20 Questions Every Practitioner Should Ask
1. What are my “all-in” costs when I work with your company?
a. How much for all of the following:
- practice management software
- patient education software
- patient reminder software
- imaging software
- accounting software
- licenses for each software program that will serve ALL of my offices
and chairs.
b. Furthermore, what are my server costs and my office network costs?
c. What are the costs if I increase the number of chairs or add a new office?
2. Do I have to purchase internal servers and set up an office network in order to run your software?
3. If I have more than one office, what is the cost to set up full access to all records from all chairs at each office?
4. If I have more than one office, can my patients see me at any one of my offices without issue for my record keeping? That is, can I have automated access to their chart and records regardless of what office I am in on any particular day?
5. Can patients view elements of their record from home in a secure environment?
a. If yes, is there an additional cost for this service?
b. Can I control what patients view when they access their records?
6. Does your system work on both PC and Macintosh computers, as my patients definitely have both types of systems and my office may consider using both as well?
7. Does your system track patient access so that I can quickly know their behavior and use it for business success and liability management?
8. How do I go about integrating all of the various software programs?
a. How much is this integration likely to cost?
b. What does integration actually mean? For example, when I open the imaging program from the management program, will it automatically go to the proper patient?
9. Can I access my records from anywhere, in the event of emergency or a desire to do off-site work, Will I need to use “go to my PC” or other software products to access my records from another computer/location?
10. How do you help me with backing up my data? what will that cost?
11. Is the data that I store with your system encrypted? Where is it stored?
12. Can you integrate my web site and my management system together? This ability would dramatically increase the traffic and repeat access to my clinic’s site, which would greatly help with my “ranking” on search engines.
13. Do you provide daily web conferencing support? If so, at what cost?
14. Can I have my referring doctors send me referrals, with pictures, through my web site so that no paper is used and patients are automatically created in my patient management software?
15. Can my patients complete and update their medical histories online, so that our patients and our office can save a great deal of time and money?
a.If so, are the medical histories automatically tied into the patient records?
b. Is there an additional cost for this service?
16. What updated medical information support can you provide for me on a day-to-day basis? Is there an additional cost for this service?
17. I work in a multidisciplinary dental clinic. Can your system manage multiple dental specialties, simultaneously?
18. What does your system do to help manage my professional liability on a daily basis? How can you demonstrate this
19. How do I receive upgrades for my system?
a. Are upgrades likely to break any of the integrations?
b. Is there a risk that upgrades are not backward compatible with other software or my server software?
20. How often do you roll out software updates, upgrades, and bug fixes to your system?
a. How does this occur?
b. Will it require clinic down-time to implement updates and upgrades?
