The clipboard that survived the computer

A new patient sits in the waiting room with a clipboard on her knee. The form asks about medication, past illnesses, allergies and recent operations, and she fills in what she can remember. Across the room, the practice's electronic record is open on the front-desk screen, waiting for the same information.

Nobody designed it this way. The record arrived, the clipboard stayed, and the practice learned to run both. A survey from Indiana suggests the clipboard is far from rare, even where computers are common, at least among the dentists who answered it.

What the Indiana survey found

In March and April 2021, Li and colleagues ran an online survey of dentists in Indiana; the results were published in 2024 in JMIR Formative Research. Of the 2,148 people invited, 161 completed it, a response rate of 7.5%. Of the 160 who said where they worked, 126 were in private practice.

Of those 161 respondents (Indiana dentists, surveyed in 2021, most of them in private practice), 127 (78.9%) used paper forms for medical histories, 97 (60.2%) reported needing to make repeated requests for medical information, and 80 (49.7%) reported information that did not arrive in time. In the same survey, 79.5% used an electronic dental record to manage clinical data.

Both at once

It is tempting to read the paper figure and the electronic-record figure together, as proof that the same dentists run both side by side. The survey cannot show that: respondents could give more than one answer, and the published results do not cross paper use against electronic-record use.

There are other limits. The response rate was low, the answers are self-reported, and the sample comes from a single state. It is not a national estimate, and it does not measure hours lost. What it does record is a pattern: paper forms and repeated chasing of information, in a setting where clinical computing is common.

An older, wider gap

An earlier survey gives a longer view. Schleyer and colleagues surveyed practitioner-investigators in The Dental Practice-Based Research Network, in the United States and Scandinavia, and 729 of the 991 invited (73.6%) responded. The paper appeared in JADA in January 2013; the year the data were collected is not confirmed, but it was earlier.

In that network survey (729 responses, published in 2013), among the American respondents, 73.8% of solo practitioners and 78.7% of group practitioners kept some patient information on a computer. Only 14.3% and 15.9%, respectively, kept all of it there. Among the Scandinavian respondents, that last share was above 90%.

These are historical figures and should be read as such. A research network is not a random national sample, and none of these percentages describes adoption in 2026. What the study offers is a distinction: using a computer is not the same as running a paperless process, and the gap between settings and countries can be large.

Where information comes in

Side by side, the two surveys do not make a trend. They asked different people different questions at different times. They do share an observation: a practice can use a computer every day and still depend on information that arrives on paper, arrives late, or arrives only after someone asks again.

That points to a more useful question than whether a clinic is digital: where each piece of information enters the practice, who has to ask for it, and how often.

This is where SoliumOS is meant to help, quietly. It prepares the administrative work around care and keeps information where the team works, inside the clinic's own cloud, while the people in the practice approve every step.

Sources

• Li et al. (2024). Dentists' Information Needs and Opinions on Accessing Patient Information via Health Information Exchange: Survey Study. JMIR Formative Research, 8:e51200.
• Schleyer et al. (2013). Electronic dental record use and clinical information management patterns among practitioner-investigators in The Dental Practice-Based Research Network. JADA, 144(1):49–58.