The Story of Dentascribe
Anuj Gupta • 5 minute read • May 24, 2025
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The Birth
Dentascribe started in August 2022. I first thought of the idea for Dentascribe during my university clinics. At the Royal London Dental Hospital, we didn’t have dedicated dental software—instead, we used to record hard tissue charts using word documents, and recorded plaque and bleeding scores on Excel sheets. A single hard tissue chart could take over 10 minutes per patient, painstakingly filling shapes with colours and adding text boxes to the word document.
It was so annoying that I decided to make my next coding project a simple interactive website for hard tissue charting, plaque and bleeding scores, 6PPC, and tooth surface loss.
Over time, more charts were added, including 6PPC, plaque, bleeding, and TSL. Believe it or not, these original charts are still widely used in the hospital today. You can even find the original dental chart online: https://dental-chart-old.vercel.app/.
The Need for Better Note-Taking
Fast forward to December 2023. As a dental student myself, I noticed the need for a note-taking tool. Beyond speeding up note-taking, I saw how incomplete notes was leading to poor shared care in student clinics. When patients are rotating around multiple different students on clinics, consistent, clear clinical records are paramount.
My aim was simple: create a free dental tool that any student in the dental hospital could use. Ultimately, I wanted to help students spend less time writing patient notes and more time learning dentistry. And indirectly improve patient care.
There were some key requirements from the outset:
- Simplicity Above All: This was non-negotiable. The tool had to be incredibly simple to pick up and use without any prior training (having to create accounts for websites is just annoying).
- Templates: The notes needed to follow UK guidelines for record-keeping, including robust consent-taking.
- Education: The templates themselves should "guide" students through examinations and treatments, helping ensure nothing was missed.
- Compliance: It had to be fully compliant for use in an NHS hospital environment.
- Integration with EHRs: Crucially, it needed to work seamlessly with the hospital's electronic health record (EHR) system.
The result? A super simple note-taking tool with comprehensive templates that drastically sped up writing clinical records and standardised note-taking. It worked with the hospital EHR by allowing users to simply copy and paste the note into the regular hospital system. And it didn’t send any patient data externally off-device/off-premise, it was automatically compliant with all strict hospital data protection requirements.
The Future of Dentascribe
Dentascribe's note-taking capabilities have massively improved since its inception in December 2023. My hope is to continue adding features to Dentascribe, with a strong focus on young UK dentists.
Even though Dentascribe has only existed for around 18 months, it’s already very robust and feature-complete. Many more advanced features have been added, like audio AI note-taking and the ability to share templates across your team. And it’s more polished and bug-free than ever. However, there are a still a few more key features that are planned (patient letters 👀).
Dentascribe started as a 'community' project to make life easier for dental professionals and students while improving patient care—and I'm committed to maintaining this mission.
If you haven't tried Dentascribe yet, I really encourage you to give it a try. It's completely free and requires no account to use. If you're already using Dentascribe and finding it helpful, please share it with your friends and colleagues and leave us a review on Trustpilot to help spread the word!
