Questions & Feature Requests

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.

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 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 added?

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.

is there a toggle/ message/ pre made message we could send automatically for patients to leave us a review after their appointment? 

It would be good if there was a straight forward way to charge for premium appointment times via the portal.The only way I can think of doing that at the moment would be to duplicate all appointment types in the portal settings but change the appointment charge to the premium charge - but this would cause a cluttered and unfriendly UI.A better way would be to manage premium appointment charges via zones in the diary combined with a percentage markup or set fee. Potentially the fee could be set/applied to a zone type in the portal settings. Prices would be displayed as “from £[default_price]” and then updated on selecting appointment times in a set diary zone, with the difference being displayed alongside the available times in the diary.

We are new to dentally moved from exact we used to get an appt pop up after patient has finished treatment to book their next recall on dentally how do we do this?  we are finding that when we select 6 months this isn’t always showing on the appt tab as 6 months.  

Hi,I’m sure that I can’t be the only dentist frustrated with Dentally’s reticence to provide an extra and intraoral Mouth Map… how else can we record oral pathology each time we see our patients? I’ve  been regularly asking for this facility since moving from SOE to Dentally in 2020, but to date, no progress! Perhaps the community could help push Dentally’s software development team to facilitate this extremely important function; it seems crazy to have to revert to separate paper-based records! 

Hi everyone,We’ve just recently switched to Dentally (as of yesterday), and I’m looking for some advice regarding using an intraoral camera with the system.We’re currently using a FocusDent MD740 (generic), and it’s set up under the “Legacy Capture Device.” The issue we’re facing is that the workflow feels quite clunky — we have to keep two separate windows open, and when capturing images, a pop-up appears requiring us to click “freeze” and then “capture.”Unfortunately, this can only be done using the mouse, which means I can’t capture images directly myself while working — I have to rely on the nurse to do it. It’s quite inconvenient and interrupts the workflow.Ideally, I’d like to:• Use just one window• Capture images directly using the button on the intraoral camera• Avoid the extra pop-up and mouse interactionHas anyone managed to set this up more efficiently, or found a workaround that allows direct capture via the camera button?Any help or suggestions would be greatly appreciated

Hello allIs it possible to link directly to a specific appointment type in the online booking.For example, let’s say I have setup a New Patient Exam. Is it possible to have an online booking link that only enables that appointment specifically.The use case would be:To include the New Patient Exam link in marketing correspondence (rather than a generic online booking link which requires choices by the patient).   To create numerous New Patient Exams for specific practitioners and zones. We can then do the logic check ourselves (e.g. is the patient a young patient, old patient, interested in implants etc) and direct them to the correct booking link.It is important the link would be isolated - its only possible to book the specified appointment type with that link, the patient cannot override the flow.Thoughts?

Identifying short notice cancellations currently relies on users selecting that option as a cancellation reason, this leaves room for error and recording the genuine cancellation reason in some cases might be better suited to the patients and hold a better explanation for the cancel rather than being used to flag the short notice cancel.  I would like to feature request, as I am hoping for an automatic short notice cancellation flag, that is separate to appointment reason? I was thinking a field in settings where the practice cancellation policy time frