First Month: Practice Management Software

Associates. Welcome back. Let's talk about your practice management software. The reason why I have this in the category titled your first month is because when you come into the practice, there's a lot of things that you're going to want to possibly change over time. One of them is the practice management software. And I'm not saying that to steer everybody away from a given practice management software. I say that because a lot of sort of doctors that have been around a long time are using a very old system that isn't supported anymore or a very paper based system and you're going to want to make some changes there. Even if you have a more modern practice management software or even a big name practice management software, it's important to understand what your options are out there because there is an increase increasing number of solutions for practice management technology. Now let me first explain. If you're a dental student or a dental associate, you may not know exactly what all the functionality is of a practice management software. You might just see it's of course what's on the computer screen of the front office at the front desk where they're entering patient information in and all that stuff. You might have a general idea or you may know a lot. I don't know, but I think I want to take a few minutes to share with you what these softwares are different functionalities that they have in some of the big names out there. So you know, as you explore options, some of the features that may be helpful for you. Now we've worked with so many dentists that we've seen so many different practice management softwares that we have just a few kind of thoughts that might be helpful to you. It is the heart of your practice data and data in running any business is critical to making good decisions. This isn't your accounting software and it's not your, you know, it's not for marketing, it's not for a lot of other things. This is what houses all of your patient data. It's what you do all of your scheduling on and it's what you do your bill. It's your billing software as well. So it has manages all of that front office data. It also manages your clinical data, the exams, the charting, the treatment planning, the digital image management as well. And then lastly, a lot of them are increasingly introducing more and more practice management data. Business intelligence, which is a big theme in the world of business ownership these days from small to large businesses, is having the right intel to understand your business and make decisions accordingly. And within a lot of these now you can do goal setting and tracking. Now features that may be built in or integrated by an API are the following. And let me explain what an API is. I think it stands for Application Programming Interface. Could be wrong in that. But API is the coding language that allows one software to communicate or speak with another software. And there are a lot of softwares out there that service the dental industry that have an API in order to communicate with your practice management software, sort of extract the data and then give you helpful information through that technology platform. For example, patient communication systems, there's a handful of those out there. For dentists, a patient communication system is what will send automatic text reminders or emails to patients to remind them of their visit and allow a lot of just communication from office to patient that's just built into the technology automatically. Business intelligence, like I mentioned there, there are some great softwares out there that will plug into your through an API, into the practice management software and give you all this really rich data about your new patients, about your hygiene productivity or productivity by provider, about your accounts receivable, about holes in the schedule. It'll allow you to set goals for various items in your practice, in your team meetings. In the morning you can be looking at your actual versus goal. These business intelligence softwares are really valuable and if I were a dentist I would have some way of tracking the business intel in my practice. Some of the practice management softwares are building that in and they're getting better. Others are exclusively on the business intel and they've created the API to then leverage the data. So they're not the practice management software, they're just the business intelligence side of it and it pulls the data merchant processing. As I mentioned in my prior module, that a lot of the softwares, now the practice management softwares will integrate with the merchant processing terminal there at the front desk so that it automatically push payment to a given patient when they swipe their credit card. There's a convenience, there's a cost, you got to weigh that, but can be valuable imaging as well. A lot of softwares are allowing you now to bring the patient images, the X rays directly into the software without a third party app that allows that to happen. So the more integration, sometimes directly, if it's native within the software, just the better it often works sometimes. Now some key points. View your practice holistically when it comes to technology to the extent that you can take, I guess what I'll call the Apple approach. The Apple approach is they have all of their, they sort of design their whole platform so that it's all working just for itself. It's not really. There's not independent third parties that are all using their technology and building their technology. It's all Apple products and therefore it works very, very smooth. Now that's not an endorsement of Apple or anything but just as a concept, think of your practice a little bit that way from a technology standpoint that to the extent you can have all the technology that is working together and, and it's very integrated or from the same provider that can create a lot of ease for you as you manage the data and you manage.

A lot of the processing and a lot of the work within your dental practice. Number two is transitioning from an old system to a new system will be painful. There is no way around that it's gonna be painful, but guess what, it's gonna be really well worth it. If you buy a practice that's largely paper based or it has some really outdated unsupported software, then buckle up, it's going to be painful. You just got to tell your staff, hey, we're going to be going through this and it's going to be hard but when we come out of this, your job is actually going to be a lot easier. And that's really important for me and it's important that we have modern best practices and best use technology for ourselves and for our patients. Now a lot of these softwares are going to the cloud. In fact even the big ones, Dentrix and Eaglesoft are going to the cloud. Dentrix has one called Ascend, Eaglesoft has one called Fuse. I think they're just going live this year, 2020, don't quote me on that. Others are built from the ground up.

To be cloud based. For example, Curved dental is one of the early cloud based only platforms that's not attached to a supply company. Dentrix is attached to Henry Schein supply company. Eaglesoft is attached to Patterson Supply company. But you have a lot that now that are sort of emerging that are just have the sole purpose, the sole focus is providing a practice management system. And then a lot of them are wanting to give you that business intel and, and a lot of native functionality like patient communications, all sort of built in. So it's not API driven with third parties. There's a lot going on there, a lot changing in the industry. Some really cool things coming out from all of them actually and do some research on those to maybe find the one that is the best fit for your style of practice. I mentioned a couple curvedental, open dental, open dental, Very popular open source online I believe it's online software. Dentrix, ascend, carestream, tap 32, fuse, and gosh, there's probably another 10:15. I don't mean to be endorsing any one of those, but just say you got a lot of good options and this is an area where you really want to do some research, see which ones will integrate with your X ray technology and other systems throughout your offices to try to create a real cohesive tech platform within your practice. Hope this was helpful.