Open Dental for Oral and Maxillofacial Surgery (OMS) clinics

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doug
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Open Dental for Oral and Maxillofacial Surgery (OMS) clinics

Post by doug » Fri Apr 29, 2022 12:56 pm

I work with a group of Oral and Maxillofacial Surgery (OMS) clinics with seven locations. They are currently on WinOMS but are looking to make a change. I am not a doctor myself, but am looking into options for them. I work with general dentists who love Open Dental.

Do OMS clinics use Open Dental?

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wjstarck
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Re: Open Dental for Oral and Maxillofacial Surgery (OMS) clinics

Post by wjstarck » Mon May 02, 2022 8:35 am

I'm an OMS, and I've been using it for 15 years.

It works really well, although there are some areas that could be better tailored for OMS, for example generation of referral letters with images. This can be addressed by having a 3rd party programmer utilize the plugin framework, which is nice because anything you can imagine can be added to OD via the plugin framework.

I am also a programmer, and I have developed an Anesthesia EMR that adds that functionality to Open Dental along with automated import of vital sign data. The link is http://www.bigideasoft.com

You are welcome to give me a call at 817-817-1709 if you have any questions or would like to discuss the needs of your doctors' practice. I am happy to help in any way that I can.
Cheers,

Bill Starck, DDS
Big Idea Software, LLC
Developer, EASy(Electronic Anesthesia System) for Open Dental
817-807-1709
TX, USA

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jordansparks
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Re: Open Dental for Oral and Maxillofacial Surgery (OMS) clinics

Post by jordansparks » Fri May 06, 2022 7:54 pm

Or we could get our act together and improve the referral letters. I thought we already had images on referral letters, but maybe it's time to go back and take another look.
Jordan Sparks, DMD
http://www.opendental.com

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jordansparks
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Re: Open Dental for Oral and Maxillofacial Surgery (OMS) clinics

Post by jordansparks » Sat May 07, 2022 12:07 pm

I reviewed our current functionality. It's easy to keep track of referral sources and how they are attached to patients. It's easy to create a letter to a specific referral. This part of our software is called "sheets". Once the letter is generated and on the screen, I can edit the text of the letter, but I don't see a way to change the image. So it seems to work right up until that point, but with no way to change the image, that's a dead end. Bill, do you agree? Are you just completely avoiding our sheets for referral letters because of this one issue? I think our alternate feature is that we do allow merge letters, so then you could edit over in Word. But I don't see any obvious referral info in merge letters. I'll start working right now on allowing changing images in a generated sheet. It should really be a very small amount of code. I'm just surprised there hasn't been more clamoring for this. I usually get an earful when customers are unhappy.
Jordan Sparks, DMD
http://www.opendental.com

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jordansparks
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Re: Open Dental for Oral and Maxillofacial Surgery (OMS) clinics

Post by jordansparks » Sat May 07, 2022 7:27 pm

OK, you can now double click on an image and you get a new window that lets you pick any other image for that patient. It's still a little rough around the edges. For example, it will take a few more hours to implement this for mounts. But it is at least working. It will be in version 22.2, which should be out to beta within a month or so.
Jordan Sparks, DMD
http://www.opendental.com

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Re: Open Dental for Oral and Maxillofacial Surgery (OMS) clinics

Post by jordansparks » Sun May 08, 2022 1:17 pm

And now you can show mounts on sheets. A typical example would be showing an FMX or photo collage on a referral letter.
Jordan Sparks, DMD
http://www.opendental.com

doug
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Re: Open Dental for Oral and Maxillofacial Surgery (OMS) clinics

Post by doug » Wed May 11, 2022 5:40 pm

I somehow missed alerts that people had responded to my post. Thank you so much for all of your thoughtful responses, Bill and Jordan. It sounds like Open Dental is a great option for our clinics. I look forward to presenting it to the rest of the team.

Best,
Doug

doug
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Re: Open Dental for Oral and Maxillofacial Surgery (OMS) clinics

Post by doug » Wed Mar 06, 2024 11:30 am

Asking a follow-up question here as I received very helpful responses with the last item.

Another item that our OMS doctors have surfaced is the ability to generate a comprehensive 'medical' note on all procedures done for a patient on a certain visit, rather than individual notes for each procedure.

We were pointed by some Open Dental team members towards the Sheets functionality in order to be able to customize templates for these types of notes, which appear to allow us to get most of the way there.

There does appear to be an issue with this particular workaround... whereas I know that procedure notes once signed are preserved forever, and you can see version history by checking the 'audit' box in the chart, this does NOT seem to be the case for sheets. As long as a user has the security level to edit sheets, they appear to be able to unlock a 'locked' sheet, make changes, re-sign, and the original sheet does not appear to be saved for future auditing.

Am I looking at this incorrectly? Is there another way to permanently lock sheets? Or is there no good way to create a permanent comprehensive medical note within Open Dental?

Thanks in advance!

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