Dentech to Dentrix Conversion? Or any to...Dentrix Conversion

[resolvetech]

Looking to help dental office out with migration from Dentech to Dextrix. I have a customer with Dentrix but have never been involved in any data conversions to Dentrix.

Anyone with experience that can shed light on gotchas, how long of process, and my role in the being the middle man?

 

[Markverhyden]

These types of apps are all databases. And they are custom so there is no "import" available that I have seen. I've not been involved in an actual migration but have been involved in the discussions and tests of several. It's pretty common for a conversion to not transfer 100% of the records. Also be aware that corruption is a distinct possibility. An old system also muddies up the waters. And it's not cheap. Buying into a new system, with migration could easily be $20-30k. And it's time consuming. They grab a copy of the DB and work on it for a couple of weeks or so. Obviously the time can vary. The migrated DB is shown to the customer and once it's approved the migration itself can happen over a weekend type of thing.

 

[gikstar]

By the way, may I suggest you make a call to Dentrix and ask them that question. They may want to know what hardware the client is using to help guide you.

 

[CompConfig]

I agree, your best chance outs to call dentrix tech support and ask them. They may even be able to put your in touch with a company that does the conversion.

 

[fencepost]

In my experience with medical practice conversions, there are three kinds:

• New vendor is able to take the data database and migrate much of it into the new system. Exception: "nobody migrates financials" aka they may pull in demographics, appointments past and future, clinical data/notes, etc. but they will not import charges, payments and payments due. Customer has to run both systems for a time to continue receiving payments for past services into the old system until they decide that what's left in there is small enough to either write off or move by hand.
• New vendor is able to take an export of demographics and not much else. For this scenario they'll provide you with a blank spreadsheet template for what they'll take in, and it's up to you to get that filled via either data extraction or reports/exports followed by data extraction. Other data (including clinical & appointments) is up to the end user; often that data is dumped from the old system as PDFs then imported as documents into the new system.
  
• New vendor has no bulk import whatsoever and just leaves it to the customer to re-input whatever data they want, generally as patients make appointments or come in. This is the same as the second option, but without the demographics pre-filled.

What is possible is going to depend entirely on what Dentrix offers - they might do any of the above depending on how much the customer is willing to pay as well.

 

[TheComputerGuy4u]

Having moved from Dentrix to Nextgen, I will tell you that you should definitely and will use both companies support. The DB's are are SQL and are structured differently. The digital xRays are also a problem as Dentrix uses Schick which is not share friendly. Do not know about Dentech. Ususally as the other fellows have said, these EHR's are all vendor specific, so without an interface being built, it is not as easy as a "migration". Good luck

 

[resolvetech]

In my experience with medical practice conversions, there are three kinds:

• New vendor has no bulk import whatsoever and just leaves it to the customer to re-input whatever data they want, generally as patients make appointments or come in. This is the same as the second option, but without the demographics pre-filled.

Spot on. I met with dentist this morning. He's working for a dental chain and just purchased this practice. i.e. not a lot of money to play with. Anyway, he plans on inputting the data manually (well he'll have the staff do that). Apparently, the Dentech software is so old that it cannot be converted easily and very pricey. He wouldn't give me a number.

What a **** show! To be expected he purchase the practice from someone retiring. It's been my experience that many older dentist don't like to invest in technology esp. knowing retirement is around the corner. So there's absolutely no value in the IT infrastructure. He's got all old Core Duo's running Win 7 they look like they're ready to die. He purchased a brand new entry level Dell server (probably SATA, 8gb RAM) i.e. glorified workstation. He had his buddy who works with corporate IT come in and install Dentrix on workstation (side by side with Dentech) and he virtualized the server with Vmware. To top things off the license COA shows Windows Foundation Server which I don't even think get be "legally" virtualized.

Not a lot of hope here. Willing to help him out by the hour if he comes up with a budget. Then maybe I'll talk to him about monthly maintenance plan. I've been in messes before but they usually have some sort of budget and don't have buddies mucking things up. Don't even get me started about how much these guys charge compared to us. Not to mention I've had a bunch of work done my self over the years including multiple dental implants! If it were an auto body shop I might have some empathy...LOL

 

[resolvetech]

Oh, I almost forget to add that he wanted to know if I could get him up and running without a Dentrix support contract in place because he doesn't have one. I also don't even know where he got the G6 software from because most customers are running G5 and that requires a special request from Dentrix. It's never cheap enough for some!

 

[resolvetech]

I agree, your best chance outs to call dentrix tech support and ask them. They may even be able to put your in touch with a company that does the conversion.

