Practice Management

Hey everyone 👋We’re doing a bit of discovery around patient communications and trying to understand where practices feel the biggest gaps still are.We’d love to get real-world input from you!If you had to pick one additional channel or approach that would genuinely make day-to-day comms easier for your practice, what would it be? You can answer in the poll below and If you’d like, you can share more detail in the comments 😊

When taking a deposit or payment from a patient using the credit card terminal, all the detailed information has to be resubmitted again if the card payment is declined.This can be a very time consuimg task on a busy reception desk when the patient tries multiple times after they think they have fixed the issue (usually by moving money between bank accounts or forgetting the pin or have to use a different card).Why isn’t there a feature in Dentally to try a payment transaction again without losing all the nuances of the details entered like how much the payment is, which practitioner it’s for, description of the payment etc.  Today I had to do this 5 times for one patient because it kept declining.  It was very inefficient and no reason why Dentally cannot make that process easier by selecing a button “Try payment again” rather than cancalling the whole transaction.We use Dojo with the ability to send send transaction data directly to the terminal wirelessly.

Exported reports in Dentally (“takings” for example) should automatically include key audit information within the report itself.This should include: Data parameters and filters selected Date and time the report was generated User who generated the report Including this metadata is essential for audit trails, internal reviews, and data accuracy, especially when reports are shared internally or externally. Without this information, reports can be difficult to interpret, verify, or rely on at a later date.This would be a small but critical improvement to reporting transparency and governance.

UDA tracking in Dentally must be significantly improved. The current reporting functionality is far from sufficient for managing NHS performance at practice level.At a minimum, practices need clear, accessible reporting that shows, per practitioner: UDA target UDAs completed UDAs confirmed Remaining UDAs Percentage of target achieved This level of visibility existed in EXACT and was essential for day-to-day operational and financial management. Since moving from EXACT, the UDA reporting available in Dentally feels like a major downgrade, creating unnecessary manual work and increasing the risk of missed targets.Robust UDA tracking is not a "nice to have" - it is critical for NHS contract management. Improving this should be treated as a high-priority feature for practices transitioning from EXACT.

It would be extremely useful to have the ability to transfer a balance or payment between patient accounts. This would be particularly helpful in situations where a payment has been accidentally recorded against the wrong patient account, allowing the balance to be corrected quickly and accurately.

Booking service-specific automatic appointment confirmations – urgently needed.

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 don't have much (or any) availability for several weeks (as we do at the moment), most people lose inte

Hi everyone, hope you are all doing well and the new year is off to a good start. 😊 Running a practice means there is always a lot to juggle, whether it’s diaries, reminders, recalls, paperwork, reports or just keeping everything ticking along. We’d really like to hear from you about what actually takes up the most time or feels like the biggest frustration in your day-to-day work, whether you are a receptionist, nurse, practice manager, dentist or in another role. Pick the option that feels closest to what gets in the way for you, and if you want to, add a sentence about why it is a pain or what you do to manage it. It’s really helpful for our team to hear how different practices and people deal with the same kinds of challenges! 

Can we please have developed a report that compares the different fee schedules for each item number against each other. IE, going vertically is a list of all the item numbers, and horizontally is the different fee schedules, so we can easily compare fees to then go and make changes to prices. 

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 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 

Hi Dentally team,We noticed that our existing patients couldn’t book a recall online, so we tried to correct this.However, in our practice, we have the patients of the lead dentist being seen by our OHT with adult scope.Therefore we had to ‘unlock’ the practitioner, as for the lead dentist’s patients, it wasn’t letting patients book online.Unfortunately, even ‘unlocking’ the practitioner does not solve the problem as when you get to the “Choose a date & time” page, there is no filter to choose the practitioner - or no way to link our lead practitioner’s patients with the OHT for recalls.I imagine if I leave the portal as it stands, we will have to manually check every single recall booking from the portal, to ensure its with the correct practitioner - and ask patients to move to a different timeslot as they may have picked the wrong practitioner.Can we have help with updating the portal so that  Dentists with an OHT can have the OHT perform the recalls? This is not a ‘hygiene’ appo

Hi Is it possible to introduce some “undo” features around Dentally.  Some examples include:Notification as per the below dialogue box - could we please have the details of the appointment that is being deleted i.e. name of patient, time of existing appointment, appointment type etc?Rationale for this: In a hurry we might have right clicked and selected the wrong patient to delete so getting a visual confirmation by amending the text in the warning message will ensure we havent deleted the wrong person.  Should be fairly straight forward to programatically do this.  When dropping patients from the clipboard to the calendar, we might accidently let go too quickly and drop it on wrong clinician or lose it somewhere if we’ve forgotten the name (it happens when you’re dealing with lots of patients and working fast)   Accidently moving existing patients on the calendar it gives a similar warning msg as above for #1 but maybe show what the action is doing i.e. moving from 10am to 10.15 to ma

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 send a support request outs

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? 

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,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 software - The data is already available through the calendar (available hours), an

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 least 3 times via email, I have not heard anything at all b