Connecting OpenDental to Stratus lets us pull your patients, their insurance and your schedule automatically, so your team stops retyping the same information twice. This article walks you through the setup, what happens after it's connected, and the handful of fields your office needs to keep filled in.
Before you start
Do the setup on the computer or server that runs OpenDental. This is the single most common thing offices get wrong — if you click the link on a front desk laptop that isn't the OpenDental server, the connection won't complete.
You'll also want someone nearby who can approve a Windows permission prompt on that machine. The whole thing usually takes under ten minutes.
How to connect
Copy the installation link we send you and paste it into a browser on the server running OpenDental.
On that page, click Connect and follow the prompts to download the sync app.
Wait for the download to finish. The installer window should open on its own. If it doesn't, open your Downloads folder and double-click the file you just downloaded.
The installer runs by itself. When it's done it will ask you to click Close. Close it.
Go back to the browser page you left open. It will now let you approve access to OpenDental for Stratus.
Depending on how the server is configured, Windows may show one extra prompt asking permission for Stratus. Click Allow.
Keep that browser page open while you work — it advances by itself once the connection comes through. If nothing happens more than 20 minutes after the install finished, email [email protected] and we'll take a look.
What about security?
A few things worth knowing, because your IT person will ask:
We never receive a database username or password. You don't hand over credentials at any point.
The connection is outbound only — it reaches out to us. There are no firewall ports to open, no VPN to set up, and no static IP address needed.
Nothing needs to be exposed to the internet.
How often does it sync?
During the business day, changes you make in OpenDental show up in Stratus within about five minutes. Syncing pauses overnight and picks back up the next day. Once a day we also do a full refresh of your patient roster, which catches anything that changed while syncing was paused.
So if you add a patient at 10am and don't see them in Stratus 30 seconds later, that's normal — give it a few minutes.
What information comes across
Patients | Name, date of birth, gender, address |
Insurance | Member/policy number, carrier, group number and group name, employer, effective and expiration dates, carrier phone number |
Providers | Provider records and their NPIs |
Operatories | Your operatory list |
Appointments | Your schedule |
Claims | Claim records |
The one section to actually read: your office's homework
Stratus can only verify a patient if OpenDental has enough information to identify them to the carrier. If a patient is missing any of the fields below, automatic verification quietly skips that patient. There's no red banner, no error on your screen — the patient simply won't have a verification, and it's easy to assume the system is broken when really the record was incomplete.
Check that these are filled in:
Policy / member number on the insurance plan
Carrier on the insurance plan
Patient date of birth
Subscriber date of birth — easy to miss when the patient is a child or a spouse and the subscriber is a separate person
Provider NPI on each provider record
Practice Tax ID
If a patient you expected to see verified didn't get verified, this list is the first place to look. Nine times out of ten it's one of these six fields.
While you're in there, it's worth making sure your carriers have payer IDs entered. That has its own guide — see Best Practices: Adding Payer ID's to Your PMS, which walks through the ElectID field.
Writing results back into OpenDental
Writeback is a separate, optional feature. When it's turned on, Stratus can push verified benefit information back into OpenDental so your team doesn't have to key it in from the breakdown.
OpenDental supports the fullest writeback of any practice management system we work with, so if you're on OpenDental it's worth turning on.
Setting it up takes one extra step: an API key. In Stratus, go to your integration settings to get the key, then in OpenDental go to Setup → Advanced Setup → API and paste it into the API key field. Once that's saved, writeback is live.
Still stuck?
Email [email protected] and tell us what you're seeing — including which machine you ran the installer on. That's usually the fastest way to sort it out.