Patient merge

[beacondental]

Is it possible to have an API for patient merge capability. PUT OR POST merge for patient duplicates. This is located in Open Dental under Tools, Misc Tools, and then Patient merge.

[allends]

Open Dental does not plan on giving the ability for API developers to directly utilize Open Dental features in their programs.

The purpose of the Open Dental API (and most APIs for that matter) is to provide access to data so it can be read or manipulated.
It is not intended to allow open access to all of the functionality that is built into the Open Dental program.

Consider the API resources provided to be similar to tools available in a professional woodshop. The woodshop provides the means to make a really nice product, but it does not furnish you with a nearly finished product for you to put some lacquer on and sell. We provide accurate assistance and instruction on the intended use of the tools we provide and how to use them safely, but it is the job of the developer to create products for their customers.

Your current request, and some of your previous requests as well, fall into the category of a finished feature and as such, will not be added to the API.
A more apt request would be asking for the API resources to the PatientLink table so you can make your own patient merge system and store the merge link in that table.

The patient merge tool is a powerful and somewhat dangerous tool to use, so I question why you would need to build the functionality into your program anyway. In general, I would expect that customers would want to make an informed decision before merging a patient and if that was the case, I do not see what the harm would be to just directing them to use the already built-in tool in Open Dental for that. Is there a specific use case that I am missing that would necessitate you designing a patient merge system from scratch to work in your program?

[beacondental]

Well, we often get front desk to create a new patient without checking prior history that we do have that patient on file. We would like to auto merge if the patient does match name/dob. There are lots of finished features in open dental that would be great to have in the API (whereby staff does not do them correctly or forget to do them). Things like patient merge, income transfer allocations, claim attachments, claim sent feature, secondary claim send feature with EOBs, etc. I can think of 100+ as a list of items that would be great to leverage the open dental built in solutions. If they are not possible then no worries. It would be great to see if we could get work arounds so we can build these tools directly without the open dental solution, but then that would have too many cooks in the kitchen fixing databases that can cause errors.

If you can do the request for API resources to the PatientLink table so we can try our own patient merge system, then we can try this path and see.

Thank you,