I have to comment because my wife is a dentist and I have considered entering the dental market a couple of times because the software is pretty terrible. I think there is one founder (SikkaSoft??) who has a similar story.
A couple of interesting things about the Dental market:
1) Customers are resistant to change because they want to spend their time focused on the dentistry not solving IT problems. One of the leading dental software providers, Eaglesoft, has a really bad UI/UX. Each screen looks like it was designed by a separate team of engineers and has never been updated. On the other hand, dental staff get used to the quirks of the UI and it's not clear that Eaglesoft could totally redo their product without a revolt from customers.
2) A pure cloud based solution would be super awesome except that you still need to integrate with a bunch of hardware, e.g: you need to tell the digital x-ray to take a picture. On the other hand, the need to operate on premise servers for dental offices is a giant ass-pain. Also the Dental market is still windows based which really sucks. (have you tried administrating windows servers? yuck)
3) Since this is a fairly mature market there is a bunch of vertical integration. Patterson (which owns eaglesoft) wants you to buy their kit which runs with their software, I think Schein is a distributor for dentrix so they have their own stuff as well.
4) While no dentist likes paying the maintenance fee for their software, it's really a non-issue when you come to the P&L statement.
I think one possible way to disrupt this market is to do a mashup of Athena health and dentrix/Eaglesoft. My understanding of Athena Health is they run your back office so you don't need staff to do billing and deal with insurance companies. I don't think there is someone who does this well in the Dental space (but I could be wrong). At a certain office size you need a full time staff member to run Billing. As long as the cut that you take is less than the cost of employing a billing department, it's a win.
Comments
I have to comment because my wife is a dentist and I have considered entering the dental market a couple of times because the software is pretty terrible. I think there is one founder (SikkaSoft??) who has a similar story.
A couple of interesting things about the Dental market:
1) Customers are resistant to change because they want to spend their time focused on the dentistry not solving IT problems. One of the leading dental software providers, Eaglesoft, has a really bad UI/UX. Each screen looks like it was designed by a separate team of engineers and has never been updated. On the other hand, dental staff get used to the quirks of the UI and it's not clear that Eaglesoft could totally redo their product without a revolt from customers. 2) A pure cloud based solution would be super awesome except that you still need to integrate with a bunch of hardware, e.g: you need to tell the digital x-ray to take a picture. On the other hand, the need to operate on premise servers for dental offices is a giant ass-pain. Also the Dental market is still windows based which really sucks. (have you tried administrating windows servers? yuck) 3) Since this is a fairly mature market there is a bunch of vertical integration. Patterson (which owns eaglesoft) wants you to buy their kit which runs with their software, I think Schein is a distributor for dentrix so they have their own stuff as well. 4) While no dentist likes paying the maintenance fee for their software, it's really a non-issue when you come to the P&L statement.
I think one possible way to disrupt this market is to do a mashup of Athena health and dentrix/Eaglesoft. My understanding of Athena Health is they run your back office so you don't need staff to do billing and deal with insurance companies. I don't think there is someone who does this well in the Dental space (but I could be wrong). At a certain office size you need a full time staff member to run Billing. As long as the cut that you take is less than the cost of employing a billing department, it's a win.