Is dentistry going to digiital hell?


Forgive me for my complaining but  I am a 63 year old baby boomer who sometimes suffers from digital overload. As a solo practitioner and the only "technical one" in my office, all digital problems seem to run through me. Between managing Windows 10 , Dexis and Dentrix, electronic Rx's, it can be a challenge.

Sometimes I get nostalgic for the old days. I miss my trusty pink recall card system that consisted of cards filled out with my patients recall history and notations for every one of our phone calls. We still use our old fashion record book that records our patient's appointments, our production and our collections, new patients and recall visits. This really is redundant because we have all of this information stored in our copy of Dentrix but I love leafing through our black loose leaf binder that shows our months data and it is updated daily by my office manager. I know our Dentrix has all this information but somehow its comforting to have immediate access to this information.

Don't get me wrong... I love geeking out over new technology and love everything new, but some days it can be a drag dealing with all the glitches that turn up and It probably costs our office in excess of t $1000 per month to various vendors supplying our dental software and I have Mathew, my IT person, on speed dial.

Probably most dental practices are like mine and almost every week we are on the phone for an hour with one of our vendors technical support people. They usually need to  to log into our server in order to fix software glitches. Windows Ten likes to update frequently and sometimes our proprietary software is slow to catch up with the changes. Possibly cloud based applications would work better for us since the updates to software would be done centrally and not have to be installed in each dental office network.

Its telling that last week  when my old fashioned suction pump died  it was almost a relief.  Now here was a a problem I  knew how to deal with... Call my Schein repair guy and arrange for a service call! The next morning two men arrived with a new analog pump and 45 minutes later it was up an running without any glitches, and no follow up tech calls! Oh sometimes I can't help thinking life seemed easier when my options were all analog and more limited!

from Ask Dr. Spindel - http://ift.tt/2l4hmyV - http://ift.tt/1SpPbm6

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