperable when “health data exchange architectures, application interfaces and standards enable data to be accessed and shared appropriately and securely across the complete spectrum of care.”⁴ For healthcare providers, interoperability allows you to:

• Exchange patient records with outside providers and referral partners: Faster, cleaner information sharing reduces friction in the referral process.
• Improve continuity of care: Fewer chances for clinical or diagnosis gaps when patients move between providers or systems.
• Reduce manual records requests: Administrative staff spend less time chasing down records by phone or fax.
• Support evolving interoperability standards: A platform built for interoperability helps your organization keep pace as regulatory and industry requirements continue to shift.

When vetting a vendor’s interoperability capabilities, ask which exchange networks and standards the platform supports, and whether your organization can exchange both medical and dental records with outside providers. Also ask how inbound records are reconciled with the existing patient record and what manual steps will still be needed when sending referrals or requesting outside records. And finally, how does the vendor prepare customers for changing interoperability requirements? Is their technology able to update to support evolving regulatory compliance?

3. The technology should include a strong customer community and long-term vendor partnership

What happens with the technology after implementation may be the most important factor to consider when evaluating solutions for a CHC’s dental practice. Most organizations assess the software itself—its features, workflows, and integrations—but then they neglect to ask whether the vendor will be there when they’re needed after the system goes live.

To ensure your technology delivers over time, don’t treat it as a one-time purchase. Instead, see it as the beginning of a long-term relationship and choose a vendor that’s ready to partner with your practice. At a minimum, the vendor should provide:

• User groups and peer networking: The vendor should help customers connect with other CHCs dealing with the same operational and clinical challenges.
• Best practice sharing: There should be opportunities to learn from peers to accelerate time-to-value and avoid common mistakes.
• Ongoing optimization resources: The platform should continue evolving to support your practice well beyond initial implementation.
• Product innovation informed by customer feedback: Your organization should have a voice in shaping the platform’s product roadmap.

Talk to the vendor about features that have been added to the solution in response to customer requests. Better yet, ask to meet with those customers to get their perspective on the company’s willingness to listen.

How athenaOne® Dental delivers for CHC dental teams

athenaOne Dental is designed to help CHCs provide coordinated patient care by extending dental services into the broader athenaOne ecosystem. Unlike other technologies that function as standalone dental applications, it’s a single, connected platform for medical and dental offices with deep integrations across the organization.

Combining EHR, revenue cycle management, and patient engagement capabilities in a unified system helps organizations run more efficiently while supporting interoperability with external providers. The athenaOne Dental platform provides:

• Native integration within the athenaOne EHR
• Shared medical and dental records to improve care coordination between disciplines
• Integrated revenue cycle and patient engagement tools to streamline administrative operations
• Interoperability capabilities to support record exchange with outside providers and referral partners
• Established and active customer community opportunities for peer collaboration, best-practice sharing, and ongoing system optimization

Equally important, athenaOne Dental is backed by a vendor with years of experience helping CHCs successfully deliver whole-person care. It’s a company that knows dental leaders have choices when it comes to the technologies they use in their practices, and it’s a ready partner who understands what they’ll need after those choices are made as they look to adapt to what comes next.