Open Dental Forum

Do you ever receive an e-mail from a patient but you don't know who sent it?
Finding a name from a phone number in OpenDental is easy. Just type the phone number into the Select Patient window, and you will narrow the list down to whoever has that phone number (home, work or mobile).
Looking up a name from an e-mail address should be as easy, but e-mail is not one of the search criteria in the Select Patient window. The only way to do it now is to run a query which is quite complicated for the average user.
I found a feature request (#1145) to add e-mail to the list of search criteria. Unfortunately, I had to take away votes from something else to vote on this. If you think this is a good idea, add your votes. It seems like it should be a very simple thing to add.

Might be easier than you think. It's just two lines of code.

SELECT PatNum, email from Patient
WHERE email LIKE '%name@yahoo.com%'

Cut and paste this code into the query box. (Reports, query)
Change the email name portion to fit your needs.
The first time you do it, save it to you favorites. Done.
Now vote for something more complicated.

drtmz

It works, but it would be much simpler to just type it into the Select Patient window. There are all those other fields in the Search By box that I never use. How often do you need to search for a patient by their SSN, or Birthdate, or Subscriber ID#? E-mail would probably be more useful than any of those. Every week we get some pts replying to our e-mails with a "yes" or "confirmed" and that is it. No way to tell from the e-mail who it is, unless I either look at all the e-mails I sent out, or run a query.

We search by birthdate and subscriber ID# frequently. It's not uncommon for patients to change last names, then when your insurance EOB comes in with a different name, searching by ID# or birthdate can be the only way to find the patient. Adding e-mail would be nice, but I don't think it should replace anything already there. You can add a feature request for this - I'd vote for it.