Are you planning to purchase a dental practice management software to oversee the day-to-day operations of your practice? With the high number of vendors available out there, it can be a difficult decision to choose the best software that ensures the success of your practice.
Therefore, you need to do sufficient background checks and select the right dental management software for your use.
Here are four key questions you should ask the dental management software vendors and avoid making mistakes during your purchase.
The extent of features in a dental practice management software will determine the efficiency and productivity of your dental practice. Therefore, you need to know the features that the software offers and how to integrate them into your practice effortlessly.
Some of the features include appointment scheduling, treatment plans, patients’ records storage and reporting, and contact databases. Furthermore, the dental management software should be flexible and easy to use. If you go for a software that comes with unnecessary complexities, it may impair the productivity of your practice.
Ensuring the security of patients’ data should be a top priority of any dental practice management software. Therefore, you need to get that surety from the vendor. Your preferred dental software should have a strong infrastructure to safeguard the records stored in your facility. Without sufficient built-in security features, the software can be a soft target to hackers.
Of late, as the healthcare industry is continuously adopting new technologies to improve care, there has been a sharp rise in security incidents that threaten the sensitive patients’ data. The stolen patients’ data are usually published online or sold to other unscrupulous people. Furthermore, hackers may delete the data, deny you access to the data, or cause damage to your computer systems.
To ensure that the confidential patients’ data does not fall into the wrong hands, your dental management software should have encryption technologies, restricted user access, world-class data storage, data backups, continuous surveillance systems, and other modern security capabilities.
Additionally, the data transfer taking place between the software and other devices should be safeguarded with the highest level of encryption standards to prevent eavesdropping and hijacking by malicious third-parties.
Cloud technology offers several advantages to the dental industry. Apart from providing easy management of data and significant cost savings, the technology also offers improved security. Therefore, you need to ask your vendor whether they offer a cloud-based dental practice management software, and go for that option.
On-premise software is often riskier than cloud-based software. Keeping patients’ data locally makes them susceptible to theft, infringement by discontented employees, and exposes them to other security risks. However, cloud dental software is usually endowed with sophisticated security capabilities for maintaining the privacy and confidentiality of patients’ data.
Therefore, when purchasing a dental practice management software, insist on a cloud-based version and you’ll realize improved data security, cost savings, and easy management of patients’ data. Deploying dental software on-premise is outdated, requires significant investment, and makes your practice vulnerable to security breaches.
Your dental practice keeps a wealth of sensitive data that patients provide. If the health records are harvested by the wrong people, you may expose those confidential details to the public and affect the reputation and profitability of your practice. Therefore, you need to ensure that your data protection mechanisms are compliant with the existing regulations for securing patients’ details.
For example, SOC 2 Type II is an industry certification standard that is used to ensure vendors manage data securely and safeguard the privacy of users’ data. Another important industry guideline is NIST 800-53, which provides a set of security controls for ensuring the safety and resiliency of information systems used by federal agencies and contractors. Also, the HIPAA compliance regulation outlines the guidelines for achieving sensitive patient data protection; otherwise, violating the standards could attract penalties.
A dental management software that is compliant with the current industry regulatory standards gives you the peace of mind that the software comes with sufficient safeguards and procedures to protect patients’ records from unauthorized access. So, you should not avoid asking your vendor this important question.
Asking your dental practice management software vendor some questions can assist you to discover loopholes that may affect the performance of the software. Importantly, asking the questions will help you to gauge whether the software has robust security features to maintain the trust of patients and dentists.
If you go for a cloud dental software like tab32, you’ll get a wide range of state-of-the-art features that are specifically designed to enhance your practice’s security, efficiency, and keep patients smiling.
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