NHS partial denture coding

Hey ​@Carl Fullaway 👋

You’re not the only one to notice this, and it’s not something that’s specific to your site.

For NHS partial dentures, there isn’t actually a separate upper vs lower distinction in the NHS submission codes in the same way there is for full dentures. Dentally submits what the NHS coding model allows, even though clinically you’re correctly charting upper and lower teeth.

That’s why it can look odd at first glance and feel like it’s saying “two lower dentures”, even though that’s not what’s happening clinically or in reality. It’s more a limitation of how partial dentures are represented in NHS data rather than an error in your setup.

I agree it’s confusing and not very intuitive, especially from an audit or reporting point of view, so I’ll flag this back to the team to see whether we can at least make this clearer in the system or in guidance.

Thanks for calling it out! 😊

Thanks for the reply, not sure if it is just me and I have not specifically phoned the NHS board about it so apologies if there is some rule that doesn’t seem to make sense that I am not aware of.  I find it odd that the NHS would specify please send all partial acrylic dentures as lower acrylic denture from Dentally but other dental software should differentiate and send as upper or lower.

There definitely is a way of submitting  upper partial acrylic dentures as upper acrylic dentures to submit to the NHS its just Dentally doesn’t have them logged as codes, I will need to create a new one because Dentally has not. Why would it have upper or lower acrylic denture in the treatment codes set up if the NHS want to use them sure it would just have acrylic denture? 

It should be corrected and new codes added to correctly submit to the NHS. I can create them as an admin but was flagging that really it should be across the board  for everyone in Dentally and not incorrectly submitting 2 lower partial dentures each time. 

As it happens if you look at code 9309 Obturators that is submitted as an upper acrylic denture (and is the response that the AI bot in Dentally help gave me to use for upper acrylic dentures but is obviously not what we want to call a regular partial acrylic denture). So it is definitely possible and should be done correctly, otherwise we could be flagged with NHSBSA for making 2 lower dentures inappropriately on a patient and also be an outlier for not making any upper partial dentures and too many lower ones on our end of year data. We will get paid the same as a Band 3 but the data set will not be correct and if blatantly not correct,  makes a mockery of submitting the data at all. 

Exact submitted separately as upper and lower acrylic dentures -(it did not submit everything as a lower partial denture if you are inferring that is the way the NHS does it) , it  took the charting for the partial denture code (ie if they were upper teeth or lower teeth and altered accordingly.  Dentally doesn’t seem to have created the correct number of codes or for upper partial acrylics or Chromes that is all and isn’t sophisticated enough to work it out from one generic partial denture code like Exact used to.  Just flagging it up in case it was just my site missing the coding or for a very easy fix that Dentally could just create/rename partial dentures as upper and lower to sort out for all Dentally sites and have them submit the correct data sets rather than sending it as a lower acrylic denture every time we make an upper denture on the NHS.

Hey ​@Carl Fullaway,

Thanks for explaining this in so much detail.

I believe Dentally is submitting partial denture data based on how the NHS submission model is currently configured in the system, which is why you’re seeing this behaviour. That said, your comparison with EXACT and the examples you’ve shared (including how 9309 behaves) raise a fair question around whether this is simply a limitation of the NHS coding model or something that we could do more accurately.

Rather than making assumptions here, I’m going to raise this with our product team and understand whether there’s scope to better distinguish upper vs lower partial dentures in submissions, or at the very least clarify this behaviour more clearly in guidance.

I’ll also loop ​@KevinBell and ​@lochansidhu, as they may have more background on the NHS coding side, and I’ll come back to the thread once I have a clearer answer.

Hey ​@Carl Fullaway,

I've had a chat with the team and they confirmed that NHS denture coding no longer distinguishes between partial and full dentures at category level. Instead, the distinction is upper vs lower only, and the same NHS codes are used whether the denture is partial or full.

What this means in practice is that Dentally expects separate upper and lower denture treatments to be configured. So, If a practice is using a single generic "partial denture" treatment, the system doesn't have enough information to submit upper vs lower accurately, which is likely what you're seeing.

Our default treatment lists were updated to include explicit upper and lower denture treatments, but it sounds like your site may still be using an older or simplified setup. Our Support team should be able to help review and align this so submissions reflect upper and lower correctly going forward. 😊

Thanks for looking into it.

Yes I saw that NHS just requires to submit if upper or lower and Dentally was configured for full upper or lower dentures. (though as an aside people should probably never use the upper AND lower full dentures code for NHS as it will only submit one upper denture) 

Dentally was just not configured for partial dentures. at least on my system. There was no separate configured upper and lower partial denture codes. We are a relatively new site since October and constantly clicking the new updates so not sure why I would have been given the older simplified set up, but good to know that other practices have it correct. I have created my own upper partial denture codes to submit correctly.