Datacon Dental System vs. Dentrix vs. Open Dental Software

[Dentrix is] well suited for a busy practice like my own. Does require a significant up front investment. It was already in place when I purchased the practice from the previous owner. May not be suited for a smaller practice that would not find value in the upfront costs associated with it.

Incentivized

Open Dental is becoming the primary dental software for a lot of dentists by providing affordable pricing, yet still powerful enough to cover most of the needs of a standard dental office. It has good scalability and real-time updating, allowing staff to work on the same chart on multiple workstations. If there is something Open Dental DOESN'T do, it usually provides strong integration with 3rd party software to increase functionality

Incentivized

• Easy to look up, edit, delete, break and make appointments. This is great when you're on the phone with someone and are able to quickly locate them in the system and see what appointments they have.
• Easily make changes to providers information, colors or schedules. This is nice because we tend to have fill in hygienists and we can change their colors so it will not indicate the same colors as are our normal staff.
• Easily print reports and deposits from the office manager. This helps us keep track of new patients, aging reports, unscheduled appointments, unscheduled treatment, continuing care appointments and so much more.

Incentivized

• User Interface is simple to learn
• Integrates well with all imaging programs
• Support techs are amazing, and remember your name when you call
• It's cheaper than almost all alternatives, but the value is higher
• Lots of plug-ins are available
• Awesome user community of dentists that love to talk about how they've incorporated plug-ins and other features
• Lots of reports to choose from, or you can make your own

• Outdated--it's not cloud based.
• Does not pull reports we need for patients like demographics in flow charts.
• Is not an open API.

Incentivized

• Open Dental [Software] has issues when users try to open more than one window at a time.
• There is no way to copy/paste provider schedules, so you have to schedule each day individually.

Our practice functions well using Open Dental [Software] and it's a very affordable option. So long as the customer service remains excellent and the price stays competitive, we have no reason to go through the hassle of changing software.

Open Dental [Software] works great....until you try to open multiple windows. This is the one feature that needs serious improvement with the product. I've had to force quit/terminate the software more times than I can count because it froze when I tried to open up a second window to complete a task. Other than this one issue, it's a very usable product.

We have used Dentrix support and they seem to be helpful. We are able to schedule meetings as needed within a short time frame, and are usually able to resolve any issues we may have within 1 or 2 calls. There doesn't seem to be as strong of a user community around Dentrix as there is with Epic.

Incentivized

Open Dental's customer support team has gone above and beyond for us. There was a 2-3 month period where we couldn't go more than 5 minutes without the software crashing - which was an issue with our server and not with their product. Despite it being our issue, the customer service team remained in constant contact with us and with our IT support company until the issue was resolved.

I used Patterson's EagleSoft in a limited capacity at a previous health center job. On the back end, EagleSoft was easier to setup, install, and manage than Dentrix. Backing up data files, migrating servers, was easier (but slower) on EagleSoft than on Dentrix. Dentrix appears to have a greater feature capability/set than EagleSoft does. Both have excellent technical support that is responsive, indepth, and well suited to address IT related problems with both EMR systems.

Incentivized

Open Dental is faster than the alternatives, and the support is much better with very low hold times. It's more customizable with lots of plug-ins available, although they aren't really needed. A strong user community group is available as well, where you can see different use cases and read up on experiences of other users of the software.

• Allows you to change the date to any date - Negative
• Simple Document center
• Sometimes it runs slow
• Support
• return on investment
• integration was easy
• positive impact

Incentivized

• The cost of Open Dental is minimal, so ROI is huge.