Transitioning from Dentrix, reasonable staff training?

[bralli]

Hello, my name is Brian Ralli. I'll be making the jump to OD (and Dexis) from Dentrix 11 in a few weeks. My staff is fairly apprehensive about this transition and I wanted to get some opinions about what would be a practical way to get everyone up and running with minimal loss of productivity. I have installed the trial version on several computers and encouraged everyone to "play" with it and all installations will be completed by my IT guy who is experienced with Open Dental (he highly recommended I make this transition). I'm understandably a little overwhelmed about the amount of setup I'll need to complete to get all of the schedules, buttons, providers etc... set up to my liking. Obviously I don't want to just close the office if I can help it but realistically how much down time can I expect to experience before we are a functioning dental office again?

I also understand that the actual conversion of my database from Dentrix to Open Dental (and subsequent conversion of Dentrix Image to Dexis) is going to inherently require a significant amount of time in its own right.

Thanks so much for any input and I look forward to participation in this forum.

[bpcomp]

Our office recently switched from Dentrix 11 and I think the key to our switch was having one person who was the "expert" in the software. I was that person in our office and I spent about a month learning everything I could on the demo. I learned how to use almost every function of the software including how to customize and setup just about every aspect. We also had the software setup on other computers in the office and encouraged everyone to play... of course some did more than others. We did the switch on a weekend and had the staff come in for a couple hours and did some remote training with the OD staff showing basic aspects of how to operate. I then spent some extra time showing things I had learned on my own to the rest of the staff. On our first live day I bounced around helping people find buttons they weren't used to looking for and whatnot. If your office doesn't have someone who can operate in this capacity I would suggest having some time where learning how to operate OD is required. So if the schedule isn't packed have your assistant learn how to enter treatment on an example patient for an hour.

Realistically, if you give yourself enough prep time you don't have to have any downtime.

[jordansparks]

I would say operate at about 1/2 capacity for the first two days, then ramp it up to 3/4 for the next week or so. After that, you can see patients at the regular rate. But the staff will still feel like they're "behind" for at least a few more weeks until they have billing, claims, recall, etc under control. My wife is a pharmacist, and they just switched software. They didn't have the luxury of slowing down, so they brought in extra help for the first week, and now in week two, the staff is just barely keeping up by putting in a few hours of overtime. It would be very similar no matter which software was involved.

If you're having a conversion done, you can't set up your schedules, buttons, providers, etc until after the conversion. Take that into consideration.

[atd]

In my opinion formal staff training in advance is very important - just letting them "play" doesn't ensure that everyone is learning what they need to and getting proficient at it. Our staff spent 2-3 days in training (depending on their position), but that was going from paper charts to Open Dental. Give them hands on time throughout the training to practice, otherwise they won't remember what was demonstrated. On the last day of training we spent 1/2 day just going through real appointments/charts from beginning to end with all the steps they'd need to do when the patient was in the chair. This was done the week prior to the data conversion, then on conversion day staff were brought back in to "practice" on the training database and refresh their memories before going live. You'll need to do a test conversion ahead of time anyway, so I recommend doing your training from the test conversion database, rather than the trial version. That way they'll know what to expect the database to look like with the patients they are familiar with. You will need to allow for post-conversion cleanup and setup of the software - we did each of our conversions at the end of the week so someone has the weekend to get things finished up. We did not alter our appointment schedules, but we have a lot of fails/cancellations, so when that happened we just didn't fill the openings and used that as catchup time. It's also important to have people that are proficient in the software to go around and answer questions and help users the first week. Good luck!

[kdna]

Obviously I don't want to just close the office if I can help it but realistically how much down time can I expect to experience before we are a functioning dental office again?

Would you find a site like Lynda.com for Open Dental Software useful? I am working on something like this. There needs to be a way to train new employees in dental software more effectively.

[bralli]

Just to follow up we went live with Open Dental about a month ago. It actually went pretty seamlessly as far as productivity went. The staff just "played" with the demo in the weeks before. Coming from Dentrix 4, Open Dental was so drastically more intuitive the staff's general reaction to everything was, "Oh wow, that's a lot easier than before". I just made sure everyone was comfortable doing all of the basic tasks required for patient flow. We were closed on Friday and my tech guy went to work installing computers and beginning the database conversion (Dentrix to Open Dental and Dentrix Image to Dexis). The biggest headache was actually the Dexis conversion where the conversion program was very inflexible and would only work if you ran it from a very specific Dell 32 bit computer. I was pleasantly surprised how OD brought over almost every iota of data from Dentrix. I logged in remotely to the system on a Sunday and went to work configuring the system to my tastes. We went live that Monday with about a half full schedule. We set up a system where if anyone had questions they would write it down and I would either figure it out myself or we would eventually call tech support. Overall everyone did great and I don't feel like we needed any additional training to prepare.

It's a great program and very easy to use and customize. I'm very glad I made the transition.