Short Notice List and diary zoning – can this functionality be improved?

Exactly the same issue, I don’t want to manually filter the short notice list that’s recommending exams when I have a gap in a treatment zone

Hi ​@Susan McDonald , thanks for raising this, I think there may be a misunderstanding. 

Short Notice Filler does not automatically block zoned slots. It only excludes zones if the practice has specifically configured it to do so. By default, patients can be sent into any zone via Short Notice Filler, which is similar to how Exact handled it.

If your zones are blocking Short Notice Filler, please review your SNF setting (Settings → Diary → Short notice) to see if any zone groups are excluded. 

Happy to look into your specific setup if that would help. Equally, if I have misunderstood your issue please let me know. 

Hi Hansa,

Thank you for your reply. I think my original point may have been misunderstood, so I'll try to explain the difference between how SOE/Exact worked and how Dentally currently works.

I completely understand that we can configure the Short Notice Filler to include or exclude certain zone groups. The problem isn't the settings themselves, but what happens when we deliberately remove a zone from an individual day's diary.

With SOE/Exact, we had our Short Notice List set up to exclude private and emergency zones, protecting those appointments from being automatically offered to patients.

However, if a private zone hadn't been filled five days before the appointment, we could simply delete that zone from that particular day in the diary.

Once deleted, SOE recognised that the appointment was no longer zoned, and the Short Notice List would automatically offer that space to patients, despite the original zone type still being excluded in our settings.

The underlying recurring zone configuration remained completely unchanged.

Unfortunately, Dentally doesn't appear to work this way.

Even when we delete a zone from a specific day in the diary, Dentally still recognises the space as belonging to that zone because of the underlying recurring configuration. The Short Notice Filler therefore continues to exclude the appointment, despite us having deliberately released it.

For example, we have an emergency zone set up Monday to Thursday, 13:30–13:50, across all practitioners. I wouldn't want to remove that entire recurring zone configuration just to release one 20-minute appointment on a particular day.

The workaround we have been forced to adopt is to remove all zone exclusions from our Short Notice Filler settings. This means the system can now potentially offer appointments in private and emergency zones that we actually want to protect.

Consequently, I have had to allocate one member of staff specifically to monitor and manage the Short Notice List to prevent protected appointments being filled inappropriately.

This creates unnecessary administration and undermines the whole purpose of having an automated system.

What I am asking is whether Dentally would consider making a change to the functionality so that:

• Zones can remain excluded from the Short Notice Filler as part of our normal diary configuration.

• If we deliberately delete a zone from an individual day, Dentally recognises that the zone no longer applies to that particular appointment space.

• The Short Notice Filler can then automatically offer that released space to patients, without us having to alter the underlying recurring zones or exclusion settings.

This is exactly how we managed our diaries successfully in SOE/Exact, and it allowed us to protect appointment capacity while still maximising diary utilisation closer to the appointment date.

We have discussed this with several Dentally trainers and colleagues over a number of months, so I am aware that this isn't something we can currently achieve through the existing settings.

What I would really like now is for Dentally to consider this as a software development request, rather than another configuration query.

For practices that use diary zoning properly, this would make a significant difference to efficiency, reduce manual intervention and help prevent valuable surgery time being left unfilled.

Could you please confirm whether this can be passed to the product development team for review  and whether there is an existing feature request or planned development that addresses this?

Thank you