Open Dental features

[sandi]

Im an Open Dental user in the land of the leprechans-Ireland. Love the GREAT software , very friendly and helpful as well as knowledgable support over the phone, best Ive ever experienced to be honest from ANY company anywhere.
Also very impressed with the new releases that keep on coming. However I notice most of the features tend to be biased towards large offices and North America its home of course.

I have therefore recently considered switching to a large provider of software in the British Isles as I was with them before many years ago at a different office. Their support isnt the best and they dont have great updates but I need a few features for the viability of my business. After the meeting I decided the expense and time of switching wasnt worthwhile currently and I would try to get some feature requests in instead of inside 'anger'. I would be happy to pay for these to be implemented partly hopefully through the request system. Ive put in some feature requests-2783,2796,2797,2800,2809,2750 - the main ones for me being why does OD not allow the date of birth to carry over to the add new patient screen. We ask the patient their date of birth and do a search for similar patients who we may have a duplicate record for and then if it doesnt exist we put their name in click Add, and then the birthdate doesnt carry over! (searching by name isnt reliable with OD one letter out and you miss the ability to see them on the search.)
The other one being should patient balances not appear on the various patient screens? why does one have to flick back and forth to different screens? Also shouldnt there be some kind of a pop up possibly by hovering over the greyed completed patient on the diary for the receptionist to say to book a planned appointment? Why does she have to go back and forth to so many different screens to see if there is a planned appointment, balances?

Another issue is completing appointments doesnt trigger the appointment complete trigger for the time of patient dismissal and this has to be separately done, yet another unnecessary click.

Another is a great feature to text a patient their appointment once its booked(date/time) however no email option exists for this so its of limited use in Ireland where callfire doesnt work( I know they can be bulk confirmed by email but not an individual appt as far as I know). So in my opinion the program lacks flow and requires alot of skilled expensive labour ( with clinical training/telepathy) at reception to make it usable for me at least(maybe there is something wrong with me )

[jordansparks]

> Another issue is completing appointments doesnt trigger the appointment complete trigger for the time of patient dismissal and this has to be separately done, yet another unnecessary click.
This must be a training/setup issue. Open Dental does do that automatically if set up right.

I'm going to be honest with you here. It has been harder to adapt our software to other countries than I ever could have possibly imagined. Government rules get more complex every year. It took a LOT of work to adapt it to Canada. When we were recently faced with the choice between spending 6 months working on our EHR 2014 certification (arcane details specific to USA) versus fully adapting to the UK market, we chose USA. We don't have unlimited resources. We need to pick very carefully where we apply our scarce resources. At this time, we have no immediate plans to build UK-specific features. When we do target the UK market someday, we will hit it hard, with everything you would expect.

[sandi]

> The trigger not going with the completed appt I asked support last week and they checked it out and got back to me saying it cannot be linked. If there is any way to do so Id appreciate it. Thanks.

I think they were wrong. But I'm not looking at your screen, and we might not be talking about the same thing. The instructions from the manual are as follows:
http://www.opendental.com/manual/aptedit.html
(Time Tracking section)
At the upper left, scrolling down allows you to see the three time tracking fields.
(screenshot here)
Right click on any of these to right click on the Now option. But usually, you would not change the times from this window. Instead it would be done automatically when setting the confirmed statuses. In the Module Setup window, link triggers to confirmation statuses. Then, when in the main Appointments module, and the middle right, changing the confirmed status will automatically change the times above. If there are any patients that have arrived, but are not yet seated, then they will show in the Waiting Room list at the lower right of the Appointments module along with their wait time.