Open Dental Forum

Hello everyone,

Thought I would reach out to everyone for their guidance. We'll be running an orthodontic practice out of a GP's office, and we anticipate using OD for the orthodontic practice. Now as a disclaimer, I am neither an IT specialist nor a dentist by profession; however, I'm the honorary computer specialist in the family, and I'm the spouse tasked w/ helping out on the IT end here, trying to keep costs reasonable.

As for computer arrangement. At the least, I would envision having a front-desk laptop, acquisition desktop for the pan-ceph, and a floating laptop that will primarily follow the orthodontist from room to room.

My plan: I see myself placing the OD server software on the acquisition desktop as it is most stationary and probably the least used system, and this "server" will be made accessible to the other computers via network router. Workstation iterations of OD will be installed on the two laptops. As we will likely not be running Ethernet lines from the router to the laptops, I would think that the laptops will be required to access the OD server and OD database (on the acquisition computer) through wireless network access (WiFi) in the office through said router. I would need to make the server/database files accessible to the laptops through an appropriate networking sharing mechanism. This specific router will be used exclusively for business operation use, and will not be used for guest access to the internet.

Questions:
(1) Does my plan sound feasible, or does OD not support such an implementation? Any recommendations on this implementation?
(2) If the plan is feasible, what sort of router settings do you recommend be used for the wireless network to better secure the OD data being transmitted over WiFi?

Thanks everyone!

Open Dental works pretty well over a wireless connection. As long as you have decent bandwidth and a reliable router, it should work all right.
It is very important that you encrypt all traffic traveling over WiFi since traffic to and from the database is not encrypted. WiFi isn't encrypted by default, so you'll have to see up WPA to be able to use encryption. Make sure you use a strong password for the encryption, and also make sure you use a strong password for the admin account on the router.

As cmcgehee pointed out strong encryption is key. Most small businesses (and many large MSPs) don't understand wireless technology well enough to realize that introducing an access point to a network drastically increases their exposure and can knock them out of compliance (PCI, HIPAA, BYOA). If I were using wireless to connect to OD I'd firewall the serer and use the middle tier with SSL.

Ubiquity ftw