The Buzz: Once you invest in a computer system, it should work forever. That’s why you paid so much money!

The Anti-Buzz: Like or not, your real investment should be in quality tech support.

Why: Like everything else you depend on, maintainence is required to keep it working properly.

I have already told you how we computer geeks enjoy our car metaphors; tech support is no exception. Finding good tech support can indeed be like finding a good auto mechanic – some will be incompetent, some will overcharge, some will be dishonest, some will suggest upgrades you don’t need and a few will be just perfect. Finding that perfect techie might unfortunately be a matter of luck, but that won’t stop me from giving you as many pointer as I can.

If you are cynical about the value of support, try to remember those times you ignored a problem on your bike or car or some other thing and then when you finally did get it fixed the performance boost astonished you. Similarly, computer and network performance can degrade very gradually, such that you won’t notice the effects yourself, but your business will still be suffering from them.

There are many factors which can affect the quality and quantity of support available to you. We’ll start from the beginning.

A new system:

Whether you realize it or not, the real reason you want computers in your office is for the database of information. I’ve heard my father extol the merits of office management software before, so I know an easy example is the appointment book. Without computers, it would make no sense to have an appointment book in every treatment room and at each receptionist’s desk – if you did that the record keeping would be very inconsistent. If a hygienist makes an appointment in one book, every other book has to be updated. If a patient cancels, same thing.

Of course, traditional paperized offices only keep one book for this reason. With a database you have the advantage of one consistent, centralized appointment book, but now not only can you make appointments in the treatment room, but two treatment rooms can be setting appointments at the same time, while a receptionist discusses the schedule over the phone with a patient and perhaps a Dentist in the back of the office wants to review what lies ahead for the day. All of this can happen without bottlenecking at the front desk for use of that one book.

But this is the sort of thing Emmott Sr. can explain better than I. I just wanted to reiterate that the whole purpose of having computers in your office is that you can condense all of your records, inter-relate them, browse them easily, and that you can do this from anywhere in the office. This means that at minimum you are purchasing the following:

• One server computer, (for the database), and a workstation computer for every location that you would ever want to access your office records from, (treatment rooms, labs, front desk, private offices).
• Equipment to network all of them.
• A software database. (DBMS)
• A suite of applications that let’s employees interact with the database. (Practice Management Software).

Possibly, each of those items could require a specialist technician. A dental office is small enough that the last two items are often combined – your practice management suite likely includes the database itself. Let’s cover the three categories.

Computers:

If buying a new computer, the first question is do you buy prefabs, (Dell, HP, etc), or do you have them custom built? This is a support question because prefabs often come with their own support crew, and often even a warranty. This is probably the most painless way to go, but is not necessarily the most cost effective.

You can typically save money on custom-built computers versus prefabs, and much like going to the dealership for your auto-maintainence, you can often find cheaper support if you look for it elsewhere.

I would not say that prefab computers are more reliable than custom-built ones, but their support team is going to be effective and reliable, if overpriced. Looking elsewhere can run the risk of getting bilked or disappointed. A good middle ground would be to buy computers supported by a warranty, and then be prepared to find cheaper support elsewhere once you stop getting it for free from the manufacturer.

(Editors note: In the past there were no reliable resources for dental IT support it was every man (or woman) for himself. That has changed with the introduction of national IT service departments supported by the big dental vendors like Patterson and Henry Schein. To add to what Andrew has said regarding price and to continue the car analogy going to Henry Schein Tech Central is like taking your car to the dealer for service. You will most likely pay more than you will at a local shop but you are assured of quality service.)

Networking:

If your computers are maintained by a plucky local tech, then you might have your networking covered by the same person. If you are going with prefab warranty support, they might not cover your networking problems. For the latter, this would be a good time to investigate the caliber of your local tech support gurus while you wait for your warranty to expire.

Either way, these first two areas, while separate disciplines, can often be covered by the same person or group. As professional relationships go, it will probably be less strain on you to have to interface with more techs than you need to, but that can vary.

Questions like WiFi vs. ethernet cables are good one to discuss with your support technician, but they are not as ground-shaking as the decision to buy prefab computers over custom-built ones. Transitioning from wireless to wired and back again should not be terribly expensive or time consuming, should either option ever dissatisfy you.

