As dental offices review dental practice software options available to them, there are many features that are important. One of these is data storage. Unlike traditional applications that store information on the local computer, some dental practice software keeps data on servers located outside the office. There are a number of advantages to this arrangement.
Increased Accessibility
Having a central storage place allows any authorized user who has a copy of the dental practice software to examine and change the information. This is a great solution for dental offices that have multiple locations. If a patient sees a dentist at a different location, all information is available to the staff there.
A dentist can even access information from home or on the road, as long as the software is available. A patient emergency could require this. A dentist writing a paper or at a conference might enjoy the ability to access patient information as desired.
Improved accessibility doesn't equate to a lack of security. As the next section shows, the information is available only to authorized users.
Tighter Security
Patient privacy used to be just a matter of professional ethics. Today there are significant federal penalties attached to privacy protection as well. Dental offices need to be sure patient information is protected from intruders who might by trying to get information for identity theft.
Paper records can be stolen by anyone who can get in the office. A thief doesn't even need to break in. A distraction provided by an accomplice could allow a person to grab a handful of patient files and walk out before anyone realizes the thief is gone. Dental practice software that stores data locally isn't safe. If a thief can get the computer or even just the hard drive out of the building, information on every patient can eventually be hacked.
Remotely stored data is transmitted using nearly unbreakable encryption protocols and stored on servers managed by data security experts. Active defenses make it effectively impossible for unauthorized users to access patient information.
Data Redundancy
A fire, flood or other disaster could destroy an office's records, whether paper or electronic. An office might have had the foresight to store electronic information as offsite backups, but the difficultly of backing up to external media and physically transporting it to an outside location often keeps offices from doing so. Hurricane Katrina showed that even remote backups can be destroyed at the same time local data is.
When data from dental practice software is stored on professionally managed remote servers, there is protection beyond what any dental office could manage. Redundancy across geographically separated remote servers ensures the data cannot be destroyed by any means.
The benefits of remote storage are far greater that those of local storage, which is why the information industry is moving toward remote applications. Dental offices which make use of this technology are better protected from a host of problems.
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