Dayna Johnson has more than 20 years of experience in dental software, and she still finds herself teaching features to offices that have been using the same practice management system (PMS) for two decades. She has witnessed this pattern repeatedly while conducting Dentrix user meetings across the country, and it's the focus of this DrBicuspid.com Podcast episode.
Host Kevin Henry talks with Johnson, known to many in the industry as the "Dentrix Queen" and founder of Novonee, about her recent American Association of Dental Office Management presentation, the "Top 10 PMS Features That Will Transform Your Daily Operations," which drew a packed crowd at the conference.
Johnson walks through her top three takeaways from that talk. The first is schedule mapping, known as "Perfect Day Scheduling" in the Dentrix world. Schedule mapping creates a road map for where new patients, surgeries, hygiene and scaling and root planing appointments should fall. It also helps guide artificial intelligence search engines to drive new patients to a practice when paired with online booking.
The second feature is automating repetitive tasks like posting payments, closing out transactions, and resetting insurance benefits, freeing up staff time that's increasingly hard to come by. The third PMS feature is tracking production goals directly in the software instead of separate spreadsheets that most of the team never sees.
The conversation also delves into a problem Johnson says trips up a lot of dental practices: buying third-party software that claims to "integrate" with a PMS solution without understanding how deep that integration actually goes. She offers a practical fix: asking specific, detailed questions, like whether a form's data sync directly with the right fields in a practice's health history module rather than settling for a vague "yes" from a sales rep. Johnson also suggests that practice staff track down PMS experts directly through LinkedIn or by posting detailed questions in software-specific Facebook groups.
Johnson closes the podcast by encouraging dentist-owners to budget for software training heading into 2027. She cites two reasons for her request: First, most practices use only 15% to 20% of what their software can do, and the software itself keeps changing. (Dentrix alone rolled out 25 updates in 2026). Second, high office manager turnover is a compelling reason why ongoing training matters, since new hires often bring with them habits from a previous practice that don't align with how the current team works.
Dayna Johnson can be reached at Novonee.com or on LinkedIn.
Listen to the full conversation below.
As a note, DrBicuspid.com is currently working with Ackerman Research on a survey about your practice management software. It's short and will help us with our coverage. Please take our survey here.
