So, my preferred dentist was bought out by a much larger conglomerate and things are changing in ways I didn’t like. So, I took the opportunity to shop around, and found one closer to work. It was even painless to get setup as a new patient.

Once I was all done getting entered in the system, I called my old dentist to cancel my appointment, and to get my records. What they sent me was surprising.

• 2 .png’s of my teeth x-rays, taken as screenshots from the desktop (UI chrome and all)
• A sideways, blurry, hastily scanned pdf of my procedures and the various prices

Putting aside the fact that they just sent this over email, and that the data is lossy, at best, it’s still kind of shitty to just hand over your customer’s data in the worst possible formats for transfer. No .tiff or any medically approved image format for my x-rays? No .csv or any journal format for my procedures? It feels like amateur hour here.

Edit: I’m requesting DICOM formatted images and an actual ledger. It also turns out that Debian has a suite of DICOM tools, so not only can I get my records, I can also view them.

Stonewalled:

No, we do not, this is how we send our x-rays. We use a different software than most other practices.

🙄

Lets see if the developers behind their software are any more responsive.