Open Dental Forum

Hi all,

I'm looking for a solution to having international (we are based outside of the US) SMSes work within OpenDental for sending out confirmation requests etc. to patients.

It has been suggested here (viewtopic.php?f=1&t=5012) that you could achieve this by sending SMSes via email however it seems that OpenDental can only store a SINGLE email address (at least it has a single email address field) meaning that if we were to send confirmation emails to patients we would have to do it manually outside of OpenDental.

Are there any plans to bring International SMS support to OD or are there any free/paid modules out there which addresses this? Thanks.

I think you can use either local or international SMS gateway (SMS Global, Clickatell, Red Oxygen, etc). It may require to create a simple plugin to send SMS.

derman wrote:...however it seems that OpenDental can only store a SINGLE email address (at least it has a single email address field)...

If you are referring to the settings for sending email, v13.1 was enhanced to store multiple email addresses. http://opendental.com/manual/version13_1.html

If you are referring to multiple patient emails, you are correct. However I don't think this would be the root cause of stopping you from sending texts to patients because most only have one email. At least that's how it is for myself and my friends.

mopensoft wrote:It may require to create a simple plugin to send SMS

I'm somewhat familiar with those services. Are you aware of any such plugins?

jsalmon wrote:However I don't think this would be the root cause of stopping you from sending texts to patients because most only have one email. At least that's how it is for myself and my friends.

Yep I was referring to multiple patient emails.

My point being that I could replace a patient's email address with something like "0123456789@desksms.appspotmail.com" and send texts through the email function - however this would mean that a patient's actual email address would have be stored elsewhere and increase the steps required to use the email function to actually send emails.

I think Red Oxygen has command line tool so you can setup the plugin yourself.
I will create one simple plugin for SMS global to send sms.