Dental paging systems
A dental paging system lets your team signal each other without raising a voice or interrupting a patient. Here is how the three kinds differ, what to look for, and where an app-based system fits.
The quiet plumbing of a busy office.
It is how the front desk tells a doctor a patient is seated. It is how an assistant asks for help without leaving the chair. It is how a practice coordinates all day without an overhead speaker and without anyone calling down the hall.
The old versions did this with wired lights and chimes. The current ones do it with the screens the practice already owns.
Most practices are choosing between these.
A box in each operatory wired back to a panel, with a call light outside the door. Dependable, and expensive to change, because changing it means changing the wiring. Adding a room or moving a doctor is a service call.
Paging software installed on computers and run over the office network. Quick and reliable inside the building for exactly that reason. It usually cannot reach a second location, and somebody has to install it and keep it running.
Runs on the tablets, phones, and computers already in the practice. Nothing to wire and nothing in a closet. AltoSignal is this kind, and it now delivers across your own office network and through the cloud at the same time.
Six questions worth asking whatever you buy.
The message
The practical part
A call light answers none of the first three. That is usually the reason a practice starts looking.
The ones that come up before anyone books a demo.
They solve a similar problem in different settings. Nurse call systems are built for patients calling staff in hospitals and care homes. A dental paging system is staff to staff: the front desk telling a doctor a patient is seated, or an assistant asking for help without leaving the chair. AltoSignal is the second kind.
Wireless paging usually means dedicated radio hardware and a pager on every belt. AltoSignal uses the Wi-Fi and the screens your practice already has, so there is no separate radio system to buy and nobody has to carry a pager.
Yes. A call light tells you somebody needs something, but not who, what, or where. A message that reads "Dr. Smith, patient ready, Exam 1" carries all three, and it can be acknowledged so the sender knows it was seen, and logged so nobody has to remember.
AltoSignal is $3 per device per month, or $2 per device per month when billed yearly, a 33% saving. Paid plans have a 5 device minimum. The 30-day free trial does not, so you can try it on as few as 2 devices, with no credit card to start. For 20 devices or more we offer volume pricing, so email sales@altosignal.com and we will quote you.
With AltoSignal, devices on the same office network deliver signals directly to each other at the same time as the cloud. Both paths carry every message, so staff keep signaling through an outage. Changing button labels or adding a channel waits until the connection is back. See how local delivery works.
Side by side with the paging and intercom systems dental offices run today.
Wired call boxes with lights and chimes, and what replacing them looks like.
Light-based visual paging outside each operatory, moved onto screens.
Windows-only light signaling and text, compared with paging on any device.
A Windows "lights" intercom on the local network, compared with cloud paging.
Cross-platform paging kept inside the firewall, compared with multi-location.
App-based intercom on Android tablets, compared with native apps everywhere.
Windows paging software with a server on the office network, compared with paging on any device.
Set it up on the screens you already own in under ten minutes. Cancel anytime, no phone call.
Start 30-day free trialWant to watch it first? Follow one morning in a practice, front desk to operatory.
