Two generations in one surgery: when the old device is still good, they just look for the image elsewhere
In a rural practice, the old handpieces and the new X-ray lived through a Sidexis update in the same surgery. A story about how sometimes you do not need a replacement, you just need everyone to search in the same archive.
Last autumn, in a rural practice, I was given a job I like: not replacing everything, but aligning the old with the new. The doctor has been working with the same generation of handpieces for ten years, but the X-ray is already new, and Sidexis has moved to a fresh version.
At the start of the job the assistant said: “Everything works here, it is just sometimes odd.” The word odd is always an alarm in a service engineer's ear. It turned out that the old intraoral sensor was still receiving images from the previous software module, while the new panoramic unit was already saving into the new Sidexis 4 archive. At reception they were looking for the same patient in two folders.
We did not throw out the working devices. We rerouted the data flow, checked the backup paths, and went through with the doctor what she would find on the screen, and where. The greatest joy was when she said: “This is the first time I understand where everything is.”
Often it is not an equipment change that is needed, but order in the background. I consider this the least spectacular, but the most relieving work — and it is on days like this that I feel why it was worth choosing this trade thirty years ago.