Cloud based practice management software for dental offices hit the market a little over a decade ago. The sales pitch of the cloud practice management software was that it was going to save you all the money of having a server $6,000, and having an IT team. This concept sounded really interesting to us as a technology company. IT support has always been a very low margin industry for those of us on the technology side and being a company that has never sold a practice management software we were very interested in a practice management software that was going to magically solve and erase all of the dental offices IT needs.

 

Unfortunately, after having a decade of experience with our customers who have many different cloud practice management solutions like Curve Dental, Dentrix Ascend and many others we have noticed some unfortunate truths.

First, the offices were not able to eliminate their IT costs. They eliminated the server aspect that cost about $6K every 5 years but they still needed all of the same operatory computers, front desk systems, printers, network equipment and now more than ever they were hyper dependent on a fast and reliable internet connection causing them to need expensive professional network routers that would allow the connection of two internet connections for failure protection.

It seemed that our offices with cloud practice management solutions actually were spending more on IT support than our traditional server client customers.

Then we started having even bigger concerns when one of our clients passed away suddenly. The practice had no plans to sell, or any dentist to take over the practice, but obviously could no longer see patients. The practice started going through the process of shutting down the office and selling off the building but couldn’t find a buyer for the practice. So the widow was stuck paying a thousand dollars a month in cloud practice management fees because she felt an obligation to have the patient’s dental records available for when those patients found new dentists. There was no way to export this information and save it offline in any usable format. It was a real nightmare scenario and unfortunately, I had no solutions for them.

We get calls at least once a day about some service outage our cloud practices are having either their internet went down, Amazon AWS had an issue and so the cloud practice management went down, an internet browser updated and now the cloud practice management isn’t working how it used to. It is very unfortunate for these practices. Recently one client suddenly couldn’t take any intra oral camera images. The cloud practice management software uses a handler that takes the images and sends them to the cloud. After 3 hours on the phone with tech support with the cloud image management company the cloud company gave up. Suggested we completely reinstall Windows on the computer which meant the customer had to pay their IT company 3 hours of support at $160 an hour even though literally everything else worked on that operatory except it’s abilities to send images to their cloud image management.

 

So for me the jury is still out on cloud, it certainly is much more profitable for the companies selling it but I am not sure how well it is serving the dentists buying it.