When starting (or rebuilding) a dental practice there are many start-up costs involved. One of these costs is the purchase of your dental practice management software. The prices for these pieces of software are generally pretty steep. This is partially due to the level of complexity of the program, and rest due to the greed of the companies charging for it. But what if you could have your practice management software for free? Does that sound to good to be true?

Welcome to the world of Open Source. You can click here to get the Wikipedia definition of open source. That’s exactly what Open Dental is - an open source or free Dental Practice Management Software. What does this mean to you? For a much more affordable price, a programmer or IT specialist (who knows what they are doing) can set your practice up with Open Dental for free. The only cost is for whatever it takes to pay that individual for setting it up for you.

By taking a quick glance at the User Manual for Open Dental you can see that it contains many of the same features that Dentrix, Eagle Soft, and Softdent have. You can see the comparisons Open Dental has against the big dogs here.

The Potential!

The potential Open Dental has is much greater than any commercial piece of practice management system. The reason is because generally with an open source project, many highly intelligent software programmers from around the world contribute to the software building additional features and plugins. This gives Open Dental the advantage over any other commercial software they are competing with because they will naturally just grow much faster.

Remember, Open Dental is free and it works. And you will find it to be beneficial for your dental practice. Why not try setting it up? It’s free so it doesn’t really hurt to give it a try. Patientdocs.com is an expert in installing and configuring Open Dental Software for the dental office. It actually comes as an option in our entire Web Services For Dentists package. So contact us today if you would like us to help you setup Open Dental in your practice.

This entry was posted on Friday, December 14th, 2007 at 5:41 pm and is filed under Practice Management. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.