Each practice using Open Dental must enable BitLocker, or another encryption system, for their hard drive on their server. This is required to ensure protection of PHI. Also see Encryption of Data at Rest and in Transit.

Open Dental does not provide technical support for encryption. For assistance, consult your IT professional.

About BitLocker

BitLocker is a simple, powerful, encryption solution that protects an entire hard drive. Users do not notice it because the entire drive is protected, rather than an individual file or folder.

Encrypted sectors in a BitLocker-protected drive are decrypted as they're requested from system read operations. BitLocker does not encrypt and decrypt the entire drive when reading and writing data. No unencrypted data is ever stored on a BitLocker-protected drive as blocks that are written to the drive are encrypted before they are written to the physical disk. For more information, see: Microsoft BitLocker FAQ

Prerequisites

An Open Dental supported Windows operating system is required. See Computer Requirements.

Before implementing BitLocker, see Microsoft's BitLocker Overview for authorized information and instructions about BitLocker for your operating system. Each operating system may have different instructions.

Implementing BitLocker

Follow the steps outlined by Microsoft to implement BitLocker: Configure BitLocker.