CUSTOMER STORY

How DSN Software is transforming the dentistry patient experience

by AWS Editorial Team | 13 November 2024 | Thought Leadership

Overview

Dental care is essential to everyone, but the operational demands of running a practice can take dental specialists away from what they do best—providing quality care to patients.

As a leader in specialty dental practice management software, DSN Software’s mission is to reduce the daily administrative burdens of appointment scheduling, switching between dental software tools, collecting patient feedback, facilitating remote access, managing patient messaging, processing online payments, and more.

DSN achieved this by developing an all-in-one patient management system with advanced automation tools to streamline time-consuming workflows. Customizable for each clinic, it includes complete electronic medical records, implant inventory management, referral tracking, detailed reporting, simplified scheduling, and a fully-featured patient portal.

However, before migrating to Amazon Web Services, DSN had to host their system in different data centers across various regions. This led to multiple challenges, from managing hardware to securing the right talent. Most critically, issues with scalability and reliability hindered their ability to expand and deliver new innovations.

Sam Munakl, Chief Executive Officer at DSN, recalls, “Our imaging partner told us how migrating to the AWS Cloud helped give them the scalability they needed. After an introduction, we dropped all thoughts of hosting on our own data centers.”

 

"When we do a technical review with a large client, one of the first things they ask is, ‘Where is your cloud environment?’ When they hear it’s AWS, you don't have to say much more.”

- Sam Munakl, Chief Executive Officer at DSN

dentist reviewing xray with a patient

Supporting software business growth and boosting innovation

Working in healthcare, DSN was rightfully concerned about how downtime could adversely affect their clients. To aid uptime throughout the migration, AWS recommended the AWS Migration Acceleration Program (MAP)—a comprehensive cloud-migration program based on learnings from thousands of enterprise customer cloud migrations. A key part of this was the expert help they received from an AWS specialist migration partner.

Working together, they utilized the AWS Migration Service, capable of individually scheduling each client’s migration to minimize disruption—for instance, during evenings or overnight. The migration process worked by creating a new, isolated Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) for each transfer. This new infrastructure provided DSN with the secure, resizable compute capacity in the cloud they needed. A big advantage of this process was that DSN could provide their clients access to this new Amazon EC2 instance before the final migration cut over, so they could verify its success. 

Reaping the benefits of the AWS Cloud

With AWS, DSN can now better support their clients’ growing needs. Because DSN has clients across the United States, AWS Global Infrastructure allows them to host each client’s service in the optimal region—and combined with the AWS Application Load Balancer, this has resulted in the fastest, most efficient, and reliable service possible.

Using the scalable workloads of Amazon EC2, DSN can automatically add or remove compute resources as needed. Since their migration, DSN has experienced 100% uptime, with no infrastructure issues.

The AWS Cloud environment offers solutions that help DSN meet U.S. Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) regulatory requirements, which are critical for securing protected health information (PHI) such as insurance, billing, clinical care data, and lab results.

Benefits beyond cloud migration

DSN now uses the Amazon Data Lifecycle Manager to automatically create backups of clients’ Amazon EC2 instances several times a day, which can be restored in the case of disaster recovery. Firewall security rules automatically alert them to issues, as well as immediately blocking suspicious activity. And to keep their developers’ skills at the cutting edge, AWS is supporting with certification training.

As new competitors come to the market, DSN’s relationship with AWS has become a key advantage. As Munakl explains, “When we do a technical review with a large client, one of the first things they ask is, ‘Where is your cloud environment?’ When they hear it’s AWS, you don't have to say much more.”

The power of AI is the future for DSN

DSN is continuing to work with AWS on the release of six new products, including a groundbreaking cloud imaging platform that enables dentists to access and share digital images from anywhere, on any device.

A major focus for DSN is AI, which has the potential to reduce administrative tasks by automating processes like note-taking and billing. AI can also help reduce patient risk, as Munakl notes, “AI can alert you to possible adverse interactions between a drug you’re prescribing and ones the patient is already taking.”

In summary, Munakl says, “We have recently partnered with some of the largest dental service organizations in the United States, and our relationship with AWS is a key assurance of our ability to deploy our technology for their organizations.”

To find out how your business can accelerate innovation and optimize costs, read more about migrating to the AWS Cloud.