Open Dental Forum

This topic has two parts:

1) Is it possible - like at the end of the day - to automatically adjust the schedule for actual time spent with a patient as opposed to the time reflected in the schedule? I know that OD has the ability to track when a patient arrives, is seated, and checks out, but can the schedule be adjusted and archived so that it is retrievable for "actual" time spent.

2) If #1 is possible . . . is there a way to allocate different services rendered (ie. new patient appt, operative dentistry, simple crown/bridge, implants, removable, endodontics, etc) so that we could see how much time we are spending according to the categories of the mix of services - including fees charged for these services?

This would allow a dentist to know how much time they are spending in their mix of services and the revenue generated by these procedures - a valuable tool in analysis of fees and efficiency.

Part 3 would be to use this information in a powerful way for block booking. As a PracticeWorks user considering a future conversion to Open Dental, do I get any votes?

You're not saying PW does this, are you? No, Open Dental does not yet do this, and it would be a feature request, maybe even 2 or 3 separate feature requests. I don't see any existing matching feature requests.

No, sorry to say PWorks doesn't do this that I'm aware of and I'm not really sure if anyone else does either. After a cursory look at OD, missing functions such as "office expert", "automation expert" and "expert exchange" seem to be a bit of a deal breaker but I can't say that I've looked in enough depth to say for sure. I'm impressed that automation has a good start, though, and OD has many strengths that Pworks is lacking. Forward progress is definitely greater with OD!

So back to the list. If anyone wants any one of these, I guess you'll have to add onto the feature request list and then vote.

This reminds me of what Howard Farran was talking about in his video when he states that dentists need to understand more about the "business" of the procedures that they do (ie. profitability).

If we have information on the time that we spend on various procedures and the fees that we charge we can better determine an appropriate fee, delegate to an associate, or stop doing them.

There is presently no dental software that allows for the study of this information and I see it as a valuable marketing tool for OD.

Jordan - do you have suggestions on how to organize the various feature requests that you state in your earlier response?