Episode #242: Dayna Johnson – Battling Confusing Software and Disorganized Systems

Dr. Eric Block: Welcome to the Stress-Free Dentist Podcast. I’m your host, Dr. Eric Block. As always, I want to inspire, entertain, and educate you on the best tools and technologies out there. My goal is to help make your practice and career more profitable, efficient, and, most importantly, more enjoyable. And check out all of my nonfiction and children’s books on Amazon, and check out thestressfreedentist.com  for any upcoming events. And if you’re feeling you’re a dental professional that’s burnt out, or you just feel stuck or want to get to that next level, visit the International Academy of Dental Life Coaches or www.iadlc.com, and we’ll get you matched up with a life coach that understands dentistry.

Hey everyone, welcome back to another episode, and today I am joined by Dayna Johnson. How you doing?

Dayna Johnson: I’m doing great. I’m doing great. Yeah. First snow, and, you know, sunrises have been beautiful.

Dr. Eric Block: Where do you live?

Dayna Johnson: I’m just north of Denver.

Dr. Eric Block: Yeah, you definitely get plenty of sun there. I’m outside of Boston, and it’s cold, and sometimes you don’t see the sun for like a week.

Dayna Johnson: Yeah, I think that’s one thing I love about Denver, about Colorado, is how much sunshine we get. I mean, it could be nine below, but at least the sun is shining.

Dr. Eric Block: Yeah. That’s awesome. And you are the founder and CEO of Novonee, and you’re an expert Dentrix trainer. Did I get all that right?

Dayna Johnson: I am, yes. I love software and workflow. It’s everything I do all day.

Dr. Eric Block: Well, let’s get into all that, but I first want to find out how you even got involved helping dental offices.

Dayna Johnson: Yeah, I actually kind of fell into dentistry. It was not my first career path of choice. I was actually in college—I was on the path of, you know, big marketing executive—and that didn’t work out. And I found myself all of a sudden looking for a job. My uncle had a software company. He was installing computers into medical and dental offices. And so I became his software support, office manager-type person. I used to install computers into medical and dental offices, and that’s how I first dipped my toe into the healthcare field.

I went to work for my first dental practice in ’91—way back in ’91. I worked for two dental practices. The second dental practice that I went to work in, they were using very old, archaic software, like DOS-based software.

Dayna Johnson: And we only had two workstations. Coming from a tech background, I was ready to bring in new software and upgrade their computers. I was all gung-ho, and it took me about eight, nine years to actually convince my doctor to get new computers. That’s where I first started with the Dentrix software, in my second dental practice in 2005—or 2003. Then I became a trainer in 2005.

When I started going out training offices, what I was hearing from doctors was, "We just don’t even know where to start. We haven’t had a lot of training. Our team is frustrated. Can you help us just get back on track and get the team trained and eliminate some of this frustration?" That really kind of jumpstarted my career in software training and consulting, and it’s just exploded from there.

Dr. Eric Block: I am embarrassed to say that we also started with that DOS system. And, strangely enough, I was at the Florida Dental Convention and I stayed at the hotel there—this was in 2025—and I looked behind the screen, and they were also using this old DOS system.

And it was like a very well-known hotel—the Gaylord Hotel. And it brought me—it gave me nightmares of the old DOS system. We switched to regular server-based Dentrix. Is that mostly what you train on? Is Dentrix server-based or cloud-based?

Dayna Johnson: Yeah, yeah. I can train on both, but Dentrix core server-based software is still, you know, the big one. They’re still the leading industry software in the country. They’re still the big dog on the floor. There are over 30,000 dental practices still using Dentrix core software, and the need is so great right now for training and consulting and coaching—just bringing teams up to speed on workflow efficiencies. There’s a lot of offices out there that need help.

Yes, offices are moving over to the cloud software, which is great. If you’re a multi-location practice or you just want your software in the cloud, a lot of offices are moving over to Dentrix Ascend and Open Dental and some of these other cloud-based softwares, which is great. But they’re still not overtaking the market yet. Dentrix and Eaglesoft are still the big dogs on the market, and there’s such a huge need for training. It’s incredible.

Dr. Eric Block: Yeah, I mean, most of the people that I talk to—we’re using, like you said, the core-based Dentrix. You’re just server-based.

