Linux for Dental Clinic

Ganoy · n00b Joined: 07 Jul 2006 Posts: 1

Are there any advantages of using Linux for a dental clinic. I have heard there are not many applications written in Linux for dental clinics.

Gan Tom
mod edit: Removed link to some dental clinic, looked like spam. --Earthwings

erik258 · Posted: Fri Jul 07, 2006 9:19 pm Post subject:

dental clinics? I have no idea what kind of program you'd need but the open-source community has given us OpenOffice which most people find is an excellent suite of programs to replace the microsoft office suite. btw it also runs in windows if you want to try before you fry (your windows installation that is)

what else do you need?
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sundialsvc4 · Guru Joined: 10 Nov 2005 Posts: 436

I suggest that you first find the best application that will "run the dental clinic." Then, purchase the computer(s) needed to run it. If those are Windows machines, that's fine. (Well, so to speak.

)

The software selection, in a case like this, should drive the hardware selection. And you probably don't want to try to "roll your own."

mikegpitt · Advocate Joined: 22 May 2004 Posts: 3224

As big of a linux support as I am, I'm not sure if you would see much benefit from using linux. I'm not sure what you specific needs are, but I know that denists use specialized software to store patient info. The software I have seen is written for Windows, however it may run in wine.

I don't think you will see any real cost savings, since dental clinics probably don't have enough desktops around to quantify any real benefit.

So my suggestion is, if you can see some purpose that Linux can fulfill that the current systems can't, then maybe you should look into it more. If not, then your minds well stick with the current systems.

You may want to ask the software companies that write the Windows dental software if they would make a linux version, but you will probably get the stock response "our company doesn't see enough demand for blah blah right now..." "in the future blah blah...", although I always think it is good to ask companies about Linux. The more they hear about it, the more the market looks attractive.

Joseph_sys · Posted: Wed Sep 20, 2006 7:40 pm Post subject:

I'm looking for one too.
There is a chance that OpenEMR http://www.oemr.org/ could be customized but it only runs on php4 (not php5) and that is stopping me from testing it.
The nice feature is that it incorporates sql-ledger accounting which we are running so it is a plus.