Overview
This project identifies these inefficiencies and reimagines Ascend through an AI-powered lens — focusing on usability, HIPAA compliance, and staff support — while reducing cognitive load and unnecessary clicks. ​
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Role: Researcher, UX/UI Designer
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Design Process: Double Diamond
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Timeline: September 2025-Present
Problem​
Dentrix Ascend is widely used in private dental practices for scheduling, charting, and billing. However, it has a reputation for being fragmented — staff jump between billing, charting, imaging, and scheduling silos.​ This creates risk of missed information and cognitive load that leads to provider burnout. By utilizing human centered design thinking, we can generate new, easier-to-use workflows that better support the clinical team and improve patient care.
Discover​​
Task Analysis
Dentrix workflows are click-heavy. Breaking down number of steps for common tasks, in this case the tasks needed for a morning huddle (ie. access notes, find forms, schedule review) made inefficiency visible.
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Card Sorting
​Staff often struggle with finding forms or modules. I organized a card sorting exercise with 3 members of my dental team (dentist, dental assistant, front desk) to reveal how they expect info to be grouped. They consistently grouped items into 4 buckets.
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Heuristic Evaluation
EHRs like Dentrix Ascend often fail basic UX principles — I used Nielsen Norman's heuristic evaluation to critically evaluate usability problems and opportunities.
Define
With key insights found through research and discovery, I identified 2 key problems and 2 key opportunities. I used these to define a 'How Might We' statement to guide my designs.
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Problem areas
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Excessive exposure of sensitive data - default dashboards and schedules display patient and financial information
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Navigation inefficiency - users waste time by toggling between modules, opening new windows, and manually scanning charts
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Opportunities
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New dashboard layout - reduce clicks and protect sensitive data that aligns with real workflows
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AI Powered Assistance - save time manually searching for information and minimize missing important information that impact chair side decisions
How might we...
Redesign Dentrix Ascend to simplify clinical workflow by providing the right information to the right team members at the right time?
Design
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Design consideration #1
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Role based dashboard, mirroring clinical workflow while protecting sensitive data ​
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Problem: The current dashboard contains sensitive financial information and schedules showing patient information — exposing sensitive data on shared screens.
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Solution: A role based dashboard that defaults to a HIPPA compliant schedule and modules that align with clinical workflow.
Design consideration #2
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AI-powered morning huddles, prepare for the day without the cumbersome preparation
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Problem: Reviewing patient charts for morning huddles requires multiple clicks, accessing buried forms, and toggling through tabs to sift through information.
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Solution: Integrated AI for morning huddles and alerts that retrieves medical alerts, relevant forms, overdue treatments, and unaddressed concerns. This streamlines the process of patient work up for morning huddles and prepares the dental team for their day.
Design consideration #3
AI Chairside Assistant, instant answers for the dental assistant
Problem: Dentists and dental assistants need quicker chair side access to check insurance coverage, treatment codes, and product recommendations.
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Solution: AI assisted chatbot and AI assisted search bars. With this solution, X pages were consolidated and drop down menus are faster to use.
Vibe Coding to create an MVP
Utilizing XX to create a what...
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Coming soon over a blurry image
Deliver
Vibe Coding an MVP
Summary and next steps
This was a challenging and valuable project to utilize product design in a field that I am very familiar with. My biggest challenge throughout this project was around designing with clarity and simplicity. With a background in dentistry, I understood the complexities around dental care and knew what I wanted the app the achieve, but it was only through usability testing and feedback that I was able to design effectively for my unique patient population.
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While there are still more opportunities to design (see below), next steps would involve connecting with a software developer to launch this product and partner with insurance companies to transfer API of patient insurance plans to address another key pain point for users.
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