Audit Trail

[MKM]

I am surprised to see that Open Dental is missing a critical piece of info on the audit trail.
Basically, we should be able to see at glance when a procedure or payment was originally entered and compare it to the date it was changed, edited or deleted. At this point all we can see is the original date.
Obviously, changing history is a red flag for many reasons. An audit trail without that information is less than robust.
I am curious if anyone has found a work around to this issue?

[jimgaas]

I don't think the Audit Trail feature is intended to do what you would like it to do. It appears you are investigating the possibility of fraud and the audit trail will give you a heads-up about that but you are probably going to need custom queries to look deeper in some issues. I have thought this is would be a very helpful thread that could make Opendental more fraud preventive than other dental management packages. As I understand it, procedures can never be deleted. They are just marked that they are deleted but are still present in the database. It would be great to start a list of red flags to search for in the database that would detect fraud. Sometimes it could happen that an honest but naive front desk person could handle a transaction in a completely inappropriate way, ie, deleting a transaction instead of reversing a transaction with correct accounting principles. Persons who have been the victim of fraud would be the most helpful since they would be able to say what the tip off was and maybe how to prevent it in the future. I hope this thread gets some attention. It could be worked into an important addition to OD.

[Hersheydmd]

If you want to prevent fraud, set the security level so that no one but you can delete a payment that is older than current day.

[jimgaas]

There are a million ways to defraud a business of which stealing payments is only one. I am told a common one is setting up a fake business that sends bogus bills to the practice which are paid to the crooks. Overstating write-offs is also common. Hopefully, this tread can be built into an automated fraud checker. Let's try.

[MKM]

An audit trail is not just for fraud prevention and deleting patients. It is for understanding what happened with scheduling, charting, payments, treatment planning basically everything. It is for training purposes and recreating what happened and when so you can figure out WHY. Could be an honest mistake, could be a training issue, could be fraud.

A robust Audit Trail should do exactly this...show the original date of an entry, when that entry was changed, What was specifically changed, and who did it.
A good audit trail in any software should let you recreate why, when and how something was changed. This is business 101.
When we were on Softdent, our audit trail did this. It was great. So it can be done with Dental software.
Open Dental's audit trail basically says...something changed, not sure what, but someone changed something. It is virtually useless. This is the biggest Achilles Heel in this entire program.