From plan to conversation

Before any of it: your pages

Chairside ships plain-language pages on the common treatments, and they are the only thing the assistant answers from. Before your first link, a chat asks how your practice actually runs — your hours, what you do about emergencies, how long you take over a crown, what you do not offer — and writes the answers into those pages in your words. It takes a sitting, not a project, and you can change any paragraph later.

Start with the plan

Chairside begins where the appointment ends: with a treatment plan. You do not write anything new for it. You take the plan you already have, choose what the patient sees, and make a link.

Make the chat

From the plan you set the items, the stages and their timing, and whether fees appear. You can add a note in your own words. A rough one is fine: "crowns for the cracks, fillings for the decay" is tidied into plain patient wording, in your voice, and tied to the plan items.

Chairside gives you the chat as a short link and a four-digit code. The whole thing takes under a minute.

Or a letter, or a reading list

The same plan can become a treatment plan letter. Chairside drafts it from your rows: what was found, what is proposed, the options, the risks, the stages and what happens next. Then it checks its own draft against your table: every tooth, item number and fee in the letter has to come from a row you entered, and anything that does not is flagged for you to fix before you download. The letter arrives as a Word file on your letterhead, with your name and provider number, and Chairside never emails it; it goes out from your practice like any other record.

For a patient who does not need a plan or a chat, a reading list: pick pages from your own patient information and send them as one link. No code, no questions, no credit used. Type a few words about the visit and the matching pages are ticked for you.

What your patient opens

At home, your patient opens the link and enters the code. There is no account, no app, and nothing to install. Five wrong codes lock the link.

They see their plan as a list, a tooth chart with their teeth marked, and the stages and timing you set. If you chose to include fees, they see the fees as written in the plan. There is a reading list you picked from your practice's pages.

What your patient can ask

Anything about the treatments in their plan, in plain language, any time the link is open. Answers come from your practice's published patient information and the plan, and they are given in your name. When a question is about a treatment outside the plan, the assistant points to your practice's page on it. When it has nothing on a topic, it says so.

After each answer the patient sees a few suggested questions, written the way a patient would ask them. They can ask for a summary of the conversation at any point.

The patient is told, clearly and early, that nobody reads the chat as it happens, that it is not a way to reach the clinic, that a flagged conversation may be passed to the practice as a nudge without what they wrote, and that you may read it later to improve the tool. They are asked not to type personal details.

What it refuses

The assistant does not diagnose, propose different treatment, or quote or estimate a cost that is not in the plan. It does not draft messages for the patient to send. It does not book, reschedule, or pass anything to the clinic, and it never claims a message has been seen. It uses nothing beyond your pages and the plan.

If a patient describes an emergency or distress, the reply points them to the clinic, an after-hours service, the emergency department, or 000 and Lifeline, before anything else.

What you read afterwards

You get a page for each patient: their plans, the links and codes, their appointments, your note, and every question they have asked. A short brief is written for you on each conversation, so you can read what happened without reading all of it. The words themselves are one click behind the brief.

A flag belongs to the patient rather than to one chat, and there are five: an emergency, something urgent, a caution to know before you see them, ready to book, and keen. You choose which of them email you. The evening before an appointment, Chairside tells you who is coming in, how many have asked something and how many are flagged.

Conversations have names, dates of birth, phone numbers, emails and addresses removed before they reach the AI service and before they are kept. Appointment dates stay. If you attach a patient to a link, their name and date of birth are held encrypted for your practice and never sent to the AI service.

What you control

Every page the assistant answers from is yours to edit, one paragraph at a time. Your wording outranks the shipped wording. Chairside updates the defaults over time; your edits stay, and you are told what changed. The reading pages carry your practice's name and logo.

Links close on their own after 90 days without use and are removed 90 days after that. You can close or reissue a link at any time.