Open Dental Forum

It would be nice to see Open Dental more involved in the UK National Health Service (NHS) market. I have been using OD for 8 years, and use it successfully to manage all aspects of NHS administration apart from electronic transmission of claims (EDI). I have recently increased the number of NHS payment claims and it is becoming critical that I move to an electronic system.
In the UK there are 10,500 dentists in around 6,000 practices who have NHS commitment and EDI. There are 21 software suppliers that transmit claims electronically. Exact and R4 equally provide dental software to 5,000 practices. The remaining 19 suppliers have a handful to 300 customers each.
Exact and R4 are excellent systems but expensive. Some of the small systems are cheap but very basic, but they can transmit electronic claims.
Open Dental is a great system. It would be a shame to have to leave it after many years of use.

Sources
http://www.nhsbsa.nhs.uk/DentalServices ... r_2011.pdf
http://www.nhsbsa.nhs.uk/DentalServices/860.aspx

Boy, there really are some small companies on that list. Maybe we will do it after all.

I used to work in the UK and have moved to Ireland. OD is a great program .
For successful use in the British Isles if it had EDI for the NHS it would take off . Dentists in Ireland are finally switching to computers and are quite far behind, there is no NHS here but as the market is large in the UK with 60 million people vs 3 million then the dental market is larger too.

A little customization such as labslips , fees( The main providers use an excel sheet with procedures and fees and times that they ask you to fill in when purchasing), autonote customisation, a few sheets, and one or two reports for the daily admin for new customers would help massively. This could be sold as an optional package which would be best ie 1000 or 1500 dollars with the customer filling out the OD new customer sheet with all the fees, times, autonote requirements , sheets rather than offered individually which is like pulling teeth with OD being reluctant to offer customisation services and of course dentists reluctant to pay.

I could easily see 2 or 300 users in the British Isles after a few years if the above was offered.

Ps absolutely loving the support offered via online chat on the OD website, makes it super easy to get support here in the British Isles. OD feels only a few mnutes away now and problems are solved very quickly and efficiently. Talking is great too sometimes but the time difference makes it feel that support is miles away.