The second location is where a practice finds out its technology was built for one building. Things that used to just happen a certain way now have to be decided, written down, and set up the same in both places.
The quickest way to double your support burden is to let the second office get built differently from the first. Same equipment, same layout in the closet, same naming, same way of doing things. Then anybody who understands one site understands both, including you and the person answering the phone at eight in the morning.
Running two offices against one practice management database turns the link between them from a convenience into clinical infrastructure. That is a real decision: where the server sits, how the sites connect, and what each office can still do on the day that connection is down. We would rather work those answers out with you up front, while there is still time to choose.
In a group practice people move between offices. A provider covering the other location on Thursday should sit down at a machine that looks and behaves the way theirs does, with the same access to the same records, without a phone call to make it work.
Patients call one number. Where that rings, whether the other office can pick it up when the first is buried, and how somebody transfers a caller between buildings are all things to decide on purpose. Most phone trouble across two offices comes down to those questions never getting answered, so we walk through them with you.
A practice you buy arrives with whatever the previous owner had, sometimes including an IT provider who still holds the passwords. Bringing an acquired office onto your standard is a project with a sequence to it, and the order matters, particularly around who has access to what and when that changes.
Multi-location practices tend to accumulate vendors: one per office, plus the one the acquired practice was using, plus the phone company. Consolidating that is usually the actual reason people call us, and for most practices it makes a bigger difference than any single piece of equipment.
We are based in Katy and support practices with locations across greater Houston and southeast Texas, from Sugar Land and Richmond to League City, Baytown, and The Woodlands.