BOC Winners in Practice: Apteryx Imaging's XVWeb

Dr. Jonathan Penchas of Midtown Dentistry in Houston, Texas describes his experience using XVWeb from Apteryx Imaging.

Dr. Jonathan Penchas

DPR: Tell us a bit about yourself and your practice.

Dr. Penchas: I'm a specialist prosthodontist and I’ve been practicing for 29 years. I own a group of five practices called Midtown Dentistry in the Houston area. We have six doctors working, and they're located within a radius of 150 miles from each other. We do all types of dentistry.

DPR: How did you learn about XVWeb from Apteryx?

Dr. Penchas: I’ve been using XVWeb for about 5 years. Over the years, we needed a software system where we could discuss X-rays between the doctors, refer to specialists, and do it in an economical way and do it in a safe way. So, in an encrypted way that’s safe, but that instantaneously we could read X-rays or have other specialists read them for us.

Before, we were using a closed system, which meant, if we moved to different software, different electronic medical records, there were always fees and technical difficulties with moving from one system to the next. And it wasn't as cloud-based as this is. Apteryx has been the leader, they were probably the first in the U.S. market in X-rays that are cloud-based.

We needed all the things that XVWeb could do. The competitors were just starting into it and they were putting roadblocks, meaning they were not software agnostic. This was truly the only open system, where we could use it, and use any dental medical records we wanted.

DPR: What has your experience using XVWeb, and how has it been most useful to your practice?

Dr. Penchas: They've added even more and more features that allow us many workflows that are beneficial to our clients and to us, both on the dental side, and also financially for efficiency and cost control. On the dental side, we're able to email and communicate with our specialists and doctors between the offices so my associates can, after taking an X-ray, immediately send that to me, not just an X-ray but also a panoramic and a CT scan. That's a relatively new development, but we can now view CT scans, and we can view them from anywhere in the world with the software that's enclosed in XVWeb.

DPR: How has using XVWeb benefited your practice and your patients?

Dr. Penchas: A great benefit is that you can access images from any internet-connected device—any connected tablet, cell phone, etc.

But, it's also very efficient. My insurance group sits in a different building and they can pull up all these X-rays. So, you can see all of the workflows of a Business Insurance Group, accounting, etc. We can email encrypted images without having to download it, and then load it to email and make sure it's encrypted. We can put a password on the file so I can send it to a doctor's office but only the doctor can see it with a password. So, it's very work-efficient and fast, and yet still OSHA protected, HIPAA protected and legal all built into this one platform.

For our patients, having a medical record that has everything in one place is very beneficial. They can go from office to office and they're not holding the X-rays in their hands and another clinician isn’t having to re-take images. XVWeb images come as a DICOM file. So basically, any dental professional can open these files with whatever software they're using, and they can see the X-ray.