Week Three: One Week In

This is the third entry in an ongoing series following South Barrington Dental Care through their transition from Dentrix to Dentrix Ascend, told in near-real time by owner Dr. Allison Bartley, in her own words.

We just finished our first week on Ascend. I’m more convinced than ever that this was not only a smart move, it was a critical one. 

Ascend is light years better than what we had. I'm not being hyperbolic. This is legitimate software for the 21st century. It’s intuitive, fast, and smart. Things are where they're supposed to be, and not buried seven layers deep in a menu where you'd only find them by accident after ten minutes of frustrated clicking. This is a practice management solution that understands the importance of your time and respects your intelligence.
I LOVE it.

But one week in, I'm also learning that training never covers everything, and that people learn at wildly different speeds.

Despite a full day of guided training, some of the simplest things still aren't landing with everyone. The hygienists don't know how to process a payment. We're running a quick refresh session tomorrow to walk through it again. It's a good reminder that repetition matters, some people need it more than others, and my job as an owner includes meeting people where they're at – not where I wish they were.

There's something else that’s really surprised me. The hygienists are resisting the AI Notes and Perio features. These should be game-changers for them. They can save time, improve accuracy, and let them focus more on patient care instead of documentation. But they're ambivalent about them at best, and entrenched in their reluctance to use them.

That's frustrating to me. Not because the features are there and they're not using them; that's a solvable training problem. It's frustrating because it speaks to something deeper: a reluctance to embrace change, to be curious, to want to learn something new. 

I built my practice on the idea that we're here to serve patients better. Better accuracy, better documentation, better time management all serve that mission. When people don't want those things, it makes me question what we're really about. I'm still sitting with that, honestly. It's unresolved.

There have been good surprises, though, too. My receptionist is excellent, but she was operating in both Ascend and Dentrix simultaneously. I wasn't sure why until I realized she'd probably found a workflow that worked for her. It’s the same with the hygienists, who felt they needed Dentrix open to access the Ledger and see patient treatment history. But our trainer Judi helped us see that Patient Notes is the better choice. This wasn’t resistance; they were just people finding their footing.

The best decision I made this week was scheduling a dedicated session on Treatment Planning during our day off. That deep dive accelerated my abilities with the software in ways a full day of broad training couldn't. I went from competent to confident in that one area, and once I shared what I learned, my hygienists asked if they could get the same focused attention on their work. That's the kind of ownership of learning I want to see.

The business side of this transition is becoming clearer by the day. My business manager spent his old days toggling between Adit and Dentrix to manage patient communication, mass emails, texts, and all of it fragmented. Now he's hunched over Ascend alone, and he loves what he's building, including patient campaigns that are streamlined and smart. Yesterday, he pulled an overdue prophy and perio report straight from power reporting, launched a reminder notification via email and text, and embedded the online scheduling link he pulled from Jarvis all in minutes. He's just getting started, and the possibilities are already visible to him.

We can't wait to get trained up on Jarvis once the historical Dentrix data uploads. I can feel us positioning to take the business management of this practice to a completely different level. And yes, let's be honest — this is a business, and we have to deal with rising costs, property taxes, maintenance, and staff expenses. We need to generate revenue and profit. Ascend gives us the tools to do that more efficiently and more intelligently than we could before.

In two days, I'm heading to the hospital to deliver my son. I'm 37 weeks along, and we discovered gestational hypertension, so he's coming a little early. For the next several months, my full attention will be on learning to be his mother and caring for him in ways I can't anticipate yet.

But here's the thing: because of Ascend's cloud functionality, I'll still be able to keep tabs on my practice. I'll be able to see my patients, their treatments, their images, their referrals, and their outcomes. I'll be able to stay connected without being physically present in a way that would have been impossible with the old system. That matters more than people might think.

I'm grateful to the whole transition team at Henry Schein One for their onboarding support, communication, and partnership. Grateful for my Account Executive, who's stayed tuned in and present throughout. Grateful for Leah Kroeger, our Project Manager, who's been the quarterback of this whole thing. Grateful for Judi and the training team. Even if the support side has its moments (it's been a bit uneven), but the broader team showed up.
More importantly, I'm grateful that I made this decision. I pushed this team through a lot of change in a short window. But that change is positioning us for something better.

More soon.

— Dr. Allison Bartley, Owner, South Barrington Dental Care