I was killing time, writing some blogs whilst I was waiting to go and collect my son from football (this is an excuse can’t you tell?).
I decided to go on to a well-known dental forum that I haven’t signed into for perhaps 5 years.
I was skimming through different parts of the forum, just trying to get a sense of what people were talking about or what ailed them and one of the things that kept featuring were comments on whether people should go to a cloud-based management system for their practice or whether they should stick to the ‘big providers’.
I was amazed at this and about the fact that there was even any discussion about whether we should stick with the previous system which won’t be developed and has no future against a system which is up and coming, which is defusing entirely though society in front of our very eyes, which undoubtedly will take over everything in a short period of time.
It struck me that it was kind of like Coronavirus variants.
The new stronger, more penetrative variant will ultimately take over everything else and kick the previous variant out. We’ve seen it time and time again over the past 2 years.
Everything that you touch now is heading towards cloud-based or already cloud-based as far as technology is concerned.
There are many reasons why that might be the case and some of them you might not like but it doesn’t detract from the fact that it is utterly inevitable.
As far as dental practice management systems go, it is the only way forward for anybody who is interested in running their practice in a modern and up to date fashion.
R4 and SoE are legacy systems which are dead.
It’s not less safe to go to cloud-based, it’s safer.
From 2009 until 2014 we had two full server crashes at our practice.
We had religiously backed up all our information daily and monthly and had a fire backup that was stored offsite.
After the first one we realised the backup system didn’t work and despite the fact that we had set it up with R4 we were unable to load all of our data back onto our new server.
Apparently, this is common, and you can pay £15,000 or there abouts to have your previous server forensically examined but it’s unlikely to help once your hard drive is gone.
At the very end, before we went cloud based, we had a separate back up server unit beside our own server unit in a cooled room where the backup server had 3 individual terabyte drives backing up our whole system all at once and it still wasn’t secure.
To argue the point that the internet might go down and you couldn’t work is to have such a significant lack of understanding of what can go wrong with IT that you really need to get paid assistance to help you set up your system.
Add to this the fact that a system like dentally talks seamlessly to a CRM system like Dengro (also cloud based) and can talk individually to Slack (wonderful cloud-based business communication) and Xero (amazing cloud-based finance system) and all the other potential service software packages that interlink.
The only thing at present which can’t go cloud is CT scans (images are able to go cloud although we’re still not doing that because we might as well keep our CT scans and images together) just as soon as the fibre is fast enough, that will go too.
On one of the threads that I looked at there was a complaint which suggested that associates shouldn’t let principles look at their daily numbers and what was going on in their surgery.
This, if it’s true, is a staggering point of view.
One of the greatest benefits of cloud-based practice software management systems is the ability to keep an eye on what’s happening in the business to make sure it stays upright and to make sure it gets better as often as you can.
Like it or not, embrace it or not, the cloud is here and it’s not going away.
Blog Post Number - 3033