Dayna Johnson: It’s the most feature-rich software out there still. They’re still actively developing it. I’m on the development team, so I get to see and help and bring ideas and insights to the developers, so they’re actively developing with it, which is awesome. You own your software. It’s in your office—it’s not going anywhere. And I think when you put your software in the cloud, it’s more accessible, of course, but you also lose a little bit of that control.

Dr. Eric Block: Does this analogy make sense? If you have server-based software, it’s essentially like your office computer, but if it’s in the cloud, then it’s on someone else’s computer. Does that make sense?

Dayna Johnson: Yeah, a hundred percent.

Dr. Eric Block: And are you seeing any—if I was to start an office today as a young dentist—are there any… what would you say the pros and cons would be of the server-based versus the cloud-based?

Dayna Johnson: For sure. I actually had this conversation yesterday. I have a doctor in Atlanta—she is opening up a scratch practice, like she’s just broke ground on the land. And I think, you know, what I asked her is, "Tell me a little bit about your future. Do you plan on having multiple locations?" If you plan on having multiple locations, cloud-based software is the right choice for you, because you can switch between locations very easily.

If you have server-based software, then each location is independent, which is great too. But if you’re going to have multi-locations, cloud-based software is the way to go. Also, if you want that accessibility—if you are a doctor and you want to access your data on your mobile device from anywhere in the world—cloud-based is how to go.

So there’s definitely pros and cons, but then also with cloud-based software, you have to have stable internet—stable and secure internet—because your patient data is now somewhere else. So you don’t have the security around that. Someone else is managing the security around that software, around that data. So it’s really important that you have a really secure internet connection and a stable internet connection if you’re going to go cloud-based.

Dr. Eric Block: Yeah, and then there’s things that are out of your control, right? Like AWS goes down, or there’s something called Cloudflare—that went down. I didn’t even know what that was, and we couldn’t access some of our third-party softwares. We were able to continue on with our Dentrix because it was server-based. But for cloud-based, you’re relying on other softwares and other computers, right?

Dayna Johnson: Exactly. Exactly. A hundred percent. You know, if you have a server-based software, at least if your power goes out, you can maybe kickstart your generator and have power again. You don’t need internet. You don’t need internet to take an x-ray. You don’t need internet to drive your drill. So you can still work. You can still write a clinical note with server-based software. So you do have more flexibility—well, you have flexibility with both. It’s just different types of flexibility with the software.

Dr. Eric Block: And what about third-party softwares? There are so many out there. I can imagine, you know, being overwhelmed by all the choices out there. What’s your advice there?

Dayna Johnson: My advice is that I want my teams to be in the practice management software as much as possible, because we all know that our teams are busy. They’re overwhelmed, they’re stressed out. And when they have to leave the practice management software to log into another dashboard—and then it times them out, and then they have to log back in—that breaks the efficiency.

So we want our teams to live in the practice management software as much as possible. We want third-party software that are very tightly integrated with our practice management software so that we don’t have to go out into that dashboard as much as we have to.

We want the electronic forms to sync data directly into our PMS. We want the online booking to drop the appointment right on our appointment book. We want the text messages to sync those messages directly into the contact section of our PMS so we don’t have to do all this copy-paste, or we don’t have to go looking in another dashboard to find our notes or to find those forms or things like that. So my recommendation is that we find the third-party vendors that are tightly integrated with our PMS as much as possible.

Dr. Eric Block: You mentioned the word "team," and you know, I—as a dentist and a business owner—my real… how I thrive and my golden goose is my chairside dentistry and keeping my office team happy with a good culture and trying to keep things efficient.

But when I’m in the practice management software, I’m really just focusing on my notes and the x-rays and the patient chart and medical history and all that. So my team—they’re the ones that are very involved with the practice management software, for sure.

How do you work your training? Do you work with typically the entire office, with just the dentist and office manager, or the entire team?

Dayna Johnson: Entire team, yeah. There are so many workflows in the dental practice that affect everyone—like, you touch everything, no matter if you think you do or not. As a dentist, you are the one treatment planning, so you’re the one diagnosing, you’re the one treatment planning. And so that treatment plan has to be well-organized and have all the details so that we can hand it off to our treatment coordinator or our admin team to then present treatment.

