Ever gotten a warning, message, or popup in Open Dental and weren’t quite sure what it meant? Well, in our multi-part series “Understanding Open Dental“, we’re reviewing some of those messages so you know what they mean and how to handle them in the future.

In the previous posts of this series, we reviewed Security Warnings and Appointment Prompts & Warnings. In this post, we’ll go over the custom Popups and other patient warnings.

Custom Popups

In Open Dental, you can create custom Popups that will appear when opening a patient record. These Popups can be associated with one specific patient, an entire family, or a Super Family if your practice has the feature enabled.

Popups are fully customizable and can say whatever you want them to say. They can also be easily disabled once they are no longer needed. Popups will also not bother you incessantly if you switch back and forth to the same patient, as once they’ve popped up on your workstation, they won’t pop up for another 10 minutes.

Automation Popups

Automation can be utilized to show Popups when opening a patient without creating custom Popups on each account as shown above. If an account meets a certain condition (e.g., allergy, medical problem, billing type, etc.) you can create a Popup to appear for all patients that meet the condition. If the account no longer meets the condition or if Automation is disabled, the Popup will no longer appear when opening the patient.

Patient Information Required Fields

Your office can set up Required Fields to ensure users enter necessary information when setting up new patients or (editing existing) ones. Required Fields show an asterisk (*) in the Edit Patient Information window. If a required field is missed or doesn’t meet a set condition, the warning will appear. You can click OK to proceed or click Cancel if you want to return to finish editing the patient information and complete any required fields. The message will appear anytime you close the Edit Patient Information window until all Required Fields are fixed.

Insurance Payment Required Fields

Required Fields can also be applied to insurance payments. These required fields will be used in the Edit Insurance Payment window when finalizing an insurance payment. You’ll get a warning if you miss a field marked required or if a required field doesn’t meet the set conditions. You can click OK to proceed or click Cancel if you want to return to finish editing the payment information and complete any required fields.

Patient Status Warning

When a patient is selected and their status is set to NonPatient, you will get a warning when opening the Chart Module alerting you of their status. This is to alert you that you may have the wrong account selected or the status may need to be changed before doing any charting (as you normally wouldn’t be doing any charting on a NonPatient). To change the patient status, you can double-click the Patient Info grid (normally on the left of the Chart Module). Edit Patient Information will open; the status is on the left. Otherwise, click Select Patient to open a different patient.

Now that you know a bit more about appointment prompts and warnings, you will be prepared in case one appears when using Open Dental.

Keep a look out for the last post in this series coming soon! As always if you ever have questions, reach out to our helpful Open Dental Support.