I don’t know many practices that would want to go back to a paper diary after using an electronic one that can be seen in every surgery, or have to develop x-rays the old fashioned way after using a digital x-ray unit. However, even with all the immense benefits the right IT system brings to a practice, when it fails it is a disaster.

In a similar way to a patient’s dental health, the IT health of your practice should be checked regularly. However, like your least compliant patient, most dental practices have no ongoing maintenance program in place and simply wait for things to fail before upgrading or performing any sort of maintenance. We call this ‘Break Fix’ and it’s expensive.

Why is this so expensive?  Firstly you have the costs of your IT Company who will charge you to come and fix the problem. Most will charge you $165 per hour, some will charge a call out fee and then you may have additional costs of hardware and software upgrades on top of this. However, this is not the major costs of a ‘Break Fix’ scenario – your down time is. Whole practices can be shut down for hours with this approach and even when practices can continue to operate in some capacity; it usually leaves a mountain of work to do afterwards to catch-up.  

There are a few more compliant practices that agree to an IT Maintenance Contract, whereby their IT Company performs regular and routine checks of their system, both remotely and on site. They are guaranteed a great percentage of ‘up time’ from this approach and when things do go wrong they will be given a higher priority than a ‘Break Fix’ client. Up until now this has been the best option for a dental practice, however only a very few practices will commit to the ongoing monthly fees involved, preferring to have a large bill and more down time on the occasions their IT fails.

There is now a third option about to hit the Australian market and it is going to change everything.

80% of all IT problems are software related and are totally preventable. Not only are they preventable but there are plenty of warning signs that are given before a failure. However, if nobody is looking for these warning signs then they are of little use. You would be amazed how many times my team gets called out because a client’s hard drive is full and this stops the system from working. If they were on a maintenance contract then we would have alerted them to this fact in advance, but as most practices currently prefer a ‘Break Fix’ scenario, highly preventable problems such a hard drives reaching capacity are a regular occurrence.

Can you imagine how many dental problems your patients would have if you checked their teeth every month or even every day? Of course very few and the problems that did occur would be accidents such as chipping a tooth etc. At Cable-Net Technologies, we have recently invested in a revolutionary IT monitoring system from North America that will monitor your whole IT system every 5 minutes. The system is called ‘Check Protect’ and is a Managed Information Technology Service (MITS). Every five minutes it will check your entire system, providing Spyware protection and removal, Virus protection, Disk drive analysis, Security patch management, Application usage, System Auditing and Backup. 

All the information monitored by ‘Check Protect’ is fed back to our head office and shown in real time on giant monitors. Each day the system reports what IT issues have been fixed or upgraded automatically on your system and alerts us to any hardware issues that need attention. ‘Check Protect’ alleviates the need for regular and expensive site visits, gives you a huge amount of control over your system and will reduce down time by over 60% based on the results shown in the US and Europe. Best of all it costs a lot less than a formal maintenance program and a fraction of the cost of a ‘Break Fix’ scenario.

‘Check Project’ is a major IT breakthrough and will provide you lower IT costs and greater peace of mind. There are also a great many advantages to the system that I have not had space to talk about here, so if you would like to know more about how to make your IT more efficient and less expensive, then please let me know and I will arrange to send you an info pack.

Wishing you all a safe and happy festive season.

CABLE NET-TECHNOLOGIES TEAM