How do you ensure your practice is mastering consent forms and estimates? 🤔

I don’t know about everyone else, but our patients really struggle using the portal, as a patient I experienced this myself when trying to book my appointment. So I gave up and just logged in and popped myself into the diary.

Is it just us?

Hey @Lesley Morgan-Barlow, something we have thought about is creating patient facing education video which can be sent to patients so they understand how the Portal works and what it’s there for to help with upselling additional treatments and other services sites may offer. This idea has never got off the drawing board (yet) but do you think this would help with patient education or would it be better if it was branded by the site and from you guys directly? 

The new Medical History and recall appointment specific links are reducing friction and easing the bottle necks but we’re always keen to keen improve the patient journey. 

I’m interested to see what other people think as well. 

with the portal- there is no option to allow digital consent forms for treatments to be signed??? only estimates- is this something that is being updated?

We’ve created consent templates in the same area of Dentally as estimates eg Crown Consent, it can then be sent to the portal in the same way as an estimate. If you are unsure about how to do this I am sure the support desk can help. 
im happy to help if you are struggling 

Hi @David Rutherford 

video would be a great tool to help with the portal!

Further customisation of the consent form is critical for us.  We have some bespoke requirements due to the nature of our NHS contract for mandatory referral and we need both the surgeon and the patient to sign.  The current consent form only allows for one (patient) signature.  

Further customisation would be ideal.

It’d be great to be able to add custom policies for patients to read and sign on the portal alongside their medical histories without having to manually add ‘estimates’ to every patient.

We have a Practice Terms and Conditions policy we’d like everyone to sign ideally before being seen.

We use the Dentally App (pre-portal) on an iPad in the surgery. This enables the nurse to talk through the estimate and pt to ask questions and sign (while this is happening, the clinician tweaks appointments and adds to notes), the patient is then automatically emailed a copy of the estimate and can also access the signed estimate via the portal. 

I’d be interested to know how others use consent forms, is it done via estimate templates or word docs?

We have built our own app which integrates with Dentally, and is part of the appointment workflow, forms are applied to appointment types automatically and the practitioner can select or remove forms to suit the appointment. We can also integrate social media consent into the appointment workflow and take one digital signature for more than one form. It also sends any aftercare information to the patient by email at the end, and sends a copy of the signed forms to Dentally mailbox. We also use the app to update the appointment statuses without having to go into Dentally (arrived, In surgery, etc). All forms are converted to a PDF automatically.

We do a lot of zoom and invisalign. 
Would be great to have custom setting so we can decide if we wanta a signature on the portal/ipad

​@Harry Leak that sounds like a fabulous app….. is it available to for other practices to purchase?

I think a quick fix in this scenario would be to build your forms as estimate templates in Dentally, you may need someone to help you code them in HTML, then technically you could use estimates on the Dentally app on the iPad to get a signature, I'm aware this is done in other practices as a workaround.

Hi Annabel, at the moment, no unfortunately, I have thought about it and I am building more features into it as we speak to detect recall appointments and force practitioners to set the recall intervals on the day before they complete the appointment and prompt to discuss care plans as well.

We have built our app within Microsoft Power Platform, which sits within Office 365,.so at present it's not an app we can simply provision you would have to have Office 365 in the backend, plus I'd have to think about packaging it up and providing a deployment and support package around it. Possibly in the future 😊

My practice switched from R4 to Dentally in December and we are really struggling with the portal 😖 R4 had a portal type system where you could create your own consent forms and filter them to be sent to each patient prior to their appointment and it would know what each patient was coming in for and whether they were private, Denplan or NHS. It was a life saver. It would also send FTA forms and things like that automatically, according to filters that you could set yourself. As a cloud based system, I really expected Dentally Portal to be like this if not even better and I am so far, quite disappointed. 

Hi there! 

Thanks for sharing your feedback. Dentally Portal is designed to simplify workflows, and while it doesn’t currently filter forms automatically by plan type, there are still ways to streamline things:

• You can use online forms in the Portal to send digital consent forms to patients before their appointments. While these aren’t filtered automatically by plan type, you can set up templates for common forms and send them manually when needed.

• Dentally’s automation settings allow you to schedule appointment reminders and follow-ups, which might help reduce some admin workload.

That said, I’ve flagged your feedback with our Product team to see if features like plan-specific workflows are something we could consider in the future. I’ll keep this post updated if there’s any news 😊

Thanks again for raising this, hope it’s clear! 

If a patient portal needs an education video for them to use it, I feel it’s too complex. An example of a very simple and easy to use portal from a different brand in the medical field is https://jane.app/  It’s not complex, I didn’t need a tutorial, etc. 

So the Dentally Portal should be intuitive and not need a tutorial video! Imagine an elderly patient not too tech saavy trying to use a portal...