A number of new cloud-based products and services have been making their way into dentistry over the last several months, rolled out by companies large and small:
- Gaargle Solutions launched Dovetail, a cloud-based, mobile electronic medical record and practice management software.
- Carestream Dental introduced CS OrthoTrac Cloud.
- The Dentisoft Office Cloud practice management and clinical record-keeping system added TigerView Cloud for online x-ray storage and retrieval.
- Curve Dental added Storyline to its Web-based dental software to help customers create custom forms that can be completed by patients using an Apple or Android tablet.
- InfoSign Media released a cloud version of its ServDentist Solo patient educational system for dental treatment rooms.
- Henry Schein introduced Dentrix Ascend, its first cloud-based practice management system.
- Focus Ortho offered a cloud-based practice management software service for orthodontic practices.
- Brightsquid unveiled SecureMail, a cloud-based service that functions like Hotmail or Gmail but allows users to up to 500 MB of images per message.
During this same time, a Tennessee company has been quietly developing its own cloud-based service for dentistry and is now in the process of rolling it out in certain regions of the U.S.
CloudDDS is the brainchild of Brad Kilgore, who previously led the eastern U.S. medical products division at Baxter Healthcare, and Russ Olsen, former president of Straumann and Keystone Dental. They originally wanted to create a buying group for dentists based upon Kilgore's experience at Baxter working with hospital buying groups. But then Olsen had a better idea: HIPAA compliance.
"About five years ago, Russ came to me and said, 'We need to focus on the specialists and give them a referral method that they can give to the generalists to pass patient records, images, etc. back and forth via the cloud,' " Kilgore told DrBicuspid.com.
Kilgore agreed, so they reached out to another professional with an equally impressive resume: Stephen Dukes, an IT specialist with 20 years of experience who was the lead programmer on the tracking system at FedEx. Once the software package was created, earlier this year Olsen and Kilgore approached a number of thought leaders in oral surgery and convinced them to test drive CloudDDS.
"The specialists pay a monthly fee of $189 for the service and give it to their generalists for free," Kilgore explained. "We simplified the product along the lines of email -- any generalist can log in and use it."
While many of its competitors offer similar fee-based services, Kilgore believes CloudDDS has an advantage because the company employs a slightly different business model.
"What we have found is that it takes the referring practices a lot of time to assimilate to a cloud-based product," he said. "The minute you say 'software,' they think months of training, expense, etc. I think this means a two-year cycle for specialists to really get comfortable using a cloud-based service. And this business model would be very difficult to maintain long-term around a monthly fee -- eventually the fee would have to get up to $300 to $400, or you might have to start charging the generalist as well."
Mall in the sky
What sets CloudDDS apart is that the monthly fees are not its primary source of revenue. Instead, the company has another revenue stream within the cloud that supports its operations -- what Kilgore calls a "shopping mall in the sky" for dentists. Calling upon his experience working with hospital buying groups, Kilgore reached out to major manufacturers of consumable products like gloves and masks -- companies such as Medline -- and offered to connect them with the dental marketplace without the need for a sales force. The company has even branched out into office products. But only offices that utilize the CloudDDS referral service -- specialists and general dentists alike -- can purchase products through the company as well.
"We save the dental practices about 25% on their operational budgets," Kilgore said. "We also have 38,000 office supplies at about 5% below Staples' cost." All orders are shipped for next-day arrival, he noted.
Having been in business only about 10 months, CloudDDS already claims 1,000 practices and 180 specialists are utilizing its service, largely in the Eastern U.S. The company is now beginning to expand to other regions, particularly in the West, according to Kilgore.
"We realized that most generalists don't have a lot of time on their hands," he said. "They want something that is fast, easy, HIPAA-compliant, can be accessed from anywhere, doesn't require a lot of training, and is free to them. So we spent the last six months fine-tuning the service, and now we are growing faster than we could have imagined."
