Hi @Helen Moss 👋
I haven’t personally seen this suggestion before so I’ll make sure to leave a note for the team to reach out to you in case they need more details. I suspect other practices use some workarounds like for example:
-
Keeping patients on the right cadence with Recalls (by Hygienist type and filtered to your Payment Plans). When a hygiene appointment (e.g. Scale & Polish) is completed, Dentally moves the patient’s hygienist recall date forward automatically, and the recall interval can come from the plan they’re on.
-
One other option would be to report on usage with the Appointments report: set the date range to the last 12 months, filter Reason = Hygiene and Payment Plan = your plan(s) to see how many hygiene visits took place; export to CSV if you want to group by patient and compare against each plan’s allowance.
(You can also slice clinical activity by plan in Income/Practitioner Activity if you track hygiene as specific treatment items.)
If it helps day-to-day, some practices add a short Patient Note (alert) on the record as a manual nudge once someone hits their allowance, so the team sees it whenever the record opens.
I’ll log your request for:
-
a per-patient counter/prompt when hygiene entitlements are reached (per year, per band), and
-
a summary report showing patients who’ve used their allowance by plan.
Are your five categories per plan mapped to specific appointment reasons (e.g. different hygiene types), or just different allowance levels within the same “Hygiene” reason? If you share the labels, I can suggest the cleanest way to set up reasons/recalls so the reporting is a one-click filter. 😊
+1 for this - it would be great. Currently we’re looking at doing this via data warehouse / API.
You would need to be able to set the “year” to a custom period for each plan type. For example, the Practice Plan “year” is typically a calendar year, but might not be. Our memberships have a rolling year depending on when a patient signs up, which would be very tricky I guess.
I Guess we would need the ability to put a plan start date into the patient details and then be able to specify on the plan Banding how many hygiene visits per band. This could be customised by each practice depending on what their agreement with Denplan is. Do others have the same issue that use other companies for insurance plans?