The Impact of Financials and IT Costs

Are financials your most significant barrier to attaining the best technology tools to manage your dental clinic? Most businesses consider technology to be vital to operations. It is critical for day-to-day clinic management and the overall success of your dental clinic’s mission: to train dental hygienists while providing superior patient care. We understand and appreciate the financial barriers institutions deal with when acquiring and maintaining new technologies. It is a challenge that most businesses face regardless of their size.

It is important to remember that the cost of owning cumbersome on-premises solutions goes beyond what the clinic sees in its everyday subscription costs. Hardware, maintenance of servers, IT support, and software upgrades add to the ongoing total cost of ownership.

When using an on-premises software solution, you may find system issues crop up on a day- to-day basis. When there are IT problems, resolutions take a long time, as IT may be overwhelmed and overworked. Additionally, on-premises software requires significant updates that can come at a tremendous financial cost when databases and applications must be upgraded to accommodate new software versions. These costs often do not even consider the many hours it takes your institution’s IT team to implement these changes. These factors add up to high hidden costs the institution absorbs to own
on-premises software.

So, let us talk about the differences between on-premises solutions and those located in the cloud and how the latter can decrease your total cost of ownership moving forward while often providing you with better features and more flexibility.

The Breakdown

Differences between an on-premises software solution and cloud computing range from software licensing costs and customization to training and implementation, hardware IT personnel needs and maintenance requirements. Let us take a closer look at the financial impact of both models of dental management solutions:

Ongoing Costs

• Apply patches and upgrades
• Downtime
• Performance tuning
• Rewrite customizations
• Rewrite integrations

• Upgrade dependent applications
• Ongoing burden on IT (hardware)
• Maintain/upgrade network
• Maintain/upgrade security
• Maintain/upgrade database

• Subscription fees
• Training
• Configuration
• System Administration

The Breakdown

Software Licensing Costs

Traditional on-premises software licensing solutions can vary based on a number of workstations and project size but typically do not include sizeable initial set-up costs or other systems needed to run on-premises solutions. Because Ascend is cloud-hosted, you do not have to purchase, upgrade, or maintain any database servers. Ascend Academic has all updated features built-in, so you always have the newest version.

Implementation and Training

After almost 30 years of providing an industry-leading solution to 90+% of North America’s Dental schools, we have learned that customizable features and workflows are what lead to expensive products and lengthy onboarding timelines. By providing the necessary modules in a pre-built fashion, you decrease start-up costs and implementation timeline.

With Ascend, you benefit from intuitive, streamlined workflows, which makes training new users a seamless and straightforward process; this lowers the initial implementation costs and saves you time training new users and students.

Hardware

While the cloud still needs a chairside set-up, the hardware required is inconsiderable compared to on-premises software solution requirements. By moving to a cloud solution, you eliminate the need for extensive hardware.

As a bonus, when you do inevitably upgrade your workstations, using a cloud product that you can access from almost any device opens the doors to more efficient and cost-effective upgrades. Laptops and tablets that can be carried from room to room mean you will not be buying operatory workstations that sit unused 25-50% of the day.

IT Personnel

With fewer pieces of physical hardware necessary, your dental clinic automatically saves time and money. You can run your systems with fewer IT personnel because there are fewer system components for them to manage.

With Ascend Academic, most IT support is centralized and handled by Henry Schein One Academic. IT personnel can focus on other tasks within your facility while minor issues are solved through the cloud; this also means your IT team can access the important system information they need, like Audit Logs with an Ascend Academic account, just like other faculty and staff.

Maintenance

When a system issue occurs, it leads to inefficient use of time. You must leave the clinic and wait until the system has been updated. Even if something happens in the middle of the night when it would not disrupt active work, IT personnel work specific hours and may not get the issue resolved until hours after it occurred in the first place.

With the cloud, there is little to no downtime. The system is maintained on an ongoing basis. Ascend Academic upgrades are all automatic. All computers will always run the latest version of the solution without the need for IT personnel to load new versions onto specific workstations.

Our cloud-based solution

Cloud computing delivers a specific, standardized set of ready-to-use technology services that you access anytime and from any device via the internet. Reducing IT costs is the foundational reason for building our cloud computing solution, Ascend. The provision of standardized technology that is purpose-built for your institution that is accessible and routinely maintained achieves this aim. Significantly, cloud computing services do not compromise on the quality or sophistication of technology to reduce costs; you can expect a user-friendly, polished, and capable application that saves you time and money.

To learn more about how Ascend manages dental clinic operations and supports dental provider training while saving your dental clinic money, schedule an information session by clicking the button below. We look forward to learning more about your organization and how we can partner with you!