Practice Management Software:

This is another huge investment, and hard to back-peddle from once you commit. My father has urged you many times to get you and your staff trained on the applications you use and this somewhat falls under the support umbrella.

But for actual problems with the behavior of the software, the original vendor is going to be the best source most of the time. A normal tech isn’t going to be versed in the idiosyncracies of your software, and expecting them to be so would be like expecting every college English major to be versed in JD Salinger. They very well might be, but Salinger is a small subset of English literature much as Dentrix or whatever you are using is a small subset of all software out there.

While I do urge the consolidation of your support crew if at all possible, the only way to get your practice management software included is to get all your support from the software vendor, (Including computers, networking – even though that’s not their industry). While this might work fine – and would certainly be convenient – your software vendor is also the only support person you can’t fire. Agreeing to take all of your support from an organization that is not incentivized to build you an inexpensive computer or network might be a mistake. Its not strictly a bad idea either, but just be alert, do your homework, etc, before handing over the reigns to a singular entity.

Pitfalls:

If I were to ask you to take only one piece of advice from this column it would be this: Don’t let your lack of techknowledge make you timid. Hold your tech support to a high standard. Shifty IT guys and shifty auto-mechanics both prey on the same thing: your ignorance.

If a doctor gave you a serious diagnosis, you would likely get a second opinion. Likewise, if IT tells you something can’t be done, or is going to cost a lot to get something done, or that you really should perform an expensive upgrade from this to that, get a second opinion. Going back to our opening: no, your system shouldn’t work perfectly out of the box, but it should work perfectly if you are investing in good IT. If you want your system to do X and your IT guy would rather it do Y, then move on to the next IT guy. If you do want to find that rare, perfect tech support crew, you aren’t going to get anywhere settling for someone who fills you with a great sense of mediocrity.

Like I said, don’t be timid. You need to walk the fine line between trust and alertness. It is okay to make demands; IT works for you, not the other way around.

On the flip-side, if you are a tech geek yourself don’t think that means you can get away without paying for good tech support. Just because you can fix all the problems in your office doesn’t mean that you should. You are a dentist, not an IT professional. While being able to handle tech-emergencies on your own is a great skill, time spent in self-IT is time spent away from the rest of your practice. Improve your skills, build rapport with your patients, etc, etc. If you really like fixing computers more than you like dentistry, you might want to consider switching careers.

Conclusion:

The idea of holding tech support to a high standard can be applied generally to your office computing experience. It’s a tired joke, but it has a ring of truth: If computers are supposed to make our lives easier, then why can be such a source of frustration? It’s a good question. Problems are inevitable, but if the computers in your office are not pulling their weight, then you need to be bold and fix the problem, and that requires outside assistance, and that’s why you invest in tech support. Don’t “computerize” just because that’s the way the world is shifting. See what it can do for you, and then make those things happen.

Patterson Dental is pleased to announce the upcoming release of Eaglesoft 16 practice management software. Eaglesoft 16 will allow you to personalize your practice management software, giving you more power to run a smart and efficient practice.

via EagleSoft.Net – Home.

Dent-X is excited to unveil EVAsoft, its completely new imaging software. EVAsoft, developed from the ground up by Dent-X engineers, works as the driving software behind the popular EVA Digital X-Ray sensor.

The new EVAsoft features include: Keep-On-Top, where x-rays stay visible over any window so a doctor can simultaneously edit a patient’s chart, while looking at the x-ray. Bridging with all popular practice management software. Also manual, and automatic image contrast enhancement, works with intraoral cameras, and is fully networkable.

ImageWorks – Dental EVA Sensors.

Coaching was one of the services we saw at the technology Summit last week in Utah. Coaching is not a hot brand new service, it was introduced a few months ago, but it is pretty exciting.

Coaching uses the numbers you generate by using a PMS (in this case Dentrix) and then analyses them for you. That means you do not need to select and run reports, or more often try and get an overworked team to run reports. You do not need to try and figure out what the report numbers mean, whether your numbers  are average or good and then what to do about them. That is all part of the coaching service.

