Reportable Sheets

[atd]

Very excited about this new feature on 12.4 - "Checkboxes and Input sheet fields are now reportable."
I've setup some exam sheets with reportable field names. I can't find anything in the manual though on how to report on this data. Has anyone done it yet?

[jsalmon]

This feature will get fully documented in our manual when 12.4 becomes stable. As of right now, every new feature in beta will only be known by a select few people and is still under testing (hence the beta). With complicated features like this one it's probably best to wait till the person who wrote it can write out directions for everyone to follow. I think I saw a commit in the code regarding patient letters, static text and a new exam sheet field button? Hope that helps.

[atd]

every new feature in beta will only be known by a select few people and is still under testing (hence the beta).

Since I'm on the beta version and interested in using this feature, I'd be happy to be a beta tester.
I had to move to 12.4 to be on the certified EHR version - just curious why a beta version would be certified.

[jsalmon]

EHR certification happens in phases. 12.4 is just the version that was chosen to get certified for the next "phase" most likely. Our EHR page can describe more http://opendental.com/manual/ehrlicense.html. You probably would have been interested in reading these paragraphs:

For year one, with Medicaid, you only need to purchase a certified EHR, but you do not need to actually use it. A signed contract indicating that the provider has purchased EHR software is sufficient. This is explained in paragraph 5 of this document: http://www.cms.gov/Final_Rule.pdf. So you will purchase version 12.4, but you will use any version of Open Dental (or even hold off on using it until year two, if you wish).

Starting in year two, when you need to demonstrate Meaningful Use (MU), you will need to only use a certified version of Open Dental. Not every single version will be certified, so you will need to be careful when you upgrade. Currently, only versions 11.0 and 12.4 are certified.

You were probably already past 11.0 and downgrading isn't possible.

I like the idea of having more people to do testing for our beta versions. So far it has just been our internal beta testers so I'll have to talk to Jordan and see if we can't get some sort of beta system for actual users going in the future. Currently we only release the beta to the public for those offices that have paid for features and want to start using them right away. We haven't actually geared it towards external testers yet. I'm not going to lie, it'd be nice to have a way for users to submit error reports and helpful information of that sort to us... but all of this takes time.

[atd]

Currently we only release the beta to the public for those offices that have paid for features and want to start using them right away. We haven't actually geared it towards external testers yet. I'm not going to lie, it'd be nice to have a way for users to submit error reports and helpful information of that sort to us... but all of this takes time.

I'm confused by this - the beta version is always available to users on a monthly support contract, whether we've paid for a specific feature or not. I usually don't install a beta version unless there's a feature I really want to start using because of the large number of users we have. When I do run across a bug I either post on this forum or send an email to Jordan. Maybe there could be a separate forum for that or just an e-mail account?

I'm releasing a new exam sheet to our staff on Monday, so I was just hoping to get some confirmation that I setup the reporting fields correctly. It will be great to be able report on exam data in aggregate.

[jsalmon]

I should have said "an undocumented" version of Open Dental is released to the public mainly for offices who can't wait to have their features that they've paid for.

[jordansparks]

You asked how to use it... You see the new Reportable Name field in the sheet field defs, right? Well, when a sheet for a patient is created, that Reportable Name flows down to the sheet field. So now, you can run queries that make use of that. There can now be a difference between the misc checkboxes, and you can use queries to extract the info from the database.

So that's the fundamental change. Then, in 12.5, we also built a more complex feature on top of that. If you fill out an exam sheet for a patient, you can then later create a patient letter or referral letter where any field from the exam sheet can flow into the letter. It makes use of the reportable names as well as some other techniques. The end result is that an ortho office will be able to automatically generate referral letters. And it's a very general solution, so it can be adapted for many special situations that we can't even imagine.

[atd]

Do you have a query example on how to report on the sheet data to get me started? I setup an exam sheet that has 143 reportable data fields that we started using last week. I'd like a summary on those data fields on the sheets complete so far. For example, on how many of those exams did the patient have an upper full denture? UF is the reportable field name for that check box. Will you have any built in reporting tools in the future or will custom queries always need to be written?

[jordansparks]

We hadn't planned on building any tools. This was mostly for power users. I haven't really thought about what the queries would look like. I was more interested in just making it possible to write a query if someone were motivated enough.