Open Dental Forum

Is there a reason when you change or edit a referral (that is a patient) that it does not change on the Referral List or in the new patients that are referred by that referral?

I had a patient for many years that has since went to dental school and now refers patients to me. Because he was a patient I found out I have to change his information in the Patient Information section. So I did that and added his title as DDS. But it still does not change him in the Referral List or on the charts of patients he referred.

Thanks for any info that may help

From one nate to another, I can solve the mystery, although perhaps the answer is not too helpful.

When you add a patient as a referral, OD copies some of that patient information to the referral table. The patient's identifying 'PatNum' is stored in ther referral table, so there could be some synchronizing event that would be triggered upon a patient edit, but such a trigger does not yet seem to exist. So updating a patient's info does not look for that patient in the referrral table to update it.

It actually does synch, and that has been working since day one. What's happening here is simply a mismatch of fields. In the patient table, title refers to a prefix, like Mr., Ms., etc. The patient table has no suffix field. In the referral table, title refers to a suffix. It will only be used with non patients. So you could use the same workaround that we suggest for patients, which is to list the last name like "Smith, DDS".