I started this site in January 2009 and have a constant flow of visitors at a least signing up. I've had a few folks post their personal stories which I am greatly thankful for. I've shared my wife's story here. For those of you young contenders not already beaten by the system, I hope this site offers a place for you to organize. For the rest of us, I propose a new cause to get behind.

From now to the end of the year, I will organize my mission for next years site activity. With my background in IT, I've decided the best way to move forward and get more interest in the site is to develop an open source dental management system with a HOOK.

I will dust off the work several colleagues helped with during my Information Science Masters degree program and ask my web site visitors to participate in ideas, design, improvements along the way.

The idea in a few bullet points:

• Make a competitive dental office management system that is secure and accessible over the Internet.
• Add a hook that allows for "consultation/second opinion" where doctors can post an anonymous case of x-ray and notes and whatever else is needed. Foreign trained dentists can review the case and provide diagnosis and treatment plan advice.
• A credential system will be in place. Perhaps you get points for posting a diagnosis. More points for posting a treatment plan. More points if several people agree with your plan. More points if the dentist who posted the case validates your treatement plan. etc. Need more help with ideas on this.
• The design will start with the work documents I already have but will have more modern internet concepts like document tagging.
• There will be a separation of personal information from case information so cases can be posted as long as a patient permission system allows for that. Anonymous cases will be aggregated by various categories that we come up with.
• The dental office management system will be multi-lingual meaning I will allow an interface for people to translate all content and cases into multiple languages. Perhaps I will use the credential management system to let only 'trusted' users translate articles that aren't theres.
• Goals - be as open as possible, incorporate as many ideas as possible, turn content into as many useful forms as possible -> dental case study guides. Engage practicing dentists to help non practicing dentists. Engage non practicing dentists to help practicing dentists.

02/16/2010

Looks like there are a number of open source dental practice management packages out there. The most prominent one seems to be OpenDental. Perhaps it is not the best use of our efforts to write one from scratch. I think I should focus more on a posting system for patients to request a second opinion on initial procedures and follow up work. I can contribute this to open source packages as additional enhancements or features thereby accomplishing my overall objective. We'll see, the year is still young.

Other Sources Melissa and I found:

ADA Guide To Practice Management Software

Lajenda - Based on OpenDental

1Dentist - Seems to be OpenDental but hosted remotely.

Easy Dental - One of the lower cost commercial packages

These are some folks who are already out there. If I were to take the community down this path, it would not be as effective as concentrating on things closer to our main purpose of "Integrating foreign trained dentists into America". I'll investigate alternative strategies to working with these packages and including a module that captures the voices of foreign trained dentists reading articles on this site.

Dental Procedure HIPPA Codes - If we were to build it ourselves, we'd need to have a recognized list of dental procedures.