The Open Dental Treatment Plan Module, and the One Thing It Cannot Tell You

Open Dental's treatment plan module does most of what you ask of it. It sorts, it prints, it collects a signature. What it cannot do is tell you what the case costs you to deliver, and once you see where its numbers actually come from, that stops being a complaint about Open Dental and starts being a fact about every practice management system.

First, the mechanics, because half the frustration with this module is not knowing what it is doing.

Phasing is a label, not a container

Open Dental groups treatment with Priority, configured under Setup, Definitions, Treat' Plan Priorities. Seven characters, a color, whatever names you want. Procedures sort by priority, then by date.

Worth sitting with the word for a second. Every tooth on that plan is a priority. You are not treating the optional ones. What you actually have is a sequence, first this, then that, and calling the field Priority tells you nothing about the sequence while quietly inviting the patient to wonder which parts they can skip. Most of us end up typing Phase 1 and Phase 2 into a field called Priority, which tells you what the field should have been called.

The deeper point is structural. A priority is a label on a line, not a box that holds things. There is no phase object with its own status or its own total. When you reorganize phase two you are re-tagging rows, not moving a container, which is exactly why it feels like more work than it should.

You can subtotal by priority, and almost nobody does

Under the Show tab there is an option for subtotals for each priority level. Turn it on and you get a number per phase instead of one figure at the bottom.

If you present phased treatment and have never switched this on, switch it on. It is the difference between a patient seeing one intimidating number and seeing what the next appointment costs.

The trap: active plans get their fees rewritten

This one catches people and it is worth knowing before it costs you a conversation.

Fees in an active treatment plan are updated by the Update Fees tool. Fees in a Saved treatment plan are not. So if you present from an unsaved active plan, and your fee schedule is updated afterward, the number you quoted is no longer the number on screen. Nobody changed it on purpose. The tool did its job.

Save the plan before you present it. A saved plan is a permanent record, it can be signed, and it can go to eClipboard. An active plan is a working document that will keep moving underneath you.

What actually prints

Print TP and Email TP both act on a saved plan. The layout is a customizable sheet: tooth chart, the treatment plan grid, insurance benefit grids, signature box. Which columns appear is controlled through Display Fields, and there is a preference for whether itemized fees show at all.

One thing to know before you promise a patient options. Open Dental handles multiple plans by saving each as its own Saved Treatment Plan. There is no side-by-side comparison. You print both and lay them next to each other on the desk, and the declined one gets renamed and deleted later.

Now the part the module cannot do

Everything above is presentation, and it is mostly fine. But work backward from any number on that printed sheet and you land in the same place every time: a procedure code, times a fee schedule, adjusted for an insurance plan.

Nowhere in that chain is the question of what the case costs you. Not chair time. Not the lab bill on this case. Not the fact that six crowns in the posterior and six crowns across the anterior of a patient with a high lip line carry the same six codes and the same six fees. The posterior six are forgiving. Margin placement has room to work with, shade has room to breathe, and nothing about the result gets studied. The anterior six are a different job entirely: the smile line decides where the margins go, shade has to hold across six units sitting side by side, and nothing goes to final until it looks right, which means shade photographs, at least one try-in and often two, a much larger lab bill, and a result the patient examines in the mirror every morning for the next twenty years.

So the total is arithmetic on a fee schedule. It is accurate arithmetic. It is just not an answer to the question you actually have, which is should I charge this, and what do I keep when it is finished?

That is the gap. Not phasing, not subtotals, not printing. Your software is telling you what the codes add up to. It is not telling you what the case costs.

Your software tells you what the codes add up to. If you want the other number, the free dental treatment plan template works it out phase by phase: chair time, lab, the coordination hours that never carry a code, and whether you are still up on the case at every step. Free, in PDF and Excel.