You’re working at the front desk at your dental practice and the building’s fire alarm goes off. What’s your first instinct? Grab your coat and personal valuables? Help the doctors and hygienists get patients off the chairs and out the door? Locate and grab the SDS binder?
What?
Yes, one dental office administrator recently related to me how she’s been told in no uncertain terms not to leave the office in this kind of emergency situation without grabbing the three-inch binder of OSHA Safety Data Sheets.
You know what I mean…three-hole-punched product safety sheets that have been wedged one-by-one into the binder over the past few years. Sheets that may be out of date or not even pertinent to the practice anymore. Sheets that someone would need to spend days to replace if the binder was destroyed or lost.
There’s so much wrong with this picture!
The Role of SDSs
SDSs contain critical reprocessing information for reusable hand-pieces and consumables. Different items need different levels of care to ensure their safe use and long life. You know very well you can’t just throw everything into your autoclave and voila – it’s clean, sanitized and good as new.
There’s a good reason OSHA’s Hazard Communication Standards require dental offices to maintain a complete collection of current SDSs for all the handpieces and consumables used in the office. Your techs need easy access to this information. And if OSHA regulators ever drop by for a visit, they’ll want pretty quick access to it as well!
But is there a better way to compliantly manage SDSs than this paper-copy-hole-punch-binder system? What if SDSs were available through a customized online database? What if everyone in your office who needed to see an SDS could immediately pull it up from your secure database on their computer or smartphone? And what if there was someone else ensuring that the SDS in your database is the most recent version from the manufacturer?
In other words, what if you had a 21st Century-approach to SDS document management?
With the oneSOURCE Dental Document Database services, you’ll have that and more.
Service…Not Binders
Your secure, customized Dental Document Database stores these SDSs online…along with equipment cleaning protocols, manufacturer’s Instructions for Use (IFU) documents, your certifications and state licenses, and other related proprietary information (how about pictures or ordering information, for example).
We work with each client to customize their database – points of access and the universe of SDSs and IFUs matching all the equipment you use.
About oneSOURCE
We’re old pros at this. We’ve been around since 2009 – our first database product was the Surgical Instrument & Equipment Database for manufacturer’s IFUs – now used worldwide and in more than 80% of the hospitals and clinics in the U.S. Several years later we rolled out the Biomedical Database (also for healthcare facilities) that contains manufacturers’ preventive maintenance manuals for the biomed equipment used in healthcare facilities.
The Dental Database was a logical next step – serving dental offices and clinics by providing quick access to critical safety information and promoting their compliance with regulatory requirements.
So, back to that fire alarm. After you’ve knocked over your coffee cup and peeled yourself off the ceiling take care of the really important things that can’t be replaced. Your SDS binder won’t even feed the fire!