I did speak with Dentrix and they do the migrations on newer versions of Dentech. This one was too old. Typically smaller practices might only take a few hours. Larger databases might take a few days.

 

[phaZed]

resolvetech,

It is amazing how many "put together" places are truly falling apart. I work with a multi-million dollar business on a break-fix model (They say no to managed, monthly money) and they have their "super important" 20 year old customer database on a Compaq Presario from 1998, running Windows 98 with some "custom" database software one of the people that used to work there put together. Ugh. The 10GB HDD was failing for over two years and finally died. A good time to get a better machine in there right? No, bought expensive, old IDE drive and recovered/cloned and continue on old machine. [Palm-Face]

 

[resolvetech]

resolvetech,

It is amazing how many "put together" places are truly falling apart. I work with a multi-million dollar business on a break-fix model (They say no to managed, monthly money) and they have their "super important" 20 year old customer database on a Compaq Presario from 1998, running Windows 98 with some "custom" database software one of the people that used to work there put together. Ugh. The 10GB HDD was failing for over two years and finally died. A good time to get a better machine in there right? No, bought expensive, old IDE drive and recovered/cloned and continue on old machine. [Palm-Face]

I can see this for specialized systems like in manufacturing or medical. Stuff that's standalone and maybe not on the network. However, if there's an upgrade path that isn't to expensive then it should be utilized. I hope you are being compensated for the extra risk. We inevitably own these problems. Documentation would be key on something like that. Shadowprotect or other imaging products with multiple backup systems would need to be in place.

I think I heard you on one of the Podnutz podcasts recently and you sound pretty sharp. I learned long ago to not chase business where they haven't bought into most of my recommendations. They don't have to agree but they do have to hear my professional advice Where they don't agree I document (email works best because it's the least threatening). I've never been to court on anything but I've been in situations where people who said they were backing stuff up didn't and then things start to get a little testy when they lose all their data. Those are the ones that usually say "it's all set" or "not that important" or "that's too much right now".

 

[gikstar]

resolvetech,
No, bought expensive, old IDE drive and recovered/cloned and continue on old machine. [Palm-Face]

I local tech company lost a major managed service contract and was moving his office to his house until things got better and passed on to me everything that wasn't of major value to him, about 60 hard drives included, some were ide, so maybe I should hang on to them along with the box that I've saving for years.
By the way, if any of you techs that are in the LA area is looking for a functioning Dell Poweredge 2950 populated with 6 - 146Gb 15k SAS, I'm willing to bless that tech... maybe something to train on? You have to pick it up... I got stuck with two of these that we have no use for, when I purchased a dozen servers recently.

 

[fencepost]

they have their "super important" 20 year old customer database on a Compaq Presario from 1998, running Windows 98 with some "custom" database software one of the people that used to work there put together. Ugh. The 10GB HDD was failing for over two years and finally died.

I dealt with something like that a couple years ago, but the box is SCO Unix running Medical Manager (reference-only, non-production). I'm not sure now which version of hot-swappable SCSI drives were in there, but it's now running on a 20GB IDE that I managed to scare up because I knew SCO would handle that OK. There's also a spare 20GB IDE drive in the case as well, labeled as such in case of future need. I'm not even sure whether it was the drive or the SCSI controller that bit the dust (the tape drive had its own separate SCSI card).

The restore was actually from their final tape backup which at that point was at least a year old, the challenge was that the office manager in a fit of "need to clean" had tossed the Lone-TAR restore floppies. Most of the time involved was because I had to track down both floppies and another SCO system so I could build bootable floppies then do some trial and error to let those floppies see the tape drive, because on SCO when you need to add devices like that it has to.... recompile the kernel. So to build the boot floppies, you need to have a kernel compiled to see the tape drive by SCSI ID, and it's not like there's a lot of good online references for how to do some of that crap on obsolete Unix boxes from dead companies.

Feh, just remembering it annoys me.

 

[Markverhyden]

Oh, I almost forget to add that he wanted to know if I could get him up and running without a Dentrix support contract in place because he doesn't have one. I also don't even know where he got the G6 software from because most customers are running G5 and that requires a special request from Dentrix. It's never cheap enough for some!

Personally I'd advise the customer that they need to purchase the support package or I would not be able to help them out. While these systems are not impossible to support access to any information beyond vanilla EU stuff is very scarce to non-existent. From what I have seen in the past these companies charge huge fees to provide support outside of a contract.

Another thought. Did they ask you to sign a HIPAA BAA? If not it puts you at risk in the event of a breach. If you have business insurance they will most likely decline any coverage without that signed document. Not to mention the practice will experience the same outcome. Talk to your underwriter about this.