And so treatment planning is really a back-to-the-front workflow. So everyone on the team touches the treatment plan in some way. Also, health history is something that everyone on the team touches in some way. Your admin team might be the one that is sending the electronic form to the patient or making sure that the patient fills out the form and the data is syncing into the practice management software.

And then you and your hygienist and your clinical assistants are reviewing that health history in the patient chart. So there’s a lot of processes that touch everyone on the team. I don’t like to compartmentalize everything. There are some things that are compartmentalized, like some reports, but even collections—even cash flow—affects everyone on the team.

I love having the whole team involved because I think everyone on the team should be able to collect money. I’ve even trained doctors how to use the credit card machine because, you know, money needs to be collected on the day of service. And if your clinical team is dismissing a patient out the door without checking in, that could be a problem. So I love doing full team training with everything.

Dr. Eric Block: And when you train the team and you help them with a software that they’re using every day—and they’re, you know, you see it—most of the time they’re staring at that screen. The practice management software is like the heartbeat of the office. They want to understand. They want to be good. They want to know.

I imagine if people don’t know how to use the software well, they’re going to complain, they’re not going to be happy, and they ultimately maybe leave the office—and it’s a retention issue.

Dayna Johnson: A hundred percent. One hundred percent. What I’m reading—I love to do research and studies and look at key market research studies and things—and what we’re seeing right now is that team members are leaving, and the reason they’re leaving is no organized team training and development.

Our team members, especially our younger team members that we’re hiring, they want to learn, they want to be challenged, they want places where they can excel. They want recognition. They want resources. And so that is why a lot of our team members leave—because they don’t feel like they’re given the resources to learn and excel and gain that confidence.

And training is what’s going to give them that confidence. And when they have confidence, they feel better. They’re happier. You get better results. You have a full and productive schedule. You’ve got cash in the bank. When people are happy, that’s what happens.

Dr. Eric Block: Yeah. I was witnessing my wife, who is a former math teacher, try to teach my son fractions—and he was just getting so frustrated.

Dr. Eric Block: He just, he didn’t understand, and it had nothing to do with, you know, him. He just wasn’t grasping it yet. And it’s frustrating.

And I imagine that, you know, the training—and training with Dentrix, which again, like I said, is something the team is looking at every day—this is helpful for a new employee, someone who’s been there, or someone who’s been there for a long time, a legacy staff member that maybe they’ve gotten into some bad habits, and the training is truly to kind of help recalibrate them.

Dayna Johnson: Absolutely. You know, I mean, statistics show that most offices are only using about 15 to 20% of what the software can do. And so you have a longtime team member—she’s been there 20 years—and maybe she’s only using 15 to 20, maybe 30% of the software. And then she’s the one that’s onboarding and training the new team members. So she’s only able to train them on her 20 or 30% that she knows of the software.

And then the new team member can only retain maybe 40% of that. So now that drops the… you could just get this dilution of knowledge as you have existing team members training and onboarding new team members.

You would up the level of confidence and knowledge and workflow efficiencies if you brought in a professional trainer. Just like doctors go to CE—they want to learn from experts, they want to learn best practices—the team needs that too. They want experts to come in and teach them best practices. Don’t teach me the slow way—I want to learn the fast way. And they want to learn the best way.

And the only way you’re really going to get that is by bringing in a trainer or finding really solid, credible online resources.

Dr. Eric Block: Now tell me about the ROI of training. I, you know, I call it ROF—or return on fun—because, you know, when you have less stress, you’re having more fun and, you know, and vice versa.

Is there an ROI, like, is there a tangible value that you can put on when you come in and train a team?

Dayna Johnson: Yes. I mean, I don’t know about me personally—I haven’t done, like, percentages on me personally—but I have read studies that the ROI on team training and development will increase the practice production and revenue higher than buying a piece of equipment.

So if you’re going to spend money—let’s say you’re thinking about spending some money in 2026—spending money on team training and development will give you a higher ROI than buying that CBCT machine or that laser. And studies show it. I mean, studies prove it.

Team training and development will increase your team retention by 24%. And so those are just studies that I’ve read. So there’s definitely an ROI with training and team development.

