Love it or hate it – IT, software and hardware are all essential elements of running a successful dental practice, says Dentally.
Today the choice of IT tools is endless, and for some elements quite often costly. However, cloud-based practice management software can provide a more simple solution and ensures expensive server upgrades, arduous software updates and hardware headaches are a thing of the past.
Cloud-based practice management software has a financial impact on several aspects of the business by saving money, the most obvious is on IT. With cloud-based software there is no need to buy an expensive server or high-specification PC’s and laptops, because the data is not stored on a physical dedicated server or even on computers.
The costs
If you are using a more traditional patient management system, then it is likely your IT is a rather large line on your business expenditure report.
A couple of recent examples that we have heard about include: one practice that was running three surgeries had to update their server every three to four years to deal with the capacity and offer the speed they had needed need to run effectively. Another example: a practice with six surgeries who had to invest over £10,000 for a replacement server.
The investment cost of a server seems to vary widely; however, just from these two instances it can be seen that an investment of this nature means an outlay of between £3,000 to £10,000 just on a server to run your patient management software. Remember, this is without taking into consideration the power needed to run it, hardware upgrades of PCs or laptops you are using across multiple users.
If you were running your patient management software using cloud-based technology then you would not need an expensive server in the practice. In fact, the only element of your dental practice that might require a small server to purely act as a central image storage depository is for your digital imaging software. This depository could be a normal PC hard drive, rather than a dedicated server.
Accessibility
Another benefit of cloud-based software is it can be used on any type of hardware or device. The operating system that you run has no impact, as, strictly speaking, a cloud service is a service that is accessible over the internet, so it has been built in this way to capitalise on its interconnectivity with other useful tools.
It is light to run over the internet, so you don’t need a super fast connection and you can enjoy the benefits of working effectively from anywhere whether you have a cabled connection, wi-fi, or even 3G or 4G. You can also choose your operating system of your own preference, whether you are running Apple or PC devices.
It is also important to note a cloud-based system is simple to update, it can be done at any time without disrupting your day. Upgrades happen instantaneously and without the hassle of hosted software that sometimes endures updates that can take hours to finish, and requires rotating external hard drives and downtime for the practice as you install the upgrades on the server and the multiple devices you have.
With cloud-based software, like Dentally, back-ups are simple and quick, and happen without interruption.
If you would like to find out more about Dentally or arrange a demo and join the 4,000 dental professionals who work smarter, work remotely and work securely with Dentally, visit info.dentally.co/be-on-cloud-9 or email [email protected].
