What is it? For dentists, as for all health professionals, knowledge and experience are the key to a successful practice. Patients who are confident in their providers’ abilities become regular visitors. Understanding this, the American Dental Association has developed a new online service to help dentists store and update their credentials, which promises to be “a safely designed environment” that “offers both dentists and payers a level of confidence in utilizing this service.”

Why it works: Designed through a collaboration between ADA and Wonderbox Technologies, the credentialing service provides a platform for dentists to upload their information, which can be easily viewed for various purposes. “Our goal is to make your professional credentialing easier and faster and help streamline your submittal of application data to third-party payers, hospitals and employers,” the ADA says. The service is free and boasts a quick sign-up process of no more than 20 minutes, due in part to the pre-populated information taken from the user’s current ADA profile.

Other Benefits: An exciting feature of the system is that all dentists are able to take advantage of the tool, whether or not they are ADA members. According to the association, all U.S. dentists can use their assigned ADA Member Number, which they received when they entered dental school. ADA is finalizing the details needed to allow hospitals, dentists, and payers to view individual’s’ credentials, with the hope of extending to insurance companies in the future.