In the past, patients who turned up to a clinic were greeted by a receptionist who would ask few questions, and take down little information off them, before passing them onto the dentist.

However, with new government policy regarding emergency care, DHSV decided to improve the process.

It enlisted the services of BlueArc, a technology integrator and a Microsoft Gold Certified Partner, early last year to make the process a digital one rather than paper based. The project was completed several months later in May, and a further review of the system was completed in January this year.

Chad Craven, sales and marketing director at BlueArc, said it built the Web-based application using .Net 2.0 and ASP.Net. All the data in the back-end is housed on Microsoft SQL Server 2005 databases.

Today, when a patient arrives at a clinic, the receptionist asks between two to five questions. These questions are sufficient to allow the receptionist to categorize the patients into one of four groups.