Open Dental for Oral and Maxillofacial Surgery (OMS) clinics

[doug]

I work with a group of Oral and Maxillofacial Surgery (OMS) clinics with seven locations. They are currently on WinOMS but are looking to make a change. I am not a doctor myself, but am looking into options for them. I work with general dentists who love Open Dental.

Do OMS clinics use Open Dental?

[wjstarck]

I'm an OMS, and I've been using it for 15 years.

It works really well, although there are some areas that could be better tailored for OMS, for example generation of referral letters with images. This can be addressed by having a 3rd party programmer utilize the plugin framework, which is nice because anything you can imagine can be added to OD via the plugin framework.

I am also a programmer, and I have developed an Anesthesia EMR that adds that functionality to Open Dental along with automated import of vital sign data. The link is http://www.bigideasoft.com

You are welcome to give me a call at 817-817-1709 if you have any questions or would like to discuss the needs of your doctors' practice. I am happy to help in any way that I can.

[jordansparks]

Or we could get our act together and improve the referral letters. I thought we already had images on referral letters, but maybe it's time to go back and take another look.

[jordansparks]

I reviewed our current functionality. It's easy to keep track of referral sources and how they are attached to patients. It's easy to create a letter to a specific referral. This part of our software is called "sheets". Once the letter is generated and on the screen, I can edit the text of the letter, but I don't see a way to change the image. So it seems to work right up until that point, but with no way to change the image, that's a dead end. Bill, do you agree? Are you just completely avoiding our sheets for referral letters because of this one issue? I think our alternate feature is that we do allow merge letters, so then you could edit over in Word. But I don't see any obvious referral info in merge letters. I'll start working right now on allowing changing images in a generated sheet. It should really be a very small amount of code. I'm just surprised there hasn't been more clamoring for this. I usually get an earful when customers are unhappy.

[jordansparks]

OK, you can now double click on an image and you get a new window that lets you pick any other image for that patient. It's still a little rough around the edges. For example, it will take a few more hours to implement this for mounts. But it is at least working. It will be in version 22.2, which should be out to beta within a month or so.

[jordansparks]

And now you can show mounts on sheets. A typical example would be showing an FMX or photo collage on a referral letter.

[doug]

I somehow missed alerts that people had responded to my post. Thank you so much for all of your thoughtful responses, Bill and Jordan. It sounds like Open Dental is a great option for our clinics. I look forward to presenting it to the rest of the team.

Best,
Doug

[doug]

Asking a follow-up question here as I received very helpful responses with the last item.

Another item that our OMS doctors have surfaced is the ability to generate a comprehensive 'medical' note on all procedures done for a patient on a certain visit, rather than individual notes for each procedure.

We were pointed by some Open Dental team members towards the Sheets functionality in order to be able to customize templates for these types of notes, which appear to allow us to get most of the way there.

There does appear to be an issue with this particular workaround... whereas I know that procedure notes once signed are preserved forever, and you can see version history by checking the 'audit' box in the chart, this does NOT seem to be the case for sheets. As long as a user has the security level to edit sheets, they appear to be able to unlock a 'locked' sheet, make changes, re-sign, and the original sheet does not appear to be saved for future auditing.

Am I looking at this incorrectly? Is there another way to permanently lock sheets? Or is there no good way to create a permanent comprehensive medical note within Open Dental?

Thanks in advance!

[moebelwagen26]

I agree with this question regarding the unalterable medical note. This is the main holdup with our clinic switching to open dental. If this can be resolved, open dental would be great for OMS.

[allends]

Do Group Notes not fulfill the functionality that you are looking for?
https://www.opendental.com/manual/procgroupnote.html

[doug]

Not really - our surgeons are looking for a more formatted and templated structure than the group notes which are plain text, don't allow you to create fields to quickly tab between, etc.

[allends]

You could use AutoNotes in Group Notes to get close to what you are looking for:
https://www.opendental.com/manual241/autonotes.html

You are correct though that higher levels of formatting and buttons would be a Feature Request in Open Dental.

[doug]

Wouldn't another option to be to just disallow the ability to unlock sheets once they are locked? I suppose what is the point of "locking" a sheet if it is then able to be unlocked after the fact?

[ashdeep]

Exploring Open Dental for Oral and Maxillofacial Surgery (OMS) clinics. Seeking a comprehensive solution to streamline patient management, scheduling, and billing processes. Researching its features and compatibility with OMS practice requirements to optimize efficiency, enhance patient care, and improve overall practice operations. lic premium calculator

[moebelwagen26]

Group notes doesn't provide the proper functionality. Creating a medical note would require text formatting and templating abilities. I actually formerly had used Open dental in a solo oral surgery practice and I used the letter merge function to create my templated procedure and consultation notes in microsoft word. I would then need to digitally sign the word document, export a PDF copy of the note back to open dental as an image which served as my completed, "unalterable" note. This process was cumbersome, enabled by a custom macro and arguably not robustly unalterable. The ability to generate beautifully templated notes in microsoft word was wonderful however. If the power of microsoft word as a word processor for medical notes could be harnessed and used to create a note, then digitally sign and save in open dental as an unalterable document (with ability to create an addendum) You would have a great product with better potential to be adopted by OMS practices.