Practice Admin

Please make the clipboard an individual feature, like SOE. Having a single clipboard for the whole practice does not work. We run a 9 surgery practice with a large reception team, across 2 floors. When you put an appointment on the clipboard, it often disappears as a colleague pinches it by mistake.A personal clipboard, per staff member, works so much better and we really miss this feature from SOE.

When a day has been cancelled (short notice or otherwise) by a clinician, the appointments that need rearranging are really difficult to spot. On SOE, a cancelled day would turn all appointments red on the appointment diary. This was a really valuable feature for reception staff to identify which appointments still need cancelling. Without it, a busy reception team can easily overlook cancelling a day as there is no visual cue. This will lead to annoyed patients who either don’t get enough notice to rearrange appointments, or don’t get called at all and show up anyway! It doesn’t help the management team either as at a glance it looks like the diary has been badly managed and not booked efficiently. You can’t see why without searching. Please bring in this simple feature. It will really help the workflow for the team.

Please could the systems team have a look at this?  If a clinician books a day holiday and their column is blocked, it isn’t visible when looking at the diary and so it’s down to us to let people know that appointments need to be moved.  In other systems, the appointments booked in blocked diaries would show in bright red, which is much more user friendly!  Could this be done in Dentally? Thanks Anita

On the new form, is it possible to make the acquisition source a drop down?We’d love for the acquisition source to become a required field option also!Thanks

The system does not allow for GP17 part 2 to be signed when a treatment plan is finished on the tablets. It makes users in Scotland a high risk for having claims rejected which could massively impact on earnings. This should be addressed as an immediate issue please. Other systems flag when a plan is finishing and prompts for a second signature. 

We do not have an integrated referral system in our area at the moment (we have been told there is one in the pipeline but that has been mentioned for the last 10 year) We still have to use Exact to email off all our referrals to our local NHS hospital trusts because there are also issues about sending patient sensitive data from any other email other than an NHS one and they will NOT accept patient referrals from anything other than NHS email address. Has anyone managed to get some integration into Dentally to be able to receive or send emails from an NHS email address in Dentally.I spoke to support and was told that the NHS mail may need to configure the MX records but I have spoken to IT guys and they don’t know anything about being able to do that or I have the email just bounced back saying its not something they can help with. It is a real problem for us and means we have to run Exact concurrently with dentally at pretty much all times and of course

I believe address look up is active in England. When can it be available in Australia please?

We are new to dentally moved from exact we used to get an appt pop up after patient has finished treatment to book their next recall on dentally how do we do this?  we are finding that when we select 6 months this isn’t always showing on the appt tab as 6 months.  

Identifying short notice cancellations currently relies on users selecting that option as a cancellation reason, this leaves room for error and recording the genuine cancellation reason in some cases might be better suited to the patients and hold a better explanation for the cancel rather than being used to flag the short notice cancel.  I would like to feature request, as I am hoping for an automatic short notice cancellation flag, that is separate to appointment reason? I was thinking a field in settings where the practice cancellation policy time frame can be logged (usually 24 or 48 hours) For example a practice then set their policy at 48 hours, and the system then flags any cancels in that time frame as a short notice cancel regardless of appointment reason, and this could then be reported on within the appointments report.  This would allow a practice to see top level information around how many cancellations are potentially negatively Impacting t

Moved from SOE to dentally. Having alot of issues. SOE had its good bits and bad but the good bits were really good.Feature 1.-bring in a drag and drop function, we have to press reordering to chnage treatment round, we have to do a bunch of extra clicks for moving and appointment time. Allow a drag and drop its much quickerFeature 2.-ACORN needs refining-its messy and really time consuming. Two tabs, repeating information twice, its a waste of time. The layout is also more difficult to follow. Instead we really need one tab that autopopulates the PR form. Also separate the information by just adding a line to aid viewing. For example put a line between the caries portion, perio portion etc. Colour code it so we know what we need to fill in quick. Highliting is fine. Also each data point should only allow one tick. Why can i tick yellow and green for medical, social and dental. This will save admin time!!

Hi there, this probably is a known issue, but after setting up a new Dentally installation for a squat practice and making lots of new treatment items, its a bit annoying: DescriptionNew treatment items do not allow a price to be setSteps to ReproduceMake a new treatment item in Settings > Treatment & Plans, press Save, go to prices tabExpected ResultThere should be text input to enter the priceActual ResultThere is no text input to enter priceWorkaroundRefresh the page Select another treatment then reselect the new treatment item...then the text input appearsSeverity/Priorityits not a massive deal ...but it would be nice to improve this behaviour at some point  

HiWe ask patients routinely when they attend the practice if there details are still the same - eg name change if now married, change of address, change of email or mobile number so that we have the most up to date information.  However, this is not recorded unless put on a note every single time which clogs up the notes - it would be really good to have an option on the Patient Details page a button to tick that says something along the lines of “patient contact details checked” with the date automatically alongside so that we know in future that the details for this patient were checked on a certain date and are indeed up to date. 

