Sunday, June 12, 2011

Dentrix Integration problems?

My integration of Dentrix Management software with my Dexis digital Xray software is not as seamless as I expected. We have been using Dexis digital imaging for storing our radiographs for the last year and a half and most of our patients have X-ray images stored in this software. We recently installed Dentrix and were promised that the integration would be 'seamless' with Dexis. Not our experience so far.

During our second training session,Daryl Kerker, our trainer, tried gamely to show us how to register new patients. Each time she did, Dentrix would give us a disturbing prompt--to either rename a patient stored in Dexis to the new patient's name or dump their radiogaphs in a general comm folder. After a couple hours of aborted training and several calls to support, it turns out that in our case the two will not play nice together. Our best option for now was to disengage the two programs. Perhaps later, when we have registered most of our patients in Dentrix we can try again to integrate the two programs. At the moment, I am neither impressed nor happy. John Giarraputo ,my Schein Technology Specialist/Salesman, seemed unaware that this would be a problem and hasn't yet offered any satisfactory solution.

Dexis support isn't sure how I should best handle the integration in the future, but one cumbersome solution was to wait until I had manually entered all the patients in Dentrix and then manually assign new numbers to all my patients in Dexis. This sounds time consuming to me. So much for the flawless integration.

If any dentists reading this have had a similar experience and might offer any good solutions I would be happy to hear from them. At this point I am looking for solutions to these integration issues. If anyone has experienced a similar problem and has a good solution I will be happy to hear it.

3 comments:

  1. I should add that since this posting John has researched several solutions to my integration problems and the solution I will choose is to build up the my data base in Dentrix and then use a report supplied by Dexis to help with the integration. For now both programs are being utilized as stand alone programs.

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  2. Anonymous7:59 PM

    I have not had any issues of that type. However when we first converted our office to all electronic (2004) using Suni with Dentrix we had some issues. However I find that dentrix is a miracle worker. I love it in our office both for up front and back of office. Good luck with your integration.

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  3. This is a follow up to the original post. We have recently run a new integration program and it worked better than the previous one. It did convert many of the dexis files and successfully assigned many with new Dentrix patient numbers. For Dexis patients who were either not registered in Dentrix or were registered with a different name spelling, Dexis assigned a new number with an X preceeding the number. These have to be manually registered with Dentrix. Then there are two files in Dexis with different numbers. At that point the two Dexis files have to be made to match by editing the Dexis information to match. We have about 400 dexis patients that have been assigned an X.

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