Need some business software advice

[ghost]

As many of you here know, I'm an orthodontist and I'm making a push here at the end of the year to make my office completely paperless and to foster a sense of collaboration and teamwork among my employees.  I'm looking for a software solution that will allow for easy collaboration between me and the assistants, i.e. "hey doc, can I do _______, or should I do _______ instead?", without having to drag me over to the chair or yell across the clinic.  I'm also looking for the same level of communication to be easy between the front office staff and the back office staff (assistants).  There has always been a dichotomy between the front desk staff and assistants in every dental office that has ever existed.  And I also need to find a nice way to have the front office staff and myself collaborate on documents that need to be written and signed. 

I have been examining some business collaboration softwares such as Jive, Alfresco, Huddle and Yammer.  Does anyone have any experience with these or other products that are similar?  I need something that is reasonably easy to use for those that aren't exactly at my level of computer savvy (which is obviously much, much less than you folks in the industry).  Also, HIPAA compliance is important so whatever I'm using would need to be secure.  I'm interested in having something that is fairly comprehensive so that I don't have to have 15 things open to accomplish what I want and I'm not opposed to spending a little money to have something useful and relatively easy. 

[Engels]

I haven't had any experience with these types of integrated products, other than Google. Our staff uses Google Talk and Google Docs (along with a garden variety file share) for this kind of thing. Its not a seamless or integrated one-size-fits-all solution, by any means, but we steer clear of small independent companies, as polished as their product may be, simply because the market is so volatile its a complete crap shoot if the company's gonna be around in the next two years.

It would be of interest to me too to know of some form of integrated platform from a company that isn't a johnny come lately.

[ghost]

Yeah, I looked at the Google apps and it seems like it would be a bit cumbersome.

[Viin]

Hmm, the closest I can think of would be something like Basecamp (www.basecamphq.com). Its great for docs but not that great for real-time communication.

Maybe just IM and basecamp would solve most of your problems? Or Dropbox for docs?

edit: or maybe something like http://banckle.com/ or http://groupdocs.com/ ? Though maybe you want something local for security purposes..

[Chimpy]

Do you already use MS Office stuff regularly? I know you said you had VoIP in the past, going for the Office365 package that includes Lync might be a good fit. Not sure how their backend systems work with HIPPA compliance.

[cmlancas]

Can you give me an example of exactly what you need done and the timeframe you usually accomplish it in?

We do a lot of document editing where I work and we have different software (or hard copies) to do what we need done.

Also, I'm guessing everyone in a ortho's office is HIPAA trained--in our 900-someodd pharmacies we train everyone.

[Krakrok]

Hmm, the closest I can think of would be something like Basecamp (www.basecamphq.com). Its great for docs but not that great for real-time communication.

I think you're on the right track with this. They also have something called Campfire which is real time and which looks like it would work pretty well. Don't know about the HIPAA compliance.

http://campfirenow.com/

[ghost]

Basecamp actually looks very good.  It's set up in a very intuitive manner.  I'm going to check it out.  (checked out.  It's got pretty weak iOS integration, to my eye)

As far as what we do with documents, it's mostly routing around to get things signed on PDF, but there is some editing of letters, etc.

I'm starting to think that Dropbox in combo with something like Basecamp might not be a bad way to go for us.

[Chimpy]

If you are concerned about HIPAA don't use Dropbox (or probably any of the major names in online file lockers at this point).

The University of Illinois just started using Box.com, which has much better business/enterprise security features than Dropbox, but we still are not allowed to use it for things that require HIPAA-like levels of privacy compliance.