How Secure is my Practice Management Software?

A couple of the most frequently asked questions by dentists regarding practice management software are:

• Is there a brand of practice management software that is better at protecting a doctor against embezzlement?
• What is the most secure software?

This question is analogous to asking if one hammer is safer to use than another. All hammers have the potential to be safe, if used properly, and the potential to cause grievous harm if they are not.

How is Practice Management Software Built?

Let’s start by looking at your software in a way that is slightly different than how what you are accustomed.

Your practice management software consists of two parts.  There is a relational database that contains “data tables” containing all the information on your practice.  Data tables include patient master information such as name, address, and phone number, as well as treatment records, receivables balances, and so on.  The database programming languages used are commercial programs made by big companies like Microsoft and Oracle and licensed to the company that makes your practice management software.  The most common database language used in practice management software is SQL, which stands for Structured Query Language.

The second part of practice management software is an interface, or “front end,” that allows you and your staff to interact with the database in an organized and hopefully user-friendly fashion.

Data Integrity

What is sometimes behind this question is fear on the part of the asking dentist that a clever staff member could somehow bypass the front end of the software and directly make edits to the database, or edit the audit trail to erase evidence of wrongdoing. 

I’ll put your mind at ease on this one.  Reading information from the database without using the practice management software’s interface isn’t hard for someone with a computer science background and some database skills.  Extraction of information from databases is something that we do regularly in the course of our investigations.

However, editing the data in the data tables is a much more difficult undertaking. Without dragging you into a lot of detail about database architecture and checksums, I can tell you that doing this is very difficult in any modern practice management software.  The result of someone trying is likely that the next time someone tries to start your software, it will report a database error and will require some resuscitation to run. 

I’m not saying that editing your data in some other way than using the interface can’t be done, but this would take someone with PhD-level computer knowledge.

If the Integrity of the Database is Secure, Where Does the Danger Originate?

Most embezzlement occurs not because of inherent weaknesses in practice management software but because human practice owners fail to apply sufficient supervision and common sense to their practice management software.

Unfortunately, there is no such thing as embezzlement-proof software. All practice management software is designed with built-in safeguards, but then practice owners neutralize many security features.  There is always an inherent tradeoff between controls and efficiency.

For example, it is possible to set up practice management software so that the practice owner is the only person permitted to authorize credit adjustments to patient accounts. While, in theory, this is safer than allowing staff members to make adjustments without the doctor’s approval, it is operationally cumbersome to have staff continuously interrupting the doctor when transactions need to be authorized. Most offices find the safest options unwieldy and end up deliberately bypassing some of the built-in safety features of their software for the sake of convenience.

Maddeningly, when new practice management software is installed, typically, the default setup disables many of the security features available, and enabling these features requires specific action on the part of the practice. The companies that make the software take this approach for understandable reasons; with unfamiliar practice management software, higher security settings inevitably prompt more calls to the software’s support line. When someone new to a software discovers that something that they are trying to do is blocked, the next step is usually to call the software’s technical support. To reduce user frustration and manage support costs, software companies normally turn off many security features in the default setup.

So let’s start treating our practice management software as the vital repository of data that it is. Having that mindset will offer far more protection than any built-in security feature in your software.

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