Open Dental Forum

We are running 14.1.14.0, and have Open Dental set up in tight integration with eCW. We have several offices that all share the same data, and I am one of the general dentists, not the IT guy, so I don't know how the network is implemented. But I'm trying to make things as efficient as possible, reduce the number of clicks, etc.

I've got lists of procedures, quick buttons, and all that I can customized there, but the weakest link now is just the slowness of user interface interaction. I don't know if this is our version, how it is set up, or pretty standard for Open Dental. There are several actions that seem to be the biggest offenders. They are:

1. Tx planning a procedure (takes about 1-2 seconds per tx planned item, so several seconds when many items are bundled together)
2. Deleting a tx planned procedure (same slowness for tx planning, multiplied by number of items highlighted)
3. Selecting/deselecting procedures in the edit appointment dialog box under "Procedures on this appointment" (about 1 second for the procedures to be highlighted)
4. Clicking okay when you are editing a note (takes about a second or two before the progress note list is updated and I've often double clicked on an item when actually has moved by the time Open Dental registers the clicks, so it opens the new item in that area).

In measuring these delays, I'm talking from the time I click a button to when the user interface updates and is ready for the next action. 1 or 2 seconds may not sound like much, but when you are deleting 5 procedures and have to wait around while the computer pauses for 5 seconds, it adds up.

Is this normal behavior that others experience? Or are there settings I can change that can speed this up like disabling certain refresh intervals, changing graphic settings, etc? I'm not too hopeful that it is a graphical issue, because some of the procedures are simply clicking on the procedure in the edit appointment box and waiting for that procedure to be highlighted. Again, I don't know the networking setup, but let me know if someone can confirm that this is what I have to deal with, or if there are things that I can do on my end as a user/poweruser.

Thanks.

I have not experienced these delays.

I don't have any great suggestions other than updating because there has been over 2 years of improvements made to Open Dental since v14.1.14 and speed improvements has been a big focus for us recently due to the increase in larger offices hoping on the "Open Dental train" which forces us developers to be frugal with our database calls and constantly improving the loading times for high traffic windows.

Be warned, newer versions of Open Dental are going to look quite a bit different from v14.1. Make sure your staff is prepared and/or aware of the update if you choose to do so. Luckily enough the eCW integration with Open Dental doesn't change very much so you might not notice a lot of the changes (other than setup windows and menu item placement changes).

Even though it looks like the UI is the thing that is taking a long time it is almost certainly related to how long it is taking to run queries against your database, which is highly related to your networking setup. In addition, there are some processes and queries that have been improved significantly since 14.1 (when there is a problem with slowness in a query or the code we fix it those fixes don't get backported past the stable in almost all cases). All of the places you describe are places where the UI is waiting for DB interaction. So that makes me think this an issue with your connection speed between your client machine and the server. If you are on support with Opendental I would recommend calling into OD and discussing the issues and some troubleshooting steps we can take to try and narrow down the issue. However it will most likely end up recommending an update to 15.4, and taking a look at your networking setup and latency between your client machine and the database.

If you are not on support, I would recommend getting more information from your IT about how the network is setup and whether the connection between the client and DB could be an issue, what the load looks like on the computer hosting the OD DB and getting slow query logging going for mysql to see if that is the issue.

Thanks guys! I work for a community health center so my influence is limited compared to a private practice, but it is great to hear there are some things to look forward to when/if we update. I'll check in with the IT dept and discuss what you've suggested. Thanks again!