Design suggestion - Colour code "kind of correspondance" items

I second that, thats two votes for it,

Hi ​@BCDC2023 👋

Thanks for taking the time to write this our so clearly. It gives us exactly the context our product team needs. Let me tackle each point in turn and suggest what’s possible today:

1.  Colour-coding correspondence

This is a very interesting idea and I can see it would help in saving time by understanding exactly what’s what at a glance. I’ll make sure to flag it to our team! Let me also tag ​@Chris Behr from our design team who may be able to add additional details! 

2.  Flagging a document so the clinician can’t miss it

As you mentioned the closest built-in tool right now is the pinned non-clinical note (“sticky note”). When you pin a note it pops up at the top-right of every patient tab until someone hides or un-pins it, so a clinician opening the chart for an exam can’t overlook it. 
For truly critical clinical information (e.g. allergies) you can also use medical alerts, which place a red heart banner beside the patient’s name. 
I get that you’d like something more customisable that forces a clinician to look at something or take a specific action. I’ll have a look and see if someone else has suggested something similar as it’s quite specific and it may take the team some time to explore. I’ll also make sure to log it in case it’s not something we’ve seen before

3  Stopping a patient being booked with the wrong clinician

Right now is only one hard stop: Prevent Appointment Booking, which removes the Create/Book buttons for that patient entirely, both in the diary and in Portal. 
Portal already honours clinician preferences (it defaults to the regular practitioner and blocks any patient that carries a booking restriction). However, Dentally’s manual diary does not yet enforce a per-clinician blacklist.  I understand your solution for a specific scenario (abusive or “do-not-book-with-X” patients) can really help in some situations. I’ll make sure to log it internally so that our product team can take a look. 

Thanks again for such detailed feedback! 😊

I always have lots of wish lists, is this the best place to request it or is there a specific discussion page?

Hi ​@BCDC2023!

Yes! This is the best place to share any feature requests, issue or anything else you’d like to see in Dentally in the future. It’s the only place you can interact directly with our product development team and make sure we’re able to track any request.

Feel free to open additional topics for other suggestions, I’ll do my best to keep you updated on the progress and if we have already something in the works 😊

Hey ​@BCDC2023, that’s some really helpful feedback - totally understand about seconds mattering.

Just so I understand correctly, is this in the Patient record > Correspondence view?

Is the issue that it’s slow to read across the table and see what type of correspondence has been sent, and being able to identify the rows by some sort of visual (eg. colour) would simplify it? 

Hey Chris,

That’s correct in the patient record / correspondance view and yes colour are faster to read.  It shouldn’t be difficult to simple add a colour to the words Uploads, SMS, Email, Estimates etc, just turn it into a button like the other screens e.g. appointments statuses

Whilst I am not a dentist, I come from an investment banking background and I had developers work for me on systems I’ve asked to be designed.  Heat maps i.e. colour coded traffic light style visuals are brilliant and are 100x faster to process in our mind and allows us to focus on the most important variables.  I wish Dentally had more of it. the appointment screen is another bug bear of mine and I’ve reported it a few times, so here’s another (repeated) suggestion to add to the above:

• Before one of my nurses or me go all nuclear on a patient who calls to cancel 10 min before their appointment time, we always look at the historical attendence.  We love the colour green and hate the colour red, so quite often we tell the patient they are being deregistered because there are too many “red” cancellations.  However, as the picture above shows, this patient has had 3 cancellations, 2 of which were down to the practice cancelling.  I would love to be able to colour code the cancellation reasons so that acceptable cancellations i e. those given with sufficient notice like 48+ WORKING hours or a cancellation due to the practice’s fault or cancellation due to illness with proven hospital letter etc, I want to categorise those as “green” or maybe “yellow” but not read.  That way we can scroll down a list within seconds and count the “genuine lazy last min cancellations”.   This for me would be perhaps more important than my other two suggestions above.

• Again something I have mentioned before, can we please also have time stamps in all areas of the portal where the date is showing.  This includes
  • The accounts screen - why is the date format so ugly?  It’s an easy fix, I personally prefer DD/MM/YYYY format + time, we dont need the full spelling of the month and the date gets cropped off.  I also need to know sometimes the time a payment was taken to find out which receptionist was on the desk (yes I know I can find out in the audit trail or the Takings report) but why do we need to navigate all over the place.  Please insert the time the payment was taken, maybe be changing the date format to DD/MM/YYYY here too.  Unfortunately when you hover over the date of the status, there is no “tool tip” to show the time either.

I’ve got plenty more constructive criticism to add….but it’s Friday so I’ll save some more for Monday :-)

I agree with the colour coding and I absolutely love the idea of colour coding cancellation reasons, especially if we as a practice have cancelled the appointment, rather than the patient :-)

​@Saymon  I’d like to second the suggestion to update the correspondence page from a design point to make it easier to find what you are looking for - eg, reports/written correspondence can quickly get lost amongst multiple SMS’s sent between the practice and the patient, and its hard to find what you need.
It also makes it harder for the practitioner to go back to a report they may need to read, trying to find it again after it’s been followed by multiple SMS’s

I’ve had software where there is a documents section (i.e. where the reports and consent forms go) and contacts (where the phone call notes, sms confirmations go). Also easier for a clinician to know to go straight to documents for a report. Additionally, from the chart, the clinician should see without having to go to correspondence or documents if a consent form was signed for the treatment.