Practice Management

HiIt’s frustrating that Dentally phone support does not offer extended opening hours for the convenience of dentists or practice staff that work outside of 9-5pm hours or especially at weekends (note: Carestream R4 still have Saturday support staff working until 2pm).  The situation is now made worse by the fact that Dentally now appear to have switched off the ability for clients to be able to send offline support requests via Ellie / chat bot outside of regular hours (when the question is more technical and cannot be answered by Ellie ai).   This is really a step backwards and a total disregard for clients - why would Dentally do that?  Aside from increasing the monthly fees from this month, how is this in any way client centric, is Dentally tryin to avoid a pile of new support requests from appearing at 9am on Monday morning from the weekend?Sorry for the rant but if I am correct in stating that chats requests (as per the below image) cannot now entail we sen

Hi Product team,I need to flag a potential flaw/drawback of the online booking portal that we have found. We’ve found that the messaging/design of the Portal is most likely losing us new patient bookings. The good news is, I believe it can be fixed fairly simply.This wouldn’t be only us experiencing this issue, it would apply to other practice also, especially smaller practices with less potential capacity for total patients to be seen.Context/Problem statementWe've had a significant growth in organic search traffic and Google ads traffic. Whilst looking into why that isn't converting to more New Patients, we found the booking portal starts off by asking if you are a new/existing customer --> What type of appointment are you after—> Choose your practitioner and see availability. Screen shot is attached of the next step "Choose a date and time".Problem/IssueAt this point, if you do

Hi team,To my understanding, if a patient texts “STOP” or “CANCEL” to any sms from Dentally, we are blocked from replying to them.While the support team told me that by texting ‘START” to our practice Dentally number, SMSs could be resumed, in practice we tried this with a patient and it didn’t work.So firstly, I’d flag that this isn’t working as intended. It is quite problematic when we cannot contact a patient by SMS, as not everyone checks their voicemail or email. SMS has a much higher read rate than the other methods.Secondly, can we please remove the “CANCEL” rule? I think it works against the intention. For example, if we message a patient with a reminder about their appointment and they reply “CANCEL” (and this has happened) - we are blocked from replying to them.

It would be great to have a bespoke tag system, whereby we can create our own tags in settings. Use cases might include the following, although an effective system would allow you to choose your own titles and colours:Mobility Restrictions Wheelchair User Downstairs Surgeries Only Ongoing Complaint Welsh (or other language) Speaker Severe Gag Reflex Carer Required Visual Impairment Hard of HearingWe should then be able to add the tags to patient records, add / change / remove them in bulk via the patients report, and report on patient tags in the patients report (e.g. add tags to the filter).Obviously you would expose the tags via the API, and have a tags endpoint!The engineering here isn’t complex.Again, this feature is fairly 101 for most SaaS CRM systems.

Hi I tried to add another new “dentist “ option for the online booking. the new dentist option is still “setting up loading.” It looks like there is an error in loading. Can you have a look please? 

We’ve just converted to Dentally.  Does anybody allocate petty cash in the finances?  We’re wondering the best way to do it in the system?Many thanks

Hi Dentally, I’m reaching out to ask whether you offer any support or guidance for tracking bookings related to Google Ads campaigns. It is essential for our marketing to have accurate data on the effectiveness of our ads and patient booking numbers through our Dentally booking system. Without this data, it’s challenging to optimise our campaigns effectively and ensure a strong return on investment. Google Ads tracking is normally set up through Google Tag Manager and GA4, however, it doesn’t look like you currently have those available as integrations. Is this something you are going to be offering soon? In the meantime, is there an alternative method for setting up Google Ads conversion tracking that you could provide a step-by-step guide for, or help us implement? Lastly, I can see that we have a Tag Manager added to our Dentally booking system. Please could you

Hi I tried to follow the instruction to add another option for adding a new ethnicity under  the patient detail tab.however, it did not work. could you have a look please? cheers 

The takings and income reports keep timing out or giving an error or returning no data - it is intermittent and does not always occur but this never used to happen. The issue is exacerbated when I do a wider date range or more practitioners however I never used to have this issue

Hi team,I’m excited to see the now “Short notice” function on the diary. However, I’d like to see one additional function/filter added to the waitlist/short notice function.Many, if not all patients, have days/times they are available - eg Tuesday afternoon (PM), Friday morning (AM).Could we have this added to the waitlist/short notice function, ie a patient can tell us what days they are normally available. This could be for example, tick boxes eg ticking the boxes for the days of the week a patient is normally available.If this data is captured, it makes it a LOT easier for the reception to know who they can call to fill a slot, rather than calling a whole list of patients. the “AM/PM “ would be a further enhancement, but at a minimum we really do need an idea of what days of the week patients are available. Currently, we would have to open each and every ‘wait list’ item to see the notes in it, and see which days patients have sa

We went live with our online booking some 6 weeks ago.On average we’re getting only 3-4 online bookings a week despite having the portal link in all our recall emails and reminder emails and mainly from existing NHS patients.  More importantly, we’re seeing a large number of these patients making multiple bookings and failing to turn up for any of the appointments.  Why does the portal allow users to book more than one of the same appointment without warning them to either cancel or rescedule an appointment? There is no feature to switch off online booking for persisten offenders, only an option to prevent further appointments in general (in the patient’s details tab) which is not the same thing as I might be happy for them to call and my staff book them inWhat is the solution here because I can see this becoming an issue as not only are we seeing wasted appointment slots but multiple text msgs which just add up?

