Open Dental Forum

Hello Dr. Jordan / Team,

I am looking to 'Optimize' the appointment scheduling in the office and one of the areas that I was wondering if I could get further clarity on is...the time split for a given appointment between the following team members
1. Front Desk
2. Dental Assistant / RDA
3. Hygienist
4. Dentist

Looks like for a given treatment, A Patient could interact with each or some of the above. The 'Time Pattern' for a given Procedure in Open-Dental unfortunatley currently only has a toggle for 'Dental Assistant' and 'Doctor'. Is there a way to have the ability to setup the 'Time-Pattern' for each of the 4 above.

If the Appointment Scheduler assigns extra time to a procedure, I am looking for an easy way to 'assign' that time to each one of the above.

As you can tell, I am not a dentist but an office manager. I am being told that there are times when a Dentist might need a dental assist to assist and then there are times when this might not be needed. Unfortunately, currently one as to assume that the Dental Assistant is needed to assist the doctor at all times when the dentist is in the chair with the Patient.

Appreciate your thoughts / suggestions....I dont think there is a way to achieve this in open-dental today but if someone has a work-around implemented around this...do share.

In my mind, this will go a long way to optmize the schedule and improving productivity / customer experience in the office.

Cheers,

OpenSource

I'm looking for the same information.

I would like to be able to schedule these different things:

Assistant only
Expanded functions assistant only
Doctor only
Hygienist only
Hygienist and Assistant
Doctor and Assistant
Expaned funcions assistant and assistant

Is there any way to do this now ? If not, what are the chances of being able to do it soon ?

Thanks,

Mike

On the subject of time patterns:

I have noticed that if you change the procedures attached to a scheduled appointment from the chart module, the algarhythm that tries to predict how much time you need for an appointment takes over and changes the amount of time that was originally scheduled in the schedule for that appointment. If one is not careful they can accidently change a scheduled appointment without realizing it....

I would also like to be able to plan more than one appointment in the treatment plan module. This way I could not only prioritize the procedures in the plan but could custom set/group the procedures into appointments with the provider and amount of time needed for that specific combination of procedures in advance. As it is now, it is difficult for the front desk to know exactly how to schedule a series of appointments, because only the next one can truly be setup by the clinical staff in the planned appointment module.

My schedule is not as advanced/auxillary specific as the previous two docs, but just being able to custom plan a series of appointments with grouped procedures and lock in an appointment time length and provider would be nice.

Thanks,
DW

yes, changing the appt from the chart is the same as changing it from the appt book. It will adjust the same if you change procs.

multiple planned appts are on the future list, but as Jordan has said before, I don't think it is high on the priority list unless lots of people ask for it!

Regarding the automatic adjustment of the appointment duration when one changes the treatments: would it be possible to have an option to disable it (in the miscellaneous setup window for example)?

If checked, any change to the contents of an appointment would not affect the duration of the appointment.

This simple enhancement would save us a lot of time...

I know what needs to be done, it's just a matter of finding time to do it. We need a checkbox on the appointment that prevents auto calc. It needs to automatically check itself if someone manually changes the length of the appointment. If someone changes procedures on such an appointment, it should ask the user whether to recalc. We also need an alternate time calculation method. Just letting people know where we're headed.