Open Dental Forum

5 months into using open dental, loving it so far but also finding a few weaknesses.

We really want to try to email statements to our patients. Called open dental to figure this out and did some research and it does not seems like there is a perfect solution.

We would like to just be able to generate statement and email them. Issues is you can only do this for patients that has preferred contact method set to email. I explained to OD that a lot of our patients has preferred contact method phone because they want to be called. So we cant change this. You should be able to email statement regardless of preferred contact method. Instead they should have a button that says does not want electronic billing to opt out like texting. Does anybody have a workaround for this?

Issues 2 is that since you send HIpaa information you need to encrypt your statement (Open Dental did say i could just send the amount they owe so no PHI but who wants to pay a bill that says $430 without any specifications) . Which brings up open dental second weakness. Their email encryption. It is more for working with specialist. You need the havwe a security certificate and share it with the patient which is way to cumbersome to have 5000 patients install security certificates. It should work usign Virtru or others like we use using outlook. Any workarounds?

The other optinos they mentioned is using dental xchange for ebilling. If you see here: http://www.opendental.com/manual/ebill.html
it sounds like there a some limitations, not only accounting for cost. Emailing them yourself would be much cheaper.

Anybody have any solutions and workarounds or what are people using?

Thanks for any input

Are you wanting to batch them out, or send them individually?
You always have the option to send a statement from within the patient's account.

I would like to batch bill after we have entered insurance payments so we know patient balance. We print like 50-100 bills at a time so now efficient having to print a list and then go to each individual one to email it.

And do you have a suggesion for the hipaa issues? I cant send a statement without it being encrypted and having the patient to install a certificate is not very userfriendly and the same with the webportal, having to sign thousands of patients up and having them remember their password also does not sound like an ideal solution.

HIPPA COMPLIANT EMAIL
viewtopic.php?f=1&t=5180&p=27476#p26990

KevinRossen wrote:I just signed up for Sendinc today based on suggestions above and I can tell you it's incredibly easy to use. I have no affiliation with them and I've been using their service for about 12 hours, so don't take this as the final word, but my initial results are very promising. For just $5/mo or $48/yr you get encrypted email sending that's as easy to setup in Open Dental as any other email. The price gives you 200 recipients per day, so it's not ideal if you're sending more than that. The recipient gets a notice that they've received a secure email message with a link to click. The first time they use it they'll need to create a password, which is incredibly simple to do. We used it to send notes to a specialist and they were easily able to access the message.

All you have to do is enter SMTP settings as mentioned above on the email account and you're ready to go. It seem MUCH easier than the built in encrypted email option within Open Dental. I'll report back after we've used it a bit longer to give a full review.

http://www.sendinc.com
very easy and simple to use,

Thank you. That looks promising. I use Virtru right now which cant work like this within Open Dental only outlook. The pro with virtru is the patient doesnt have to make an account.

But lets say i get sendinc that would solve the emailing issues of the bills.

I still cant bill patient myself because you are only able to bill patients with preferred contact method set to email (and we cant change that since a lot of patients wants phone call but are ok with getting email bills).

Does anybody have a workaround for this, sending out email statements using open dental without having to set every single patient to preferred contact method email.

Hi noestervemb ,

I think OD, now, do not offer the option to automate the monthly bulk emailing of the statements.

1- You can contact OD and ask them for an option to automate it, or create a feature request
2- Minh, a programmer in Australia, at http://www.mopensoft.com, for the last 2 years, did many custom plugin for me and for other OD users, in many countries, USA, Australia, Ireland, India, etc...and I think he can automate that for you. You can reach him at info@mopensoft.com , very reasonable pricing for his plugins, send him a message. http://www.mopensoft.com/pricing

My only affiliation with him is that he created special plugins that always solved or figured out a way how to customize OD for my personal office needs.
And that's why OD is great. All programmers are able to ad their own hooks to the program and that's what help improving it.