Questions & Feature Requests

My colleagues have found that when making an appointment using the calendar, when we enter a patient with an Open Course Of Treatment, and when we click under new appointment where we select the unbooked appointment for example 20 mins - Glass Ionomer (UR7), it selects that fine but under duration it stays at 5mins.I believe normal behaviour should be that when we select the treatment it should also update the duration so we don’t have to manually match it each time.I hope this is the correct place to report minor bugs like this whenever we find them, if someone could let me know and if not then where is best to i would also appreciate it!

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

Any help or advice would be greatly appreciated.We have been using Dentally for approximately one month. Since the changeover, we have consistently been losing X-ray images on a daily basis. We are using a Carestream CS 7600 system.We have contacted Dentally, who advised us to use IP image acquisition rather than selecting the CS 7600 unit directly. However, we are still losing images daily. The image appears on the scanner and transfers to the Carestream window launched through Dentally, but when this window is closed, the image does not always transfer into Dentally and is effectively lost. It also does not appear in any recovery folder.It seems that the multiple windows involved in the process may be contributing to the issue. Is there a simpler, more reliable way to take an X-ray, process it, and have it transfer directly into Dentally without needing to open multiple Carestream windows?

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 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

*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

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?

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

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.

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

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. 

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?

We have identified an issue whereby selecting the ‘stabilisation’ care package; along with the treatments required for stabilisation stacks the care packages on top of each other.For example 2 extractions and 5 fillings on carious teeth should trigger only the stabilisation care package; but when charting the treatment planned it stacks the simple and extensive restorative packages as well; effectively charging the patient for each care package which is incorrect.The workaround we currently found is to list our own stabilisation treatments and numbered them VHNS1, VHNS2 etc. and set them up as the treatments required on band 1 with the very high needs stabilisation marker.We have set these up for XLA, Fillings, and removal of PRFs for the time being. Is this an oversight in light of the huge changes that have been implemented?Should dentally not ‘see’ the stabilisation package and as such technically ignore further care packages from getting

The cost per item and the total payable for the appointment shows only in private treatments. Please adapt to also show for NHS items so patients can be told how much a fee or appointment will cost without manually scrolling to the bottom and adding it up. The current setup works for a UDA system but not for fee per item. This already exists for private items so should be easily adaptable. 

The standard Private Forecast report sometimes brings in odd days which affects our planning, some days get missed off in our monthly view and we need to manually trawl through to complete the absent days in the cycle. For example, Tuesday is 31st March and the forecast looks in weekly blocks. The last full week of March ends on Friday 27th and the next week will be from Monday 30th to Friday 3rd April. As we monitor monthly this means manually adjusting for the crossover weeks.It would make it a lot simpler if we can adjust the date range in the same way we can other reports.