Hello, New Open Dental Developer

[kdna]

Hi!
I'm new. My plan is to automate some things inside open dental so that I can deploy my solution to a few sole practitioner practices that could benefit.

Goals:

1. Batch/Bash tasks to synchronize practice schedule with third-party solution such as Google Calendar/BlackBerry Calendar
2. Automatic report emails at the end of the day
3. Automatic statements after procedure completion
4. Confirm appointment from an online component
5. Custom statement design

Thanks for making this stuff open source. Documentation looks solid too. Looking forward to sharing my work with everyone interested

[drtech]

sounds great...i have lots of minor plugin options for Open Dental as well..I love customizing it...

[jordansparks]

Sounds good. I've always been surprised that so few people tackled automatic reports for their own use, based on third party software.

[beattyph]

Hi Jordan:

Yes, the ability to directly access the database and create a lot of automation & reporting scripts is a great feature of Open Dental and we do use this. It may be that there is more customization/automatic reports going on than you realize --- people (like us) just aren't reporting it back to you.

I'll consider this an excuse to let you know some of the ways that we are using this ability. We have a script that runs daily that grabs schedule information and emails a patient-anonymized schedule for the next week to staff. We also update our website with our hours of operation (http://www.tappunidental.com/Hours.html) using a script that automatically collects this information from the Open Dental database. This way, patients know when we are closed for a Holiday or away at a CE course, etc. Over time, we just chip away at this, building up our infrastructure as needed.

Thanks again for your work on Open Dental!

Best,

Phil

[drtech]

nice, I like the hours feature

[jordansparks]

It may be that there is more customization/automatic reports going on than you realize --- people (like us) just aren't reporting it back to you.

Glad to hear it.