Business Continuity for the Dental Office, Part 1

Oct. 27, 2009
Just like dental offices do preventative maintenance to keep their patients’ oral health at a high level, your computer network also needs regular maintenance to keep it running smoothly.

Keeping your computer network running

by Lorne Lavine, DMD

As many dental offices know, no matter what you spend for IT support for your computers, it's usually nothing compared to what it costs if your network goes down for two to three days. This is the first of a two-part article on “business continuity,” keeping your network running 24/7. It involves two steps:


1. Monitoring the network 24/7, and
2. Having a great backup protocol in place should something go wrong.


Your computers are the machinery that runs your business. Every bit of down time costs you money. Just like dental offices do preventative maintenance to keep their patients’ oral health at a high level, your computer network also needs regular maintenance to keep it running smoothly.


If you are not in the business of IT support, then it makes no sense for you to self-manage your network. Using on-call consultants for basic maintenance has also become a costly proposition for most offices. Add to that the delays between the time you notice a problem and it actually getting fixed. All this extra downtime is costing you money.


These new monitoring systems provide electronic management technology that has changed the way companies can maintain and manage their IT systems. No longer do you have to wait for things to break before your network gets attention. With these systems watching over your network, many problems can be seen and corrected before they impact your staff. Modern automation technology alerts technicians whenever specified events occur on your network. This allows us to directly focus on areas that need attention. Without this automation, a technician would waste valuable time hunting around for possible problems. These systems show us exactly where to look.


Thanks to secure remote access capabilities, most problems can be fixed remotely over the Internet. For you, this means problem resolution in minutes, not hours, plus your network security is not compromised. This is an important factor for organizations in industries such as dentistry that must follow HIPAA regulations.
Patches and updates are released regularly for your operating systems and key applications. These fix problems with security and make the systems run better. Without these updates, your software is vulnerable to threats that can damage your systems, or worse, make them available to attackers.

The old way of providing network support relied upon you to call a technician when something broke. Then you waited for someone to come find your problem. You had no idea how long it would take to find and fix it. With this outdated "reactive" support model, you paid when things went wrong. Your IT consultant got paid when things broke down. There was no incentive to make your network as reliable and efficient as possible.


Cost of supporting computers is a common complaint among dental offices. Something goes wrong on your network and the support bills start piling up. How much will it cost this month? Many dentists we’ve worked with in the past commonly agree that the unknown support costs are one of their most aggravating management issues.
Most of the new systems are a subscription-based service. There is no hardware or software to buy or staff to hire. You pay a monthly fee based upon the number of servers, workstations, and network devices you have. All monitoring, notification, and remote support is done for you. The only extra charges you might pay are for consulting, implementation of new equipment or software, or services that are not part of maintaining your existing IT infrastructure.

Lorne Lavine, DMD, practiced periodontics and implant dentistry for more than 10 years. He is an A+ certified computer technician, as well as Network+ certified. He is the president of Dental Technology Consultants, a company that assists dentists in all phases of technology integration in the dental practice. He can be reached by e-mail at [email protected] or by phone at (866) 204-2298. Visit his Web site at www.thedigitaldentist.com.