Practice Management Software

By Michael Dorausch, D.C.

I received another fax today regarding some chiropractic software for managing the office. I think I saw a similar fax the other day and I was amazed how expensive some of these software packages are priced.

This was chiropractic software for a paperless office and it was being advertised for around 250 bucks a month, for 60 months. That comes out to $15,000 and this is for the most basic package. A friend of mine, who works for Sun Microsystems, was taking a look at some of these chiropractic packages and basically said they were crippled software, meaning most have the ability to offer full function, but the features are locked down for no other reason than to make more money from the purchasers.

I’m still looking for a lead on some quality chiropractic software that can be used to manage the office. One of the major problems is I want to run everything in the office on Linux and I am seeing no development in that area when it comes to healthcare applications. While I am on the topic of software, I highly recommend Clam Antivirus if you’re running a Windows machine and require antivirus software. Clam is opensource and free. Thankfully, the moonshine that’s used to run my home office servers is open source as well. I’d be running Ubuntu in the front office if I could get the Wine configuration working properly for our current chiropractic office software.

I may as well mention how much I still love WordPress and this article I just found regarding Microsoft Internet Explorer 7.0 came to fruition as there’s currently not a single install of Internet Explorer that gets used on any of my computers, either at home or at the office.

By this time next year I’m expecting to see greater use of Linux based software in my office and home.