INTRODUCTION
The global dental care and treatment market is growing at 5% Compounded Annual Growth Rate which has been visible in the last five years with the Asian market showing highest growth of 10% followed by the United States of America at almost half of the total rate of 5.5% CAGR. The market research and analysis team of BCC research agency reveals in its latest report Global Dental Markets: Furniture, Equipment, Materials and Supplies that the global market for these oral health care and treatment industry is expected to reach a total revenue of $55Billion by the year 2019, this steady change in the global market is seen to grow with a five year compound annual growth rate(CAGR) of 2.9%. According to the Indian Dental Association (IDA) the overall revenue of dental care industry including products and equipments in India is expected to reach an amount of $120 million by the starting of 2017 and is projected to hit a staggering amount of $250 million by the year 2020. Surely a great division of this market is dominated by manufacturing based products related to dental treatments along with an assorted array of other helping entities, such as human resource. Major portion of the clinics operating in India generally tend to attract a huge number of patients as oral health maintenance is highly recommended. Major portion of the dental clinics in India are solely operated and privately managed practices where it is widely seen that the dentists offer an extensive array of treatment procedures along with a range of minor tooth surgeries too. Every year 13000 to 15000 new clinics are started in India. The dental care and treatment sector in India is consistently growing at a fierce pace and steady growth can be seen from the market trends. Despite this rapid growth in the sector, it is found that a major section of dental clinics operating within the country tend to store their clinic’s crucial information and payment related calculations in simple and unprotected logbook based systems, which sooner or later result into duplicity, inconsistency and corruption in existing data. Such a blunder could turn out to be a major fatality later for the supervising staff. Surely with the huge increase in population of the country, the fact is inevitable that there would be a drastic rise in the number of patients visiting dental clinics. With the sudden increase in number of patients, the difficulties faced by dental clinic’s staff to store and retrieve data would also increase. It is expected that more and more people would take up a regular oral health care maintenance regime which will include regular dental checkups, just like regular body checkups. The proposed application software is a desktop based data storage and maintenance system designed in the form of a Relational database management system. It is created as a productive alternative to the orthodox method of storing information in the register based system. It has been planned and developed as an attempt made towards assisting the dentists and their apprentices working at their dental clinics in making it less cumbersome for them to collect and retrieve patient related information and monetary calculations. The stored data is kept in a robust and secure method and the desired information by the user is presented in an automated and computerized manner. It is designed to provide the end-user a comparatively organized and time saving approach in manipulating all the relevant information related to a patient’s completed treatments or regarding their visit to the dental clinic as per their appointments. The complete software has been created in the form of an effortlessly accessible user interface based management system. Storing patient’s personal treatment reports and other important details in logbook based format makes the data vulnerable to theft as the registers are not able to protect the data stored inside from any unauthorized access. Apart from this fact, searching for some particular information out from such a file based storing format turns out be greatly challenging if the amount of data stored in the register is high as it means that the user has to search for the data by looking at almost every page of the register. As an efficient and accurate helping tool, computer has a vital role to play in this regard. It has got tremendous capability to store, retrieve and modify information along with the prospect of maintaining data securely in its entirety. A computer system is able to store comprehensive and accurate information in an easily retrievable structure and it also helps the user in locating and extracting exact desired information to make the data storing methods more efficient. Although Indian dental care practitioners have setup their privately run clinics at a high growing pace but majority of them have blindly followed the insecure file based format for keeping clinic’s important monetary and patient related data. Computer based system promises to give an error free handling of the information stored inside it as it processes the data according to a specific input request from the user. While working with computer software it is seen that most of the time it is an erroneous command given by the user which turns out to be the reason for a program for not processing correctly. Dental Clinic Practice Management named DentalCare is formulated after a thorough study of the prevailing dental clinic management system along with its constraints and limitations was done and hence has been designed as a solution for the problems tackled by dental clinic staff and dentists while storing and manipulating their clinic’s internal information in normal and unprotected register based systems. The designed software is also meant for any private entity/person or any organization who feels it is a better time now to shift towards newer techniques of dental patient’s treatment data upholding. As everything from equipment to medicines and all supporting elements of a clinic need capital to be purchased, it is obvious to state that at the end of the day any dental clinic’s monetary collections hold quite a significant importance both to the dentist and to the clinic. It is highly advisable to preserve the records of all the payments received and total collection related information of the clinic in a totally secure manner so as to maintain privacy over the data. Computer is considered to be the safest method to securely store information and to maintain complete privacy over the data, hence it is suggested that if the amount of information to be kept is large in quantity and is of private nature then computer based storage system should be taken as an option as it could provide highest level of security to stored information. DentalCare is an automated dental treatment billing and a computerized dental clinic management system which stores the treatment and patient related details in a precisely cohesive and robust arrangement. The software can also be used as a computerized tool to store the clinic’s total data related to money collections, which can later be accessed both in monthly and weekly format.