Questions & Feature Requests

is there a way to set up automatic emails to patients (both private and NHS) a day or so before their appointment to update their medical history without having to send them all separately or have them fill in the form when they arrive on the tablet which takes at least a good few minutes 

is there a way to have it stated on an estimate for patients what treatment is private & which is NHS instead of having to open two courses of treatment and print/email two separate estimates? if we can chart NHS and private together it would be handy to be able to print them together clearly so patients understand which is which 

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 I copy my neat notes from Microsoft Word to dentally , dentally automatically changes my notes to simple font and size. Is there anywhere I can override this? My notes are quite long and neat in dentally it looks all over the place.  Many thanks  for your support

Has anyone else experienced taking a payment, and then it loads and processes it to the users account but rather than getting rid of the payment box it keeps it on the screen, occasionally causing confusion as we think we just haven’t clicked record payment yet but we have and it successfully went onto the patient profile, so sometimes we end up putting a payment through twice as a result.We have very good internet, but this happens occasionally and has done for a few weeks now, is anyone else aware of this happening when taking payments, has this happened to anyone else before?

Please consider a ‘drag and drop’ layout for online booking. I would like to re-arrange the way it appears in line with our paid advertisement strategy and ease of finding most valued appointment bookings. Right now it isn’t supporting each practice’s growth specifically and generalised for all. 

HiCould I please request improvements to the following: Lab related featursLab work received - nice feature but the green lab bottle does not appear on the calendar in some circumstances.  I’ve played around with it and whilst it appears for patients who are booked in and have no long preferred name, I’m finding that where the name is long or we have additional comments in the preferred name and we want to set a short appointment time of 5-10 min, the green bottle will not display.  The only way I can make it display is by increasing the appointment duration to 20 min which we dont need that long.  I am able to book some 15 min appointments but only where the patient name is short.  Perhaps text wrapping or something is preventing the lab icon from appearing A logical extension to the lab work received is to have the ability to write somewhere which lab we have sent the work to (if we use and have several different la

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.

A suggestion for an automatic email/SMS to patients when their Medical History needs updating, instead of having to do them individually.

Currently the portal says: “Balance due after appointment” but some practices take payment on the way into the appointment - it would be better to say “Balance due at appointment” ...or give the option to choose the preposition in the portal settings

It would be good if we could use newlines, as well as bold, italic, underline - ideally just hmtl/css including hyperlinks - in portal appointment descriptions.Currently we are using brackets to section/demarcate second and third paragraphs but this is a pretty bad user experience, and not great for effective communication.Example“Description of appointment type. (Cancellation policy) Information about discounts and offers.“

Really disappointed at the lack of effort in adapting the software for Scottish users. The software has clearly been optimised for English users privately or in the UDA system and while we pay the same for the same software, it is shamefully lacking in functionality and clunkier than older softwares especially for use within the Scottish NHS SDR.

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!!  

For clinicians, to streamline treatment plans, please make it so that when I mark a treatment as complete or charge or submit an NHS claim that it marks the appointment as complete

The system does not allow for GP17 part 2 to be signed when a treatment plan is finished on the tablets. It makes users in Scotland a high risk for having claims rejected which could massively impact on earnings. This should be addressed as an immediate issue please. Other systems flag when a plan is finishing and prompts for a second signature. 

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.

Trying to calculate patient chair time for an ongoing course of treatment it would be really useful to be able to generate a longer time period than having to do 12 monthly reports for one years length. Totally impractical 

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

I am trying to fill out patient’s occupation in line with the notes audits we do, which covers occupation being listed. I am finding it hard to select and option for all patients as the occupation is a drop down menu of set ideas of an occupation.There is a lot of occupations that aren’t on the list, nor have something similar. How do other people manage this, and doe we feel as though it should be a free entry section, rather than a selection of prewrittten options. A lot of patients don’t want to give this information, so would be handy to have an option to put this down too. 

We do not have an integrated referral system in our area at the moment (we have been told there is one in the pipeline but that has been mentioned for the last 10 year) We still have to use Exact to email off all our referrals to our local NHS hospital trusts because there are also issues about sending patient sensitive data from any other email other than an NHS one and they will NOT accept patient referrals from anything other than NHS email address. Has anyone managed to get some integration into Dentally to be able to receive or send emails from an NHS email address in Dentally.I spoke to support and was told that the NHS mail may need to configure the MX records but I have spoken to IT guys and they don’t know anything about being able to do that or I have the email just bounced back saying its not something they can help with. It is a real problem for us and means we have to run Exact concurrently with dentally at pretty much all times and of course

Hi  Does anyone know if Dentally hold a training session for new practices, either in person or remotely? I am trying to set up a training session for a new practice were 90% of the staff haven’t used Dentally before. I was hoping to hold an afternoon training session with all staff members. Is this something Dentally will offer?

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?