Openmolar User Manual

What does openmolar do when I add an item of treatment to a patient's treatment plan.

  1. Openmolar checks that the patient has an active treatment course, and gets the user to verify which clinician is responsible for that course.
    If no active course is in place (or started at this prompt, the process is abandoned.
    Appendix i - What is an active course?
  2. As an example, let's assume you are adding a small xray.
    For this item the treatment shortcut is "S" Appendix ii - What is a shortcut?
  3. At this point the feescales are checked to get a price for this treatment. Appendix iii - feescales
    (ie. A key lookup for "xray S" is done.)
    At this point there are 3 possibilities.
If we have got this far without the user chosing to abandon, we will have both a shortcut and an esimate object.
It is time to apply these.

Appendix

i: What is an active course?
An active course responds to a single data row with a unique id. Until that id is set, there is nowhere to save the treatment plan data.
ii: What is a shortcut?
A shortcut is an abbreviation of the treatment being applied.
Many are very common in dentistry, example "MOD" describes a specific thess surface filling.
For non-filling items, shortcuts are less obvious.
In fact, Openmolar allows heavy customisation of all these shortcuts, however consistency is key, and for historical reasons, in my practice, a small xray is "S", a medium xray is "M" a panoral xray is "P" and so on.
Codes should be unique for each type of treatment (namely xray, perio, chart, denture, other etc.. ) and consistent across all feescales in use.
iii: What is a feescale?
A feescale is an xml document stored in the database.
More information can be found at feescales.html
iv: The patient has a default feescale?
Yes. Assuming your system has more than one feescale, when a record is loaded, or a new treatment course started, the best match is used a a default.
Criteria used are contract type (example NHS, Private or Insurance Plan), patients age, and the date the treatment course commenced.
v: What is an attribute?
An attribute is simply a computer science term for a property associated with an object in memory.
In the case of a treatment plan, this attribute is a sequence of space separated characters.
eg "2S P M " as an xray attribute would equate to 2 small, a panoral and a medium xray.