What can the Cloud do for you?
The Short Answer is “Outsourcing”. This means to take something you have been doing in-house yourself, and get it from someone else that can hopefully do it better and cheaper than you did on your own. Another benefit might be that the time you no longer have to spend on this can now be better directed to patient care, improving your Practice further.
An example of this would be Pandora Radio. In the past Practices that wanted to have in-house music would put in speakers and an amplifier, and then connect a CD changer to it. You would have to buy CD’s, load them into the player, and change them out regularly to get some variety of music. The need (and cost) to buy new CDs and the effort to change the disks frequently enough were a hassle. Along comes Pandora Internet Radio. If you replace the CD changer with a simple Internet Radio linked to a Pandora account, you can setup your musical preferences and start the music that will play indefinitely. Better selection, less hassle, more variety all for $5 per month (a fraction of the cost of a single CD).
In our context of discussion here The Cloud offers outsourcing your Practice Management and Imaging Programs (PM Apps). These are the heart of a Practices information system. Some Practices have done really well working with an IT professional and investing in the necessary equipment to properly run the PM Apps internally. Others have not done as well and suffer from the lack of equipment or know how, and are often frustrated by poor PM App performance and interruptions in service.
The promise of the Cloud then is to move your PM App to The Cloud and hopefully have it function better at a reduced overall cost, leaving you more time to dedicate to patient care.
In this multipart series I am trying to help educate you to the issues surrounding the issues of Cloud based solutions offered by Dental Practice Management software companies. By arming you with the questions to ask and the context behind them you should be empowered to better evaluate the products and how they would benefit your Practice. You can find a link to all the Parts of the Series back on the Index in Part 1.
Up Next in Part 4 of the Series I will discuss “One Challenge – Multiple Right Answers”
If you need a little help with your Practice, this is what MME Consulting does. Just give us a call at 866-419-1102 or check us out online at www.mmeconsulting.com.
Want more Tips and Tricks like this? Sign up to get updates by email as soon as we add them.
