A Lightbulb Moment: Embracing The Mac

I have been using SoftDent in my dental practice for many years. I'm dating myself, but Softdent adorned my office PCs since the days of MS-DOS.  I'm now running the latest iteration, version 14.x for Windows.  Over the years, I have endured the numerous technical glitches and IT headaches that were not uncommon with networked PCs running in the Windows environment.  Whenever you have a number of computers linked together through a network, all accessing a data server and sharing peripherals like multiple printers, things can happen. And they did.  Through the years, we lived with it. Got on the phone with tech support . . . spent nights or weekends troubleshooting "issues".  Life moved on.

But over the past handful of years, something in my personal life changed:  I slowly but surely became "an Apple Guy".  Sure, I had a tiny Mac in dental school, but after graduating, I became one of those tech geeks who would build-up the latest and greatest Windows box, dressed with the fasted hard drives and video card and lots of noisy fans to cool the over clocked CPU.  Of course I needed this bleeding edge technology so that I could run programs like . . well . . Microsoft Word. Oh, and email.  Along came the iPod, and I was led down the path to enlightenment, so says the late Steve Jobs.  The iPod begat the iMac which begat the iPhone which begat the iPad (or was it the other way around). As I type on my Mid-2010 27" iMac, I take a glance at our (computing) electronics at home, and I can count a bunch of Apple products: (3) iMacs, a MacBook Air, a MacBook Pro, (2) MacBooks, (2) AppleTVs, numerous iPhones and an iPad. I know what you're thinking: I sorely need an iPad 2.  

Moving on.  Back at the office, we wanted to delve into digital radiographs.  That was the "cause première" of this journey to a Mac-based practice.  Those of you who are reading this already know that there are a number of (dental) digital sensors on the market.  You also probably know that any given dental practice management (DPM) software only supports a limited number of these sensors, and only one or two are supported "natively".  After making this decision to embrace digital x-rays, I decided to take a step back and ask if I was happy with Softdent.  The answer was: not really.  

Over the years, Softdent has gone through a number of parent companies.  From memory, I believe it went from InfoSoft to PracticeWorks to Kodak to Carestream. This constant change of ownership was a bit disconcerting.  The software itself isn't the easiest or most intuitive software to master. It certainly has its share of "why do they do it like this" and "what happened to that appointment that I just entered" moments.  Now that it was time for digital x-rays, a software change was in order.  I obviously considered the other mainstream DPM software packages like Dentrix (Henry Schein) and Eaglesoft (Patterson), and even the upstart cloud-based Curve.  But in the end, I came-up with a brilliant idea that kills two birds with one stone: Reduce potential IT problems *and* improve my DPM software by going to a Mac-based system!  

As I write this first entry, it is the first of December.  Wishing to make the change by year's end, there is quite a large bit to do and not a lot of time to do it.  At this point, I'm not sure if this will be a largely favorable change to our practice or just a major dud.  Henceforth is my journey to the "Mac Side".