The fallout over the cessation of development for Dental Mac continues with information about alternate products continuing to come in. (See our previous stories — Dental Mac ceases development, Dental Mac alternatives offered, and FileMaker Pro to salve dental software woes? — for details.)
Randall C. Markarian DMD, MS, likes the commercial dental management program called MacBraces. Though it’s geared more for orthodontic practices, the basic features lend themselves to any dental practice regardless of specialty, as well as to general dental practices, he added.
“I have been using it for over five years and find it feature rich, and the support is great,” Markarian said. “Also, I have seen some suggestions that my office has made incorporated into the program.”
MacBraces is a comprehensive office management program that includes scheduling, appointment cards, patient accounting, statements, electronic charting, patient information, coupon booklets and much more. The product is now in its 12th year. A company called Exceptional Software makes it and the contact info is:
Dan Regan Exceptional Software 10921 Wilshire Blvd. Suite 512 Los Angeles, CA 90024 Phone: 310-397-4873 E-mail: macbraces@mediaone.net
“MacBraces is a 4D based solution so there should be an OS X compatible version in the very near future,” Markarian said.
Craig Landrum, chief technical officer of Mindwrap, said the company doesn’t specifically tailor its software to dentists, but makes a document management system that can be customized to serve the needs of a dental office or any other business.
“What our software does is basically allow anyone to scan multipage documents, index them using a real database that you can design to fit your needs, and retrieve them very quickly,” he said. “This could be useful for capturing patient records.”
Mindwrap’s single-user system is available for US$499. It includes six generic indexing screens, but a Screen Generator program allows end users to build their own for special purposes. If you need multiple scanning stations or have a large number of documents, you can step up to a full Unix, Linux or NT-based server system, Landrum said. He added “there isn’t any other document management company around that builds large multi-user systems the Mac.”
“Our systems can be upgraded to do OCR (using Textbridge from Xerox) and full text search (content searching),” he said. “We also have a very sophisticated workflow system. We just installed a very large workflow system at Hallmark Cards. Users can access our server databases from the Web.”
Bob Wilkoff, DDS and CEO of SmileSystems, said his company makes 4Dental, a standalone software product that’s based on the 4thDimension database engine.
“I engineered it over 12 years ago,” Wilkoff told MacCentral. “I have used it to run my dental practice for over a decade. It rocks! Problem is that I am so busy with my growing practice, that I have no time to support the tech side of distributing a program such as this.”
Interested? Contact Wilkoff by e-mail.
John Broughton, a computer consultant and FileMaker developer in Charleston, SC, has a client who is presently using Dental Mac. He said the client has become increasingly concerned about the application’s change of hands from company to company “without any appreciable increase in quality or support.”
“Dental Mac has some glaring restrictions such as not being able to run on AppleShare servers as well as an incompatibility with newer versions of the Mac OS,” Broughton said. “My client has asked me to give consideration to developing a solution based on FileMaker and I would do so if the projected market would support such an effort. The attractiveness of a FileMaker solutions is its cross platform support, server based model, and ease of customization.”
If you’re interested in seeing Broughton, who has been working with and developing solutions for FileMaker since such a product was available, proceed with such a product, you can contact him via e-mail.