Is your dental business managed by a local server? Managing your own server requires a significant, ongoing IT investment — both financially and time-wise. Whether your server goes down from a natural disaster or through experiencing a plumbing mishap, you’re left with a nonfunctioning practice, and productivity comes to a complete halt. This causes you to call in the IT person again. You're already paying him or her for regular maintenance, how much more are you paying for these disasters?
In earlier days, a dental office having a server was pioneering. Today, having a server has become risky and expensive. In addition to all the extra costs of employing IT for multiple problems and updates, server shutdowns and hacking are obviously critical threats, but have you stopped to consider other inefficiencies that have been killing your productivity and raising costs?
Incompatible equipment costs more than you think.
Furthermore, do all of your systems, tools and equipment integrate with each other, in every operatory?
When servers and/or their programs decide to stop working, your entire business is vulnerable. Sometimes it’s so disruptive that the entire day or consecutive days have to be rescheduled costing you more revenue.
How this can cripple your workday and your expenses:
- This delay immediately triggers a backlog of appointments, some of which are likely to get cancelled by the patient due to inconvenience.
- Your staff now has to try and make up for the lost time and money by moving faster, calming irritated patients, and scheduling appointments creatively, adding a sense of urgency and stress to your practice.
- Patient satisfaction is at risk; no one wants to spend extra time at the dentist, or feel like a procedure is being done by a dental professional playing “catch up," so you may lose that patient altogether.
- More loss in profits to pay for fixes and updates.
Many servers, that are not even outdated yet, respond to regular updates by freezing up or crashing, forcing practices to resort to using a computer on wheels or a laptop that might be capable to log into the software remotely, in order to post anything of necessity or take and record X-rays. Often an IT professional is needed, and the cost is always an unexpected expense.
Little things add up, in a big way.
Save Time with Cloud-based Dental Software
Time = money. When using a cloud-based software rather than an on-site server, smooth integrations between programs and applications stop the multiple clicks throughs on multiple pages throughout the day to get to the information you need. Currently, you might have that information stored in separate programs or separate computers/hardware altogether. Cutting down the number of clicks and pages it takes to get to patient history, for example, can give you a significant amount of your day back when all of that time is added up.
With all of the technologies you might be utilizing, including phone systems, appointment scheduling, patient engagement, insurance processing and payments — wouldn’t it save so much time and effort if they were all truly integrated without the worries server controlled practices encounter?
With cloud-based dental practice management software, your integrations live in the cloud, streamlining your work and enabling you and your staff to work remotely, if needed. Web-based dental software upgrades are done overnight, so the end user doesn’t experience a disruption to the business, which affects productivity and profits. Whenever you log in to use the software, you have immediate access to the latest and greatest features and enhancements.
Traditional software requires installation on every computer in your business, which takes time. After installation, the software will need to be configured. And that takes even more time. With a cloud-based solution, all you need is a username and a password. Click. Done.
Find out more about cloud-based software options, and make the switch today.