Is there any way a time-specific filter could be added to the appointment finder.A lot of our patients want appointments before or after certain times, so it would be helpful to be able to filter out any appointments that aren’t suitable.Could this be added or does anyone else have a workaround that could help?

It would be a great time-saving feature if there was an option to do a mass export in the correspondence section, just like we can export the clinical notes history at the click of a button.The reason I am requesting this is that I am in the middle of copying & pasting every SMS sent, every email sent and every call log for a solicitor acting on behalf of a patient who has requested their entire data file from us. I think this feature should only be available through Administrator access level. 

Is it possible to display dentally id number when doing patient search as he have a large cohort of patients who share same name as another patient registered with us.  We correspond with laboratories via dentally id number but finding right patient when we receive correspondence from them can take time especially when there are several patients with same name

We find with some regularity that a treatment has been charged in the wrong practitioners name. We’ve tried to eliminate this through training, but it still occurs from time to time. Does anyone know of a way for the manager / admin to change this? If not, could the developers provide one?We currently have to re-open treatment plan > unallocate payment > delete invoice > untick treatment > change practitioner > charge using the same date of the original invoice > complete treatment plan > re-allocate payment.Suffice to say, this is inconvenient and prone to creating new errors. Worse, it means existing invoices (invoice numbers) are erased / replaced.Without doing this, Dentally’s reports become useless, and we’re back to calculating schedules manually.

Practice managers, owners, and financial admins, we’d love to hear your thoughts!How do you currently calculate practitioner pay in your practice, and what challenges do you face in this process?Share your insights on how Dentally could help make this task more efficient and hassle-free 💡

Confirmation of all of the patient  appointmentS instead of only the upcoming one 

Hi there.  I am finding dentally really difficult to use in terms of paying my associates at the end of the month. I simply cannot find a way/report option to be able to see where payments are placed when a patient pays a deposit towards large treatments and where finance payments can be seen. The way I want to pay my associates is as follows: We calculate from the 1st of the month to the last day of the month (and then we pay a month behind which is standard for a dental practice). We do a lot of cosmetic dentistry which has high ticket value. A lot of our patients put large deposits down/take out finance/patients pay off their balance as and when they want via stripe on the dentally portal to reduce their balance for treatments such as ongoing clear aligner treatment. This money i’m assuming on dentally is ‘unallocated’ as it doesn’t know where to go/the treatment has not been completed yet/ticked through on the system so it doesnt have a specific invoice to p

There should be a way to autopopulate at least the signor when not the patient as its often the parent living at the same address but we have to type it in for every child 

*typo in title - should read “how do others cancel whole day list of patients”I’m interested to know how other practices get around the problem of having to reschedule or cancel a clinician’s whole day list due to illness or last min holiday. I think there is feature in Dentally which allows you to send a bulk email or text message for all the patients in one clinician’s diary (someone please remind me how) but that worries as we might lose the details of who those patients were in the system and get complaints later. I prefer to ensure we call them and cancel / reschedule each, one by one so it’s 100% confirmed that the patient is aware in case they didnt see the sms or email and come to the practice and start ranting about the cancelled appointment.  Where we cant get in touch with them, we leave them a voicemail message and send an email / text but still wont remove them.  We cycle through the checkin, in surgery and checkout (tick box) to preve

Currently, we cannot select our Email templates when right clicking from the appointment diary and clicking “Send Email”This means that i am limited to having an email template to “Cancel Next Appointment” but what if the appointment i am cancelling is not their next appointment?It would be useful to have a dropdown to choose from our Email Templates just like we can do when we send an SMS when right clicking an appointment in the diary.This would allow us to create a template which we can use the data tags to pull info from that specific appointment.This would be efficient because we do not pay for sending Emails but we do for sending SMS’s

We have an issue with short notice cancellations being offered to patients after the appointment has been booked and unavailable.

How do you search for de-reg or archived patients?

There is no prompt support. Any issue with Dentally will take more then 1hr to get someone to help you. This is delaying the workflow in the practice. There is no agent that can call you, they always send you the the chat where the AI gives the instructions on how to fix something but no really answering to the questions and helping with what you need. The support after the onboarding is only once a week. Really disappointed with the experience we have so far with Dentally.