Open Dental Forum

(We're on v15.3.38)

It's annoying that after spending lots of time in the Treatment Plan screen getting several different treatment plans just right, we can't seem to take advantage of that in the "Make Appt" dialog. The online user manual seems to imply that we need to keep track of which saved treatment plans are active and inactive. I don't see "active", "inactive", or "status" anywhere on our treatment plan screen, and the appointment dialog seems to have no reference to treatment plans at all, whether saved, default, active, inactive, whatever. "Priority", which is a property of *procedures* (not treatment plans) in the treatment plan screen, also has no discernible effect. If we haven't done anything in the treatment plan screen, the procedures in "default" show up in the appointment dialog, but that's all we ever get. The best method we have so far seems to be to print out the treatment plan and then refer to it while manually picking procedures in the appointment dialog.

There has to be a better way?

There is.
It seems there is a bit of a breakdown, somewhere, about treatment planning and appointment planning. It doesn't help that we recently made some huge enhancements to Treatment Plans (15.4), so if you're on a lower version, the documentation may not match the program version you are using. This webinar was recorded in the older version, so can be useful to understand what I am talking about: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JbW7RnW ... e=youtu.be

When Treatment Planning, you have the option to prioritize treatment. When you prioritize treatment, the procedures will list in priority order in the edit appointment screen. That is, Priority 1 will list first, followed by priority 2, etc. This should make it easier for your schedulers to pull the intended procedures for each appointment (they're chronological).

If you'd prefer to plan the appointments yourself, you can use the Planned Appointment feature in the chart. That way, if you have planned the appointments for the patient, your staff will be notified when they attempt to schedule a new appointment that you have planned one or more, already. http://opendental.com/manual/apptplanned.html

Should we upgrade to the newer version? We just installed this one last week! Thanks!

It's still in beta, so I wouldn't recommend it, no.