And it’s fun. I mean, I don’t know how many times I’ve gone into a practice and the doctor will hire me to come in for a couple of days, and we’ll get to, like, the third day and we’re doing our review…

Dayna Johnson: I love to play games when I teach, because adults are just kids in big bodies. We love to play. We’re very competitive. And so I love to play games when I teach. And we’ll get to the last day, and the team is always like, “Can you stay the rest of the week?” because they’re just having so much fun learning—and the lightbulb moments.

And the doctors are like, “Oh my gosh, we’ve been looking for these answers for so long.” And it’s just—it’s so heartwarming. And then teams thrive. I mean, when people are happy—you’re right—the office just thrives, and it’s so fun to watch.

Dr. Eric Block: Now what are you seeing out there when you go to offices? What are you seeing that offices are really struggling with?

Dayna Johnson: I think a lot of offices really struggle with—you hire a new team member and you throw ’em on the front line, and they’re like, "Well, what am I supposed to do?" "Well, just start answering the phone." You know? And so they’re not given any kind of clarity on what their job role is or any kind of roadmap as to what their path to success is.

And I think that’s where people get frustrated—because they’re just not given a roadmap or a path to success. I see that a lot. Turnover is rampant in our industry, and so we’re just going through team members. And you would think that we would’ve learned by now—we need to give them a path of success, an onboarding guide.

Dayna Johnson: And that’s my goal, is to really help offices with that. The other thing that I see a lot of is the redundancy in software. So we have a lot of overlapping software, which then costs the doctor too much money, for one thing, and also drives the team crazy—because they just have too many things that they’re trying to manage.

You know, we need to give them one or two things, and that’s about it. Because that’s about all that they have time for, and that’s about all you really need, you know? So those are the two main things I see offices really struggling with.

Dr. Eric Block: Now tell me about your company, Novonee. Is it all virtual? Do you always go live in person? What’s your process?

Dayna Johnson: Yeah, so we have two options for offices that want training and team development. We do have an online option that’s available now 24/7. We have an online library of courses, we do Power Hours every week where we do group coaching calls, we have an online community for support, and we do practice assessments.

So the online version is available always—it’s the most affordable option. And then, for offices that want more comprehensive, one-on-one personalization, I do three-day, two- to three-day—sometimes four-day—in-office trainings. And I travel all over the country for that.

Dr. Eric Block: And are you finding you can help offices that are either just starting out or offices like mine that have been around for, you know, many years?

Dayna Johnson: Yeah, many years. Most of the offices I work with have been using the Dentrix software for many years. They have solid, loyal team members—or maybe they have a couple of new team members—but most of the time, I’m going into offices that have been around for a long time.

Rarely do I have a startup or a new office. And, you know, it’s just so amazing to see all the things that I can help them with. Like I was saying earlier—the lightbulb moments, the "Oh my gosh, you just saved me hours in my week!" It’s just really heartwarming. I love it so much.

Dr. Eric Block: All right, two final questions. How do we find out more about what you’re up to? And then the final question—what advice would you give to the young dentist out there?

Dayna Johnson: Great question. The easiest way to get a hold of me is to go to my website, novonee.com.  All my free resources are there—podcast, newsletter, YouTube channel—all that’s there, all the free stuff.

And what advice would I give the new dentist out there? I would take information that you may see in a Facebook chat room—and then do your own research. Talk to an expert. If you see that doctors are praising a software and they have really good reviews, then talk to an expert that trains on that software or has used that software.

I feel like there is a lot of misguided information in these Facebook chat rooms. I think that, yes, it can give you some good ideas, but don’t take it as the gold standard. I think there is a lot of really good information in these chat rooms, and it’s a good place to connect with people, but you can also get really poor information there as well.

So, do your research. Reach out to somebody that’s credible and has been working with those softwares for a while. How do they integrate? All those things.

Dr. Eric Block: That’s great advice. All right, Dayna Johnson, thank you so much for joining us. That was excellent.

Dayna Johnson: Thank you, Eric. It’s a pleasure to be on your podcast, so I appreciate it.

Dr. Eric Block: Thanks again for listening to the Stress-Free Dentist Podcast, and don’t hesitate to get in touch with me at thestressfreedentist.com.  And if you haven’t already, please subscribe on your favorite platform and leave us a review.

Until the next episode, I’m Dr. Eric Block, the Stress-Free Dentist.