Building State-of-the-Art: Why Dr. Allison Bartley Chose Ascend

This is the first 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. 

I acquired South Barrington Dental Care five months ago. Five months isn't very long when you're trying to learn a business, a building, and a team all at the same time, all while getting ready to expect a new baby at home in the fall. And if I'm being honest, I wasn't very familiar with Dentrix when I walked in the door. It came with the practice.  

My dental assistant didn't use it at all. I don’t mean she just used it a little or on occasion. She did not use it at all. And she really needed to. My receptionist was newly hired, capable in a lot of ways, but nowhere close to being a super user either. So, I was looking at a team that was, in different ways, starting from close to zero on the one system that's supposed to run almost everything in this building. 

That put me at a fork in the road. I could invest significantly in training everyone up on Dentrix, or I could look at installing a new system that better fit our office’s needs. And once I framed it that way, the answer got a lot more obvious. There's never a good time to make a transition this big and complicated. I don't think that time exists for anyone, in any practice. But I've come to see it differently. I see it as an opportunity. This team is fairly new, we haven't been through much together yet, and a modest obstacle we solve together is exactly the kind of thing that builds a team out of a group of people who happen to work in the same office. 

I won't pretend there isn't fear attached to this. There is, and it's real. This is yet another big change stacked on top of a lot of other big changes in a short window. I brought in a CEREC and started doing same-day crowns. We're using AI-enhanced tools now. I've changed out staff, and I put in a new, stronger bonus incentive structure.  

Any one of those changes on its own would ask a lot of a team. All of them together, in five months, is a lot to absorb. So yes, there's fatigue. There's some hesitation, and I'm not going to pretend it isn't there just because I believe in where we're headed. 

But here's the thing I keep coming back to: all of it is in service of the same goal. I want this practice at state of the art, and I want to get there sooner rather than later, especially because I’ll be taking maternity leave next month. My PMS is a key part of it. It's the system underneath everything else I'm trying to build, and if it's the wrong system, it slows down or undercuts every other investment I'm making. 

So, before I decided anything, I did the homework. I shopped all the usual candidates, and Ascend came out on top, by a real margin. That mattered to me, because I didn't walk into this evaluation looking for a reason to switch. We already have a strong partnership with Henry Schein One. Staying put is the easy, more comfortable choice, and honestly the default one. For me to walk away from that relationship and their PMS, the alternative would have needed to be utterly superior and critically necessary. It had to clear a high bar. 

Ascend cleared it. 

That's where we’re starting from. Onboarding begins in a few days, and over the next six weeks we'll be building toward a launch date of early October. I don't know yet exactly what that road is going to look like week to week. What I do know is why we're doing it, and I wanted to put that down first, before any of the rest of it happens: not because switching systems is the story, but because building a state-of-the-art practice, with a team that's still learning to move together, is. 

More soon. 

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