Practice Admin

Dentally update idea - make Email the default option for recalls rather than Letter.Are any other practices finding this to be time consuming? Having to manually change each patients recall option to email (or SMS should you choose) rather than letter is rather tedious.Are many practices still opting to send letters given the cost and inconvenience? Email is surely the preferred option!My idea is for the default selection to be updated to email so any new patients moving forward would automatically have email selected for recalls and further selections can be manually made from there. 

I would like to know if we can print multiple Provider Invoices on ‘1’ page?It is a waste of paper when patients want a printed receipt, especially when the Statements print out all previous Invoice dates.Also is it possible in the future to add the patient next appointment to their Invoice?

My colleagues have found that when making an appointment using the calendar, when we enter a patient with an Open Course Of Treatment, and when we click under new appointment where we select the unbooked appointment for example 20 mins - Glass Ionomer (UR7), it selects that fine but under duration it stays at 5mins.I believe normal behaviour should be that when we select the treatment it should also update the duration so we don’t have to manually match it each time.I hope this is the correct place to report minor bugs like this whenever we find them, if someone could let me know and if not then where is best to i would also appreciate it!

*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

I have been asked to pass some feedback regarding booking appointments via the diary.When we book an appointment from the diary and click on the diary whilst viewing the calendar, it comes up with that appointment details box for us to start typing the patients name as normal, and now whenever a patient is chosen, it wont let you edit or change the patient, its stuck with that patient and we have to cancel and then click in the diary again to make a new appointment.We used to be able to click back on the name and change it, now we have to cancel it and click in the diary again. Is this because of a new update to dentally? Is this something others prefer?

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.

Hi everyoneIt would be great if there was a way we could input the lists of patients we receive from the Welsh DAP onto Dentally in bulk in a similar fashion to how inward migration is handled. We currently receive lists in Excel format and it takes a lot of staff hours to input all of the details manually with the added risk of transcription errors.There would be a welcome in the hillside for years if you could do it!!  

We use a 3rd party that takes direct debit payments on our behave that is not integrated with Dentally. Therefore, we are manually doing this at the moment. Instead of putting these payments against a generic payment  method, it would be helpful to have “GoCardless” as a method.the exact payment method you want added - GoCardless why it’s important for your practice - help isolate these payments from others for tracking and account management how many practices you think would benefit - lots of practices use GoCardless, a full integration would be ideal.

As a practice, we find the option of lunch and tea breaks being in the diary as movable appointment blocks.Our superiors want us to use the break blocks that are fixed in place when added as part of the clinicians schedule. Would it be possible to make these moveable from the diary page, without having to delete and re-add for a different time? We often shift the breaks to fit around patients.Hope that makes sense.

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.

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

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?

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 

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