Software firm gets its teeth into US

US dental school deans, from left, Brian Stoute, Daniel Armstrong, Gary Guest, Darlene Armstrong, Stephen Kostewicz, Melanie Peterson and Ronald Mito with Brian Weatherly. Picture / Dean Purcell

Listed dental software company Software of Excellence is winning the hearts, minds and, maybe, wallets of customers acquired in the takeover of a rival software firm.

Software of Excellence this week has representatives from six US dental schools in Auckland to consult on what should be in the next generation of its enterprise product, aimed at hospitals and dental schools.

While the University of California, Los Angeles, is an existing customer, the other five - from Texas, California, Florida, Washington and Kentucky - use systems from General System Design.

Software of Excellence chief executive Brian Weatherly said the success of the GSD acquisition would be measured by the number of GSD customers who chose Software of Excellence for their next upgrade.

He said Software of Excellence had worked closely with the acquired company and wanted to get close to its dental school customers.

"Being able to draw on a much larger base of customers has greatly increased our intellectual property," Weatherly said. "We now have 19 US dental schools we can work with.

"It means we can really identify the common threads and know we are building for the industry rather than just solving individual needs."

Gary Guest, from the University of Texas Health Science Centre in San Antonio, said while his school had not yet signed to migrate its system, it was moving that way because it wanted a true electronic patient record system.

"Right now we have a GSD clinical information system which has typical management functions like making appointments, looking at demographics and recording patient histories, but we can't get the detailed progress notes and the links into other systems such as x-rays."