The large majority of Dental Practice Management Software products really work well in a one office practice. Of course, just about every dental team has their own unique set of good and bad experiences with these products, by and large most single office practices are fairly well served in the market place.
It is a lot harder to get a multi-site dental practice to be able operate smoothly across miles of separation using those standard products. This type of setup will invariably mandate some higher than average Networking costs for high speed links between the cities. For a multi-site dental practice that utilizes a centralized server, there is the additional consideration that the central site’s network connection needs to be larger in size, depending on the number and speed/size of the remote offices’ links.
In other words, for a multi-site network to provide decent response times in a 5 location practice, you normally would have the central site link speed set at say 2.0 Mbps and the remotes all set to about .5Mbps (1/4th the speed of the central site). Otherwise you create your own self-inflicted “bottleneck” which creates lockups, timeouts, database corruption, slowdowns and other undesirable events.
There are a number of ways to adapt the popular software packages to a multi-site practice model, none of them are very elegant or responsive. These single office software packages can be adapted for multi-site but each has it’s own drawbacks.
There are only a couple of Dental Practice Management software packages that have been specifically designed from the ground up to support a distributed environment. We recently got a taste of what it is like to work with a vendor that offers a very interesting multi-site dental practice software. The product is DENTECH from Softech, Inc. (www.dentech.com)
They make this product in a Windows version and a UNIX version. It is the UNIX version that is truly the most robust and lighting fast performer for operating the business side of a dental practice. The reason it is so fast, is that it is a “green screen” type program that does not carry with it the tremendous overhead of the graphical user interface and interlocking “client –server” transaction traffic. What is delivered to the user is characters on the screen in their most basic form…..typically for a letter that would be 8 bits. To represent that same letter on your screen in a GUI, graphical user interface, the commands need to be sent to invoke the pretty screen, the arrows, the buttons, the menus, the drop down box choices, etc..
What is the NET NET, you ask?
A single click of the mouse in a GUI program will require the transmission of thousands of 8 bit “bytes” each of which is the equivalent of a letter.
A single keyclick in a “green screen” program would normally only require transmission of a handful or a few dozen “bytes” to accomplish the same business action.
The upside of this program is that it handles scheduling, insurance, financial arrangements, ledger, a good solid set of reports, time clock, backup, and is probably the best system available for someone who needs a lightning fast multi-practice dental software and doesn’t what to spend a lot of money on monthly networking costs.
The downside of using this package is that you really need to be prepared to use standalone products for case presentation and clinical imaging tools. But that may be preferable to trying to make a one-office software product do something it was not built to do.
There is always the choice of having all remote offices stand-alone with their own servers and systems. Then you have the problem of having to move records around from one system to the other (not to difficult but labor intensive). You also have to have all the practices run separate financials which then have to be concatenated manually by a central finance coordinator. It’s really the nature of the market right now. There are simply not enough multi-site practices in existence to drive the market place to build a better product.
If you are a multi-site practice or are having problems with a multi-site software implementation, you might give DENTECH a fair look. Their director of customer service, Pat Schwind, and one of their trainers, Marsh Bettner, were extremely helpful, courteous and responsive in helping us to setup a new Dentech configuration for one of our clients to address implmentation of highly granular and efficient scheduling methods.
To learn more about Dental Practice imaging tools and software, computing technologies and environments contact the technology division of Jameson Management today (580-369-5556) and ask for ROBIN, or visit us on the web at www.jamesonmanagement.com .
It is a lot harder to get a multi-site dental practice to be able operate smoothly across miles of separation using those standard products. This type of setup will invariably mandate some higher than average Networking costs for high speed links between the cities. For a multi-site dental practice that utilizes a centralized server, there is the additional consideration that the central site’s network connection needs to be larger in size, depending on the number and speed/size of the remote offices’ links.
In other words, for a multi-site network to provide decent response times in a 5 location practice, you normally would have the central site link speed set at say 2.0 Mbps and the remotes all set to about .5Mbps (1/4th the speed of the central site). Otherwise you create your own self-inflicted “bottleneck” which creates lockups, timeouts, database corruption, slowdowns and other undesirable events.
There are a number of ways to adapt the popular software packages to a multi-site practice model, none of them are very elegant or responsive. These single office software packages can be adapted for multi-site but each has it’s own drawbacks.
There are only a couple of Dental Practice Management software packages that have been specifically designed from the ground up to support a distributed environment. We recently got a taste of what it is like to work with a vendor that offers a very interesting multi-site dental practice software. The product is DENTECH from Softech, Inc. (www.dentech.com)
They make this product in a Windows version and a UNIX version. It is the UNIX version that is truly the most robust and lighting fast performer for operating the business side of a dental practice. The reason it is so fast, is that it is a “green screen” type program that does not carry with it the tremendous overhead of the graphical user interface and interlocking “client –server” transaction traffic. What is delivered to the user is characters on the screen in their most basic form…..typically for a letter that would be 8 bits. To represent that same letter on your screen in a GUI, graphical user interface, the commands need to be sent to invoke the pretty screen, the arrows, the buttons, the menus, the drop down box choices, etc..
What is the NET NET, you ask?
A single click of the mouse in a GUI program will require the transmission of thousands of 8 bit “bytes” each of which is the equivalent of a letter.
A single keyclick in a “green screen” program would normally only require transmission of a handful or a few dozen “bytes” to accomplish the same business action.
The upside of this program is that it handles scheduling, insurance, financial arrangements, ledger, a good solid set of reports, time clock, backup, and is probably the best system available for someone who needs a lightning fast multi-practice dental software and doesn’t what to spend a lot of money on monthly networking costs.
The downside of using this package is that you really need to be prepared to use standalone products for case presentation and clinical imaging tools. But that may be preferable to trying to make a one-office software product do something it was not built to do.
There is always the choice of having all remote offices stand-alone with their own servers and systems. Then you have the problem of having to move records around from one system to the other (not to difficult but labor intensive). You also have to have all the practices run separate financials which then have to be concatenated manually by a central finance coordinator. It’s really the nature of the market right now. There are simply not enough multi-site practices in existence to drive the market place to build a better product.
If you are a multi-site practice or are having problems with a multi-site software implementation, you might give DENTECH a fair look. Their director of customer service, Pat Schwind, and one of their trainers, Marsh Bettner, were extremely helpful, courteous and responsive in helping us to setup a new Dentech configuration for one of our clients to address implmentation of highly granular and efficient scheduling methods.
To learn more about Dental Practice imaging tools and software, computing technologies and environments contact the technology division of Jameson Management today (580-369-5556) and ask for ROBIN, or visit us on the web at www.jamesonmanagement.com .
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