For example a coaching report will:

• Use Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) – to better Analyze Your Practice and show you how reports can help you track and analyze these crucial numbers more effectively, and provide suggestions for improving your KPI results.
• Optimize Your Schedule – eliminate these costly scheduling gaps by reconciling appointments with production goals.
• Increase Case Acceptance—review unscheduled treatment plans, analyze treatment plan statistics, and increase overall production and case acceptance.
• Maximize Continuing Care—continuing care is critical for both your patients’ long-term dental health and your practice’s long-term financial well-being.

The new Profitability Coaching is delivered by experienced Dentrix coaches and is customized to each dentist’s unique practice management needs. This coaching program includes important topics tailored to help dentists and key team members…

via Dental Software – Dentrix.

Those parts of the system that you can hit with a hammer are called hardware; those program instructions that you can only curse at are called software.
- Anonymous

PracticeWorks has announced that effective Sept 1 theywill no longer operate under the Kodak brand but will change their name to Carestream Dental

Update Correction:  (From Practice Works) the above is incorrect as stated. As of September 1 we will operat as Carestream Dental, exclusive manufacturer of KODAK Dental Systems.

Digital Imaging | Dental Practice Management Software & Solutions | Diagnostic Radiology | Dental Systems.

I spent the morning with some of the people from Dentrix and they showed us some of the new features planned for the coming year as well as details of new projects that have been released and are still gaining momentum.

Practice Advisor is an improved reporting function that puts all the important key indicators into a single report, compares your office to benchmarks and then even gives a recommendation as to what to do about it. Very powerful lots of customizable features. More to come on this and what is even better is the coaching program.

The next major upgrade G5 is scheduled for release late in Q1 of 2011. The big news here is the long awaited conversion to a SQL data base. This has many long term consequences and allows for more automatic functions and even better reporting. Again lots more detail will follow.

One of the mistakes dentists make with digital charting is they only go part way. For example: They use a paper chart in the treatment room during diagnosis to mark future treatment. Then they take the paper chart to the computer and enter everything again. They will use the computer to create an estimate, insurance forms and schedule. Then they will go back to the paper chart to enter procedure notes, back to the computer to take a payment, back to paper for a prescription, back to the computer for the next appointment then back to paper to check the x-rays.

What the office ends up with is a mess. Everything is done at least twice, the paper chart is still needed no one is ever sure if something is on paper or in the computer. As a result the computer chart doesn’t save time and money it makes things worse.

The Buzz: “User-friendly” means the machine or system will do everything for you, taking dictation if necessary, and prepare your taxes at the end of the year.

The Anti-Buzz: “User-friendly” means that the machine or system does not get in your way, and that common functions are intuitive to find.

Why: Unless you think your job and industry are trivial, don’t expect your software to be either. It needs to be able to do a lot of things … and it certainly can’t read your mind.

This week is all about common technophobia. As blog readers, you are inherently more likely to be computer savvy, but stick with me. Computer engineers like to joke, “there is always a car metaphor,” and sure enough automobile drivers all know how to operate their vehicles, but some drivers are safer than others, some know how to change their own oil, others never learn where the cruise control is, and very few of them know enough to repair the car on their own. So to, go computer users.

“User-friendly” is an industry buzz term, and not a bad one. It came about in recognition that the success of the personal computer would be greater if it were more accessible to the average person. Computing technology predates World War II; it was only during my lifetime that somebody stood up and said, “Maybe we should make one that doesn’t require a PhD in electrical engineering to use?” Thus user-friendly denotes a certain design paradigm.

However, as I have said before, computers are not magic, and least of all they are not mind readers. Users need to understand and embrace this if they are ever to reconcile the fact that allegedly user-friendly software still demands a lot of know-how on their part. If you dream of the day when you can just speak your desires aloud in plain English and have them performed with a minimum of fuss, then what you want is a secretary, not a computer, and those will always be more expensive.

I have said before that security is a matter of personal responsibility, and so to is learning your suite of office software. The “Computer Revolution” is really a revolution of personal freedom in a very democratized, libertarian sense – by this I mean, your freedom and power in the information age are most directly linked to the amount of work you put into your own skills, knowledge, and business.

