What Leady reads and writes in Open Dental
Leady connects to your Open Dental only after your Business Associate Agreement with us is signed, with a key your practice enables and can revoke. This page lists everything it touches.
Updated 19 September 2026
What Leady writes
An appointment, in the chair your rules allow
With “Hold for front-desk approval”, the default, the appointment takes the chair and is marked as waiting for your team’s approval. With “Book directly”, it goes in confirmed. A short note on the appointment says Leady made it.
A communication log entry
An entry on the patient’s communication log noting the inbound call, so your team sees it where they already look.
A task, if you want one
Optionally, a task for your team to confirm a held appointment. Callback requests go to your Leady portal.
A patient record, only when needed
If the caller has no record at your practice, the new prospective patient record the appointment needs. It stays in Open Dental even if your team declines the hold, so your team decides whether to keep it.
How a held appointment looks in your version of Open Dental is set up and checked with you at onboarding. When your team declines a hold, it leaves the chair and nothing is deleted.
What Leady reads
- Patients, to find the caller
- Appointments
- Schedules
- Chairs (operatories)
- Providers
What Leady never reads
- Clinical notes
- Imaging
- Ledgers and payments
- Payroll
Will it break my schedule?
The question behind that one is usually a memory: software that put a patient in the wrong chair, and a front desk that found out from the patient. Three answers, and none of them is “we are careful”.
Nothing is confirmed until your team approves it
Hold for front-desk approval is the default, and most practices leave it there. The appointment takes the chair straight away, marked as waiting, and sits in a queue your team clears in the morning — your software has no tentative slot, so a hold is a real appointment wearing a label. Approve it and it is confirmed; decline it and the chair is free again, with the record of the call still there. You can switch a provider to direct booking once you have watched it for a while — that is a setting, not a plan we sell you.
It cannot double-book a chair, and not because we are careful
Two appointments cannot overlap in the same chair, because the database refuses to write the second one. It is a constraint, not a check our code remembers to run, so it holds when two calls arrive in the same second and it holds when something we wrote has a bug. If your front desk takes that chair by hand first, the check we run in the seconds before writing sees it gone, and the request goes to your team with the caller’s number so you can offer another time. We say check rather than guarantee on purpose: your own software will accept two appointments in one chair if it is asked, so the last word is the one on your screen. The caller was told you would confirm, so nothing we said on the call turns out to be untrue.
When we cannot reach your server, we take a message
If your Open Dental is unreachable, or what we can see of your schedule is older than we trust, the assistant stops offering times and takes a message instead. It does not guess at a free slot and reconcile later. If a write fails after the caller has hung up, we retry for a few minutes and then leave a task for your team — the patient is never told about our infrastructure.
Will it sound like us?
It says what you decided it says. Before a single call, we write your protocol with you: who it may book with, what it may offer, what it must refuse, what it says when it does not know, and who it hands the call to. Those are your words, not our defaults. You hear it on a staged call before a patient does. Every caller is told at the start that they are speaking to an automated assistant, because we would rather set that expectation than be caught pretending.
What the setup actually is
A conversation, mostly. We go through your chairs, your providers, your appointment types and the rules that live in your team’s heads — the provider who never takes a new patient on a Monday, the type that needs a longer slot for a specific patient. That is the work, and it is why the second practice is easier than the first. The connection itself is a key you enable in your own Open Dental and can disable without telling us.