Using Open Dental with a mobile clinic

[cnewgaard]

We are a community health center in Arizona that is looking for a replacement for Dentrix. We've come across open dental due to our electronic medical records system, eClinicalWorks, having a built in interface. Our current dental clinic is a fully mobile clinic using laptops to run Dentrix and Dexis. We would like to transition to Open Dental and interface it with our eClinicalWorks installation and are wondering if anyone else has done something similar and how it worked out? We were thinking of installing a central server at our main medical site with the Open Dental server interfacing with eClinicalWorks and then using mobile broadband/VPN connections from the mobile unit. If anyone has tried something similar I'd love to hear about it. Thanks.

Chris Newgaard
IT Manager
United Community Health Center

[DavidWolf]

I use OD from my house with microsoft terminal services. It works perfectly but can be a little slow.
I have also logged into the same kind of session from my laptop with a mobile broadband card, it works the same but can be slow.

I use it mainly to look up patients when they call with after hours emergencies....So it is not a great test, but it does work.

[atd]

We are using Open Dental for our mobile clinics. We use mobile broadband card/router for internet access and connect to a VPN and then Terminal Server 2008 to access Open Dental. The only issue we've had is that the mobile broadband speeds are unreliable - they can be running fast at one time of the day and then slow significantly at other times, even when the signal strength is excellent. We setup our equipment inside each facility rather than in a mobile van, so depending on where we're setup in the building (i.e. basement) or even the structure of the building can affect if we can get a signal or not. You'd probably have more success with it if you're setup in a van in a parking lot than we do indoors. At some locations where we haven't been able to use it due to slow speeds, we've had to work out an arrangement with the facilities to use their internet connection. If you want to discuss further you can reach me at 763-784-7993 x15.

Brenda

[dentalonthego]

We use Open Dental with 2 Mobile Dental Trucks. We have the two trucks and one central site server. We opted for the daisy chain replication of mysql since we are limited on internet access. Everything has worked great. We us microsoft synctoy to sync the scanned documents and also run Schick CDR Dicom for digital x-rays. We replaced Dentrix with Open Dental.