You’ve decided to use the clinics feature in Open Dental – congratulations! (If you’re not sure if the Clinics feature is right for you, check out our post:  Introduction to the Clinics Feature.) Once you complete the setup outlined in this post, you’ll be ready to take care of your patients no matter where they visit and measure both practice and organizational metrics to continue to grow your business. Enabling and Creating Clinics

First, enable the clinics feature.
Go to Setup > Advanced Setup > Show Features. Then check “Clinics (multiple office locations)” and click OK.

You will need to restart Open Dental for the change to take effect.

Next, create your clinics.
Go to Lists > Clinics. Click “Add” and create each clinic.

Fill in each field. This is the information that will be used when sending claims, billing patients, and when using eServices. See the User Manual for a description of each field.

Now that you have added your clinics, you will get a Clinics Dropdown menu at the top of Open Dental.

When moving between clinics, use this dropdown to select the clinic you want to work in. The first clinic that shows on the list is Headquarters. By default, everything is assigned to “Unassigned” (or None), which is Headquarters.

Tech Tip: To determine which clinic is automatically selected upon login, change the “Track Last Clinic By” preference. Go to Setup > Miscellaneous.

Your options are:

• • None: Select the user’s default clinic.
  • Workstation: Select the clinic last selected on the workstation, if the user has access to it. If not, select the user’s default clinic.
  • User: Select the clinic that was active the last time the user logged off.

Restricting Users

You may want to restrict employees to their specific clinic, and you may want to allow certain employees to access all clinics. This can be set by user. Users can then only access the clinic(s) they are restricted to.

Go to Setup > Security, then double-click a user. Select the Clinics tab, then select the clinics to restrict them to.

For more information on restricting clinics, see our Manual Page.

Note: If using Alerts, these can also be set per clinic using the Alert Subs tab.

The Appointments Module

Each clinic can have its own operatory setup, schedules, and appointment views.

First, create operatories for each clinic.
Go to Setup > Appointments > Operatories.

Enter the operatory name, abbreviation, clinic, provider, and any other necessary info. Do this for each operatory.

Next, create your schedules.
Go to Setup > Schedules. When creating a schedule for a day, be sure to select your clinic in the upper right.

The operatories available will be the operatories we assigned to the selected clinic,

For more about creating schedules, see Schedule Setup on our manual.

Lastly, create your appointment views.
Go to Setup > Appointments > Appointment Views.

Select your clinic from the dropdown, then create any needed views.

eServices

If using eServices, be sure to contact Open Dental Support. Our team will assist with setting up eServices to use the correct clinic settings.

Some Other Notable Settings

Here are some other settings that help keep your clinics running smoothly.

• Fee Schedules can have clinic overrides. See our manual page: Fee Override for Provider or Clinic.
• Provider Overrides. If your other location is in another state, be sure to set the Provider Overrides for DEA #, State License #, and more.
• Billing Options. If sending patient bills from Open Dental, each clinic can have its own default settings.
• Clearinghouse Setup. If your other locations have their own account with the clearinghouse, be sure to set clinic specific settings.

Now that you’ve set up your system, you’re ready to use Clinics! If you run into any issues, just reach out – we’re here for you.

Stay tuned for our next post on clinic logic, usage, and tips.