Questions & Feature Requests

Hi Dentally Team,I recently signed up for the Dentally partnership programme as we’re looking to build an integration, but I haven’t heard back yet. I was in touch with Megan a couple of weeks ago about putting this through, so just wanted to follow up.I wanted to check on the status of the application and specifically request access to the sandbox environment so we can begin testing the API.We’re keen to get started with development and want to ensure everything is built correctly before going live.Thanks in advance — happy to provide any further details if needed. Thanks,Riyad

hi every time an xray is developed an automatic radiographic report appears in my notes, how do i stop this, i already have my own report 

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.

Hi,We’ve been using the Dentally API to power Dentext (our custom external patient communication platform). It handles our SMS routing, custom templates, and automated messaging beautifully but we’ve hit a specific challenge. We want to automatically text patients a link to complete their Medical History questionnaire prior to their appointment, exactly how it behaves natively in Dentally's SMS system. To do this, we need to inject that patient-specific link directly into our Dentext templates.Does anyone know how to retrieve or construct this unique link via the API? Is there a specific endpoint to request this token/link? Or is the URL structure predictable enough that we can build it programmatically using the patient_id or patient_uuid?I know we can use the practice portal link from Portal Admin > Customise, but that behaves differently. It forces the patient to register first, whereas the native Medical History link goes straight to the questionnaire aft

I write notes using a dental note taking tool then copy and paste them into Dentally. Now I get a space between each line of my notes which I cannot remove. This did not occur with EXACT.Please can you help fix this? 

I'd like to provide feedback on your DIrect Messages feature. The windows to see the list of contacts is too small, and there is no appropriate signs as to which conversation has been read or not. Perhaps this features requires some reworking, as it is specially frustrating on large practices with dozens of staff texting. In fact, you cannot even read their full names if too long. Please fix this as this is a huge quality of lifeimprovement for a very good platform.

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 💡

Today we had a medical emergency at the practice. On Exact we had a button we could press which would alert all clinicians logged in of an emergency situation on their computers.There is no feature on dentally yet, therefore my suggestion would be if we could one day have a feature where we can alert all clinicians of such a situation, as there were multiple clinicians unaware of this today whilst they were in their rooms. Vas - Receptionist Smile Dental Care Gosport

Confirmation of all of the patient  appointmentS instead of only the upcoming one 

a sidebar would be useful as in exact for seeing what a patient owes and next appointment due without having to go into patient in the way exact had.

I like having the pop ups but it takes time to hide each one when there are several and they don’t hold a lo of visible text 

We ran into an issue today that highlighted what feels like a massive gap in the workflow, so I wanted to share it here as both a question and a feature suggestion.A patient was completing their NHS PR on the tablet, but unfortunately the tablet crashed mid-process. As a result, the signature didn’t save and the PR form no longer appeared as an option on the tablet for the patient to complete.Support advised two possible workarounds:1️⃣ Ask the patient to complete a paper PR and upload it (!!! -  I was quite taken aback when a paper form was suggested. We invest in software precisely to avoid reverting to manual, paper-based processes. )2️⃣ Create a brand new treatment plan (with no completed items) plus a “temporary” appointment, link them together, and generate a new PR form that wayApparently the invalidate option removes the form but doesn’t prompt a new one.While I appreciate the suggested workarounds, neither feels idea

At the moment if an NHS patient books a Private appointment via the portal e.g for Private Emergency then the portal forces the patient to fill in an NHS PR form even though the appointment is a private appointment. NHS PR forms are ONLY for an NHS Course of Treatment. This is wrong functinality.

Hi there, We would like an option as part of the medical history flow, where we could duplicate and update a previous medical history. Patients will frequently have a minor update needed to their medical history. It would save time if we could duplicate the last medical history and then edit, with any recent updates. Rather than having to complete the entire history each time. Thanks,Tom

Hi, One of the dental practices which we work with is having a Dentally account for multiple sites. I don’t know the exact number but they have around 10 sites for the Dentally account. Is there a way or a procedure to increase the limit of 3600 API calls per hour? With the current limit and setup of the account, it would be very hard to stay in sync in a correct way. Thanks, Saimen

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

I would like to request a full day daysheet with the appointment space included to be able to make notes regarding patients in the appointment space. 

I have found that when I am viewing a patient’s details, if i click on another patient through the “Recently Viewed Patients” section, it will keep stuff the same like the patient ID, and other things like dropdown selections such as who their dentist is etc.Most of the time its data that has been changed on patient X for example, then you view patient Y and those details yoyve changed are on their profile, however if you refresh the page, you will find these changes have not been saved onto anyone else you view after (phew).But it can create a lot of confusion for multiple people and multiple reasons, are we aware of this mini-bug and is it being worked on to improve? Is there anything internally we can do, any settings to change to make that run smoother? Obviously when loading a patient, refreshing the page is easy to do to make sure its all correct, but its not ideal.Im not sure if anyone else has encountered this or reported it but any feedba

Anyone know where the source of this tag is? [appointment_practitioner_name] or [appointment_practitioner_name_formal]Sending email reminders where a patient is booked in with a dentist other than their usual [patient_dentist].Doesn’t populate for me. 

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 

*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

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

If we had a data tag that pulls from the patients Dentist Recall, we could tailor automated texts to include the data tag which would read something like “Dear Patient, This is a reminder you are due a dental examination on or around *[patient_next_dentist_recall]…… etc etc.It could be pulled from two locations in dentally, via either Patient Details-->Next Dentist Recall where it shows the date chosen but this is a dropdown that can be changed, OR from Patient Recalls→Due where it shows the date chosen under where it says DueLittle additions like this would be fantastic for customisation for automation. EDIT: Referencing a specific date in a text like this works better because a patient can know exactly when they are/were due depending on when they read this communication from us (as long as the dentists set up recalls correctly!)

Am i missing a trick with zoning? for example our hygiene clinics are every 30 mins, is there an easier way of zoning this than having to create separate 30 mins zones? is there an option to set up a zone and make the slots occur every 30 mins between a set of times easily?