Hi team,Having the functionality to schedule an SMS or email to go out at a certain time (particularly SMS) would really help in practice management.We find for example, during business hours, as many people are busy or working they do not reply to our calls or messages sometimes.One of my staff members actually tested the theory and found the “golden hour” for confirming appointments etc is after work hours from 6.30 onwards - hence I’d like to propose the ability to schedule SMS’s especially to go out later - so that staff do not have to stay back to do so, but we can catch patients at the optimal time.Even for things like social media, the 7-8pm and beyond window is one of if not the most active period of the day - reflecting people’s behaviours and ability to take in information at this time of the day. I believe sending out correspondence at this time when people have the time/ability to engage with it would be really effective.

Hi there, We’re looking to retrieve custom field data through reports. As far as I can see this, isn’t currently possible. We would ideally effectively use the custom fields as tags for marketing purposes and patient management. Two use-case examples would be:(Marketing) We add a custom field (checkbox) for any patients that are interested in Invisalign. From this we can then generate a report for marketing/re-targeting.  (Workflow) We add a status field for referral tracking. We can then generate a report that tracks any outstanding referrals to follow-up on.If this is already achievable, apologies and could you please advise. If not, it would be great to see this functionality in the future. Thanks,Tom

Hi team, We have the Dashboard where we can see a forecast of our practitioner utilisation (commonly referred to as CTU or chair time utilisation), which is really helpful for practice management.However, to my knowledge, there is nothing to review historical CTU which is a major gap for practice management. Or if I am missing where it is already there, please point it out to me on Dentally as it would be really helpful.One of the key metrics for any business is productivity of resources, and CTU is a key element of practice productivity. I have heard that your add-on software lets you access this, however I think its a huge gap that Dentally does not let you report on historical CTU as a very basic metric for practice performance. Also not to mention, I am aware from some peers that several competitor software platforms do offer this in the standard offering. It should be a standard metric given in the softw

Within the space of 5 minutes I’ve had 3 patients call to query their estimate for treatment. They have all seen both the dentist and the hygienist today and are returing for further treatment, and have all queried why the treatment plan they have been emailed doesn’t include the hygienist appointment. The only reason I can think of is because it’s on as a different clinician, even though it is on the same treatment plan. Understandably the patients are confused! Is there a way to make sure that all appointments on one trteatment plan actually appear on the estimate even if it’s different clinicians?Thanks

I was looking at the Dentally NHS report and I was wondering why does the Dentally UDA report differ from the compass year end report in regards to UDA and UOA count. Would there be any reason for a discrepancy there?

Ability to send a group message rather than copying and pasting to individuals . We are a 9 surgery practice and find opening every dentist message box and copying and pasting far too time consuming. 

Hi Dentally team,More than a year ago we flagged with our Dentally contacts (Product Lead and Consultant) that Dentally does not have Cross Domain Tracking with Google.What this means (simplistically), is that when patients see a Google ad and click through to book via Dentally, the link is lost and we have no way of knowing how many leads convert to a booking. The Dentally team are aware of this and the associated issues, such as almost all competitors (at least, in Australia that I am aware) already do offer this, and also, it means investment in advertising has a poorer effectiveness/return on investment as Google cannot track and optimise the advertisements to get the best results. In short-  wasted expensive advertising dollars.In July, I was told by our Practice Success consultant that there was good news that CDT had been prioritised in the next quarter. However, he left  Dentally soon after, and despite following up at

Hi, As it is pretty much general policy that the use of remote access and cloud services in healthcare require a multi-factor authentication to be set for access.Is it possible to make this a requirement for new users to set up, or is it possible to at least allow us as a company to have it so new users must set up MFA in order to create their login?Many Thanks

Hi, i am looking for advice on zoning the practice Diary, we are mixed practice and feel the practice is extremely busy , the team seem burnt out. I am looking for ideas to help the practice feel more smoother . 

Hi, When we initially moved over to dentally we had put a feature request in for a month view of the diary, that could be filtered by clinician. We had this feature on our old management software, this allowed a straight forward easy view of how busy the diaries were for each clinician. It also allowed reception to see white space very quickly in order to book appointments, and to see any closed days.I understand dentally has the utilisation analytics, which we also had previously. I understand we cant use this to book but it at least gives us some idea of how busy diaries are. My request for this would be then simply add the ability to go forward month by month in the utilisation feature, rather than just allowing us to see the next 24 days.

Hi all, just wondering if you have a practice plan and how you pay your associates in regard to this? We are having to create a penny payment and then charge an invoice through as a penny - very confusing. Thank you :)

HI We have been using dentally since January, and having difficulty integrating the NHS referrals onto Dentally, we are having to flit in-between SOE and dentally . Is anyone else having issues or can advice us on how to refer through dentally?

We have moved over from Pearl to Dentally and have noticed that patients who have previously opted out of marketing aren’t getting recalls? As recalls aren’t marketing I’m wondering how we rectify this? 

  We’ve reached the final week of our six-part series - and we’re closing with something powerful: Dentally Vision AI!Designed to enhance clinical confidence and clarity, Dentally Vision AI uses intelligent overlays on your clinical images to help identify patterns and highlight areas of interest - like caries and bone loss - before you’ve begun your review. 👉 Read the full blog here  📚 Missed a week? Start back at Week One and catch up on the full series in your own time. That’s a wrap on Summer