Practice Management Software Support

There is no single right answer, and be wary of any IT company that gives you one before asking questions.

• Dentrix — widest imaging bridge support and the largest install base, so staff you hire later are more likely to already know it.
• Eaglesoft — often the smoothest path if you bought your chairs and sensors through Patterson.
• Open Dental — lightest on server hardware, least expensive to license, and by far the easiest to migrate away from later.

In practice the deciding factors are usually which system your imaging equipment bridges to cleanly, and which one your office manager already knows.

Yes, mostly through server requirements. Dentrix and Eaglesoft both expect a proper Windows Server with SQL underneath — real hardware and a real license. Open Dental runs on MySQL/MariaDB and is happy on a much lighter machine. That can move the server line item by a few thousand dollars. The cabling, switching, firewall and workstation side of the job is effectively identical either way.

Nine times out of ten it is the network, not the software. These are client-server systems that talk to the database constantly, so latency and packet loss show up as charts that hang mid-appointment. Usual culprits: an operatory on Wi-Fi instead of a wired drop, a consumer-grade switch, imaging traffic sharing a flat network with everything else, or a server still on spinning disks. We find the actual bottleneck instead of selling you a new server.

Conversions between the major systems are normally run by the destination software vendor — they own the conversion tooling and they warrant the result. We handle everything around it: standing up the new server, getting the data onto it, reconnecting imaging so historical scans still open from the chart, validating that ledgers and charts landed correctly, and being on-site the first morning your team uses it.

Yes. Cloud PMS removes the server but not the IT — you still need reliable internet with a failover path, wired operatories, imaging bridged to a browser-based chart, local capture machines, and backups of whatever still lives on-site. Going cloud doesn't eliminate the need for a proper network; it makes your internet connection a single point of failure worth engineering around.

Yes — one of the most common calls we get. It is almost always a driver, bridge configuration or USB power issue rather than a dead sensor. Windows updates and PMS version upgrades routinely break bridges. We can usually diagnose remotely and often fix it the same day without you buying anything.