Rewrite post-op instructions patients actually follow
It is eight at night and a patient from this afternoon's extraction is calling the emergency line about bleeding that is completely normal, because the sheet they went home with is a photocopy of a photocopy that nobody reads.
You have a clean one page sheet for every procedure you do, written the way you actually talk, with a call us right away section specific enough to cut the after hours calls that were never emergencies.
The prompt
Paste this into claude.ai and replace anything in brackets.
You are writing patient post-operative instructions for a dental practice. These are general instructions for a procedure type, not advice for any specific person, and a licensed dentist will review and approve them before use. Procedure: [name it, for example simple extraction, surgical extraction of a lower third molar, scaling and root planing, crown seat, root canal therapy] How we actually do it: [gauze pressure timing, whether you use sutures and whether they dissolve, what you recommend for discomfort, food and drink restrictions, rinse instructions and when to start, activity limits, and anything you tell every patient out loud] Practice details: [office name, phone number, after hours number, hours] Write a one page sheet at a sixth grade reading level with these sections: 1. Today, for the next few hours 2. Tonight 3. The next few days 4. Normal, and not a reason to worry 5. Call us right away if 6. Your follow up Rules: short sentences, active voice, and a plain word next to any clinical term. Do not name specific drugs or doses unless I listed them. Do not invent timelines I did not give you. Put anything you are unsure about in brackets so we can fill it in. Then give me the same sheet again in Spanish.
What to skip in dental practices
- Anything with protected health information in it. Do not paste patient names, dates of birth, chart numbers, radiographs, or exports from your practice management software into claude.ai on a Free, Pro, Max, or Team plan. Anthropic's Business Associate Agreement covers HIPAA-ready services such as Claude Enterprise with HIPAA compliance activated by the Primary Owner, and the first-party API, and those consumer plans sit outside that coverage. Work from de-identified summaries and templates until a signed BAA is actually in place.
- Clinical diagnosis and treatment decisions. Claude is not a medical device and is not cleared for diagnosis. Do not ask it to read a radiograph, stage periodontal disease, choose between restorative options, or decide whether a tooth is restorable. The dentist diagnoses and the dentist owns the plan. Claude only helps explain a plan a clinician already made.
- Sending anything to a patient or a carrier unread. Post-op instructions, appeal narratives, and treatment explanations all carry professional liability, and a draft that reads well can still be wrong. A licensed clinician approves every word before it leaves the office.
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Before you try it
More for dental practices
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- Draft the insurance appeal before the deadline passes
- Build a recall and reactivation message library