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Automation and technology have proven their worth across every industry and vertical. The benefits are clear for larger businesses and world-spanning enterprises, but those benefits have started to trickle down to local practices and smaller groups as well.
To gain the benefits of modern technology, providers must adapt and expand, but the benefits of tech come with a steep learning curve that not every practice has the time or monetary budget to reach.
So the answer to the question is a firm “yes.” Remote dental IT support provides a way for smaller and medium-sized offices to take advantage of everything modern tech can offer them without the enormous investment in time and knowledge. Local dental IT support just can’t keep up, as much as a small team might try.
A remote IT support service divides and conquers. It keeps local IT within their sphere of control — the hardware and software within the office — and handles larger-scale upgrades and maintenance that takes your practice to the next level.
The benefits are many. In most cases, tech and IT dental service organizations (DSOs) provide a way to streamline, combine, and automate business processes your practice already uses multiple times a day, every day, into a single suite of programs managed by practice management software (PMS).
HIPAA remains as strict as ever, with high fines for negligence and higher fines for intentional violations. A smaller practice can’t hope to meet these fines, and we need to remember that HIPAA applies to dentistry just as much as it does to other healthcare providers (HCPs).
Even though we think about general practitioners and hospitals when we discuss HIPAA, it binds all HCPs, and that’s important to remember. HCPs must provide adequate security and adhere to best practices (like not emailing customer information on an unsecured line) to maintain HIPAA compliance.
A remote IT support service that specializes in dental services can audit your practice and your policies to plug any leaks before they harm your customers, your reputation, and your bottom line.
IT support for dental practices does more than handle the boring back-end security. Computers and automation might seem to operate opposite to the human element, but in reality, programs and services managed by digital IT support make it easier to connect with your patients than ever before.
These programs and services make this human connection possible by combining systems and functions under one umbrella, then taking advantage of automation and integration between multiple services and software suites.
This combination cuts down on redundant data entry (where human users must enter the same information, like customer contact information, multiple times — sometimes without the benefits of copy-and-paste functions). Management like this saves you time by making programs talk to one another on the back end.
As an example, a digital IT service can help you combine and automate interactions between your appointment calendars and customer contact information. With the right settings, it can automatically update customers when they make appointments or when the time comes for the next checkup or cleaning. It can send reminders by email or text.
The right automation means your front desk staff no longer need to work for hours on mundane copy-paste emails to each customer or risk mistaken notifications that double-book patients.
Dental IT not only makes such a thing possible, but it also ensures constant uptime for your systems, so you never miss a patient. Unlike your local IT team, many providers stay open 24/7.
A great system managed by an external provider can do much more than assign customer appointment dates to individual profiles. It can handle everything from charts and forms to medical records and billing information, which makes information recall a snap whenever needed.
The right service can make clicking through multiple windows to accomplish anything related to a customer a thing of the past. Instead, it creates a unified picture of each patient’s entire journey with your practice, from their first appointment and records of every procedure to complete x-rays and scans.
This combination might sound like a security risk, and for generic IT providers, it is. But dental-specialized IT services are the same groups that provide the security you need for your local IT, like email and onsite records, and are guaranteed to review their storage services with the same level of scrutiny.
Because many of these services operate on a software-as-a-service (SaaS) model, they make it easy to scale up as your practice gathers more clients. Rather than making big, risky investments in large hard drives and other storage devices that may or may not pay off, you can ramp up slowly as your patient count does.
Secure digital record-keeping benefits patients just as much as it does your staff. They have to spend less time entering their insurance and payment information when it’s stored on your server the first time, assigned to them, and pulled up automatically when they’re ready to leave.
Moving them out fast is great for everyone — most patients, once they finish their appointments, are ready to get outside and go about their day rather than linger in the office. A quick checkout ends their appointments on a positive note, and a positive ending increases the odds of a return visit.
These services also help you build your patient count. Automated marketing protocols make it easy to send out the right advertisements to the right patients and inform them of discounts, optional services, and other benefits they might not know about.
When you tell them about new options through text or email rather than in the office, you put the thought in their head early and give them much more time to consider their options.
It would take weeks or months for local dental IT support to set up a program like this, but remote providers with years of experience spread over many clients make it a snap.
This type of automated marketing integrates with the same customer contact information as your appointment-reminder service, which means front desk staff needs to enter information once, and no more.
These marketing services also access records of previous appointments to avoid advertising incorrect or redundant services — no longer will your patients receive information about a product or service that they just don’t care about or already use.
There’s no need to tell a patient who comes in for regular teeth cleaning about fluoride treatments — instead, the system can share the benefits of teeth whitening or proactive protection.
All these benefits sound wonderful — until they break down, and your entire practice goes with it. Thankfully, external providers are better than that. Most offer 24/7 service, and if you encounter an outage, they likely already know and are working to fix it as soon as possible.
When you employ an external IT service provider, you cut down on desperate early-morning phone calls to your local IT team and take the stress of crisis management out of their already-busy days.
On top of all that, a DSO’s experience covers many crises every single day. What might seem like an utter disaster to you is a part of their everyday routine, something they handle regularly — which means they can handle it fast with a cool head and practiced skill.
External maintenance cuts down on the time your IT department needs to spend on updates after normal business hours to apply fixes once everyone else leaves the office. 24/7 service means updates can instead be handled at any time by people who signed on to work outside normal office hours, with a minimum of fuss and downtime.
On the off chance something does go wrong with your systems, a DSO’s on-call staff can help resolve problems right away no matter the hour or issue and may have more resources available if IT is occupied elsewhere — no more ticket queues or “one-at-a-time” problem-solving.
The right dental IT services build for more than just modern technology released now — they build for the future as well.
A larger firm has more eyes on developments and more expertise in the up-and-coming tech available to individual businesses, offices, and practices than dental IT has time for. It’s part of their job right alongside helping offices like yours.
Dentistry is a lucrative field and provides a service that everyone needs. It comes as no surprise, then, that you have an overwhelming number of choices for your IT needs. Open Dental, Dentrix, Eaglesoft, and more are all out there, and all of them seem like excellent choices — choices that are hard to tell apart.
Of course, we’re biased and believe that we’re the best choice. More importantly, though, we’re willing to put our money where our mouth is and prove it.
Contact Zenith Dental IT today for a free quote, so we can discuss your dental IT needs — and how our team of experts can meet them while bringing you everything discussed here and far, far more.
