Registration Forms 

For new patients, you have a few options on how you collect their information:

Paper Forms
The old fashioned way. The new twist is that you can scan and shred the forms after they are filled out. The paper is not stored in a patient chart. If you scan and shred, rearrange your forms so that all signatures go one one page. There will probably be three signatures:
- Financial agreement (signed by guarantor, not patient)
- Medical history
- HIPAA

Online Forms
Patients can fill out the forms online before they come in for their appointment. You can even put a computer in the waiting room for them to fill out forms online at the time of their appointment. The information on the form is then typically emailed or securely retrieved by the office. The receptionist must still type the information into Open Dental. Some companies providing this service include:
patientdocs.com
submitpatientforms.com
medictalk.com
www.logiforms.com
formrouter.com (no prices listed, probably too expensive)
adobe.com

One problem with online forms is that there is no place for the patient to sign. You will probably still need one piece of paper for that.

We are exploring the idea of integration with an online forms hosting service.  This is a link to a new patient registration form we are working on:

https://www.logiforms.com/formdata/user_forms/19983_3709044/63924/

We plan to allow the information that goes into the online form to flow automatically into the office database.  The service is $25/month for basic service plus $20/month for the necessary logibridge component.  The capacity is far beyond what a typical dental office would ever need.

PT Dental Bridge
This bridge is functional as of version 5.4.  See PT Dental.

Patient Info Terminal
The Patient Info Terminal is a feature of Open Dental which attempts to provide a built-in solution for patient registration forms. It might work for a few offices, but is probably not refined enough for most. Again, there is no place for the patient to sign.  Consider this a temporary solution that will be phased out soon.

Sheets
Not functional yet.  See the Sheets feature.  One option is for us to incorporate patient registration forms into the sheets framework. We will probably include the following two forms within Open Dental itself:
Patient Info.doc
Med History.doc
The corresponding images of these two files are below. To get these image files, we did a print preview on a very large screen, did a screen capture using Alt-PrintScreen, and cropped it in Corel PhotoPaint.
Patient Info.gif
Med History.gif
If you view these images in Internet Explorer, they will probably look very choppy at first.  Just single click on the image itself to toggle to full resolution.  The image quality is quite good.

You are free to adapt these for your own use.  They are only provided as examples to get you started. They are designed in such a way that if you are scanning and shredding, all the signatures are on one page.  Therefore, you only need to scan the page with the signatures.  The other page can be destroyed after keying the information into the computer.