Of course I don’t mean to chastise anybody, I’m just suggesting that the robot-slave-singularity that some of us might have been hoping for is probably never coming and we might want to roll up our sleeves.

So how does one put down the misleading mantle of “user-friendly” and learn to set aside their techno-fear?

I’ll begin with a joke my father likes to tell, which in turn has become a joke I like to tell:

A chemical engineer, a mechanical engineer and a software engineer, old buddies from college, decide to take a road trip. Things are going well until the car sputters to a stop. The chemical engineer asks if they are out of gas, when the last oil change was, and what the coolant levels are. The mechanical engineer insists that he heard a rattle, and maybe a rock got in the transmission or, worse, the engine.

The software engineer says, “I don’t know what you a guys are worried about. Let’s just get out, get back in, restart it and everything should be fine.”

If you understand the joke, then you understand the first rule of overcoming technophobia: you can always re-boot:

1) Do not be afraid of failure, and just try again.

We’ve all been there. Sometimes that application just stops running. Sometimes that file won’t open. Sometimes restarting the application solves the problem. Sometimes restarting the computer solves the problem. I suppose it is hard to assert that computers are not magic when nonsense like this occurs, but try to understand the gravity of the situation: A computer is a machine that does billions of things per second. Every hour that your machine is turned on, it has done trillions of different things without failing once. Even if your computer failed once per day, you’re talking about something like a 0.000000000001% failure rate. Computers are not perfect, but they are really, really close and still they manage to annoy us. Best to take it in stride.

Sometimes buggy failures are more regular. We’ve all seen that error window:

Error Number 39
Unexpected value at 0×5E14
Cannot continue

And it just keeps coming up every time you do that one thing, right? If it makes you feel any better, I don’t know what this means either. I can take a few stabs. Programmer’s number their errors, so “39″ means something to the guy that wrote the code 12 years ago. 0×5E14 is a memory address – a physical location in your RAM. In other words, these sort of error messages mean nothing of value to anybody on the planet except for the dork who wrote the buggy software in the first place.

But if it happens all the time, here is the second rule of overcoming technophobia:

2) Copy the entire error message and paste it into Google.

A million monkeys on a million typewriters will eventually write the perfect novel, and somebody somewhere has encountered – and solved – your problem before.

Really this is the natural extension of the first rule. Failures happen, don’t be paralyzed by them, do what you can to fix them, move on. Many jokes are made about how your 12-year old is better with the computer than you are – this is because your 12-year old did it wrong 100 times first and wasn’t ashamed of it. They also probably picked up a lot by watching someone else do something. It has been suggested that this is a generational thing, but it probably suffices to say here that adults are less willing to put up with repeated failure and also less practiced at the art of learning new things through simple observation.

If I may be so hokey, try to approach computing with child-like curiosity. Revel in the thought that there is so much to learn, and then live the self-made adventure that is learning it.

And so we come to my last point, coming full circle to that great buzzword: User-friendly. As a developer, making something user-friendly means making the program intuitive to use. The greatest tool to that end is following the same standards that other programs follow, both spoken and unspoken. Ideally, if you learn one application really well, you are well equipped to use another. As most of you know, Ctrl+C copies and Ctrl+V pastes, and this is the same across most programs you have used. Most of the time Alt+W will close the current window. The first two menus in nearly every application are “File” and “Edit” and the last is typically “Help” and the sort of things you find in those menus tends to be the same. Thus, our last rule for the day:

3) Learn the basic conventions and keyboard shortcuts of the applications you use most because that knowledge is transferable.

My father advocates a program like Microsoft Word to learn on. Its basic functions are easy to grasp, but it is actually a very powerful program. Learn all the basic shortcuts, and even venture deep into the menus and observe how may features exist that you didn’t even know about. This a good attitude to adopt because a lot of people yearn for features they already have and are just too unadventurous to find. Learn to find them. (Of course, also as my father advocates, training is an excellent way to learn your complex office management suite).

Remember, all those menus and options are there for you, not the tech support guy.