Open Dental Forum

I'm a kid in a candy shop tonight.

Just played with the terminal feature for forms - love it -

I just have to RTM about setting up a terminal now and pick up a new (used) tablet computer.

So Jordan, is this how you've kept busy when the baby has been up all night? <G>

We did forget to let the receptionist send forms for an entire family to the terminal. Dentrix beat us slightly with that feature in their new Kiosk. But I think they actually outsourced the Kiosk software and made it an expensive add on. At least that's the impression I got. Anyway, we'll make more enhancements to it, but I think we finally have a good solid terminal feature. The old one was embarrassing.

Love the patient terminal. It gives us the chance to finally ditch PT Dental from paperless technologies. Their software was never reliable. We found it best to use a tablet with digitizer mode. Unlike a touch screen it does not get confused by the patients palm touching the screen. We had a TabletKiosk slate PC, great computer, you just have to throttle CPU power, it gets really hot under full load. Right now we are trying a Modbook with win7, great screen, less hot but HEAVY. Pen input in win7 seems worlds better than XP tablet pc edition or vista.

I am playing with the Trial version 6.9.22. The Terminal feature is the key item for me to decide between Dentrix and OP. The 6.9.22 Terminal feature only has patient information form, without any button for submit information. How's it looking for 7.0? What forms are integrated in the terminal? Are those forms (med hx, insurance form, hippa?) customizable? Do I need a signature pad service from other vendor?

You can see screenshots of it on the lower half of this page.
http://www.opendental.com/manual/adobeforms.html
The new paradigm is that you are allowed to drop any number of "sheets" into the terminal for the patient to fill out. There are not any screenshots of the actual sheets that the patient sees on the link above, but because you can use any background image, you have a lot of flexibility on what each sheet will look like. You could use a scanned paper form as a starting point, or you could use a Word document, or you could use a screenshot. Then you lay out your fields as rectangles on top of your image. You can see some of that going on here:
http://www.opendental.com/manual/sheets.html
So the form that the patient sees would look very similar to a pdf. Here's an example of one such form:
http://www.opendental.com/manual/PatientInfo.pdf
The sky's the limit.

Wow - lots to think about.... Fortunately, I have been too busy working on patients to do much IT thinking lately! (the barn pays for the house so build a nice barn!)