Open Dental Forum

Hello, Just switched to Open Dental from Practice Works. I would like to know how many appointments we made today for future dates, total and recare. I would also like to drill down further and know if these appointments were from people who came in for an appointment, or if they were from our long list of people that are not within a 6 month recare cycle. Finally, I want to know how many recare appointments we have in the next 6 months.

I tried a query on the appointments table with a selection of datetstamp=curdate(), however, if an appointment gets moved to another column, the field gets updated and I get moved and new appointments. A suggestion from Nathan was to use the securitylog table and use the permtype=25 with logdatetime = curdate(). However, this returns I'll have Saturday, no a Wednesday, no a Tuesday (you will get nothing and like it!) appointments set, then changed do to patients not making up their mind when talking to us.

A more involved solution might be to add a second date field to the appointments table, populated with today's date and not edited when the appointment is moved.

Since everyone can make an appointment, I want to make sure that we have good management of this process so that we do not have appointments slip through the cracks as everybody think everyone else is making the appointment. This will also show us growth.

Feature request 55 is to add that field.

Thanks, found that and just added my 5 points.

not sure this (55) is the right issue. it appears that 55 requests a "date of original appointment" and not the "date the original appointment was created ON"

this can easily be confusing in human language, because an appointment has a date it is FOR and a date it was created ON.

what i believe is needed here is a field in the appointment table that timestamps the moment an appointment is CREATED and has nothing to do with the date OF the appointment (or its status as planned, cancelled, broken, or whatever). rather analogous to the DateTP field in the procedurelog that records the CREATION date, and isn't affected by the winds of change.

the object of this field is to count the total number (or dollar value better yet) of appointments CREATED on any given date, as a measure of scheduling effectiveness.

think of it as a leading indicator. your book may be full, but if your new scheduler isn't making any new appointments, this statistic will alert you early to the problem.

i have requested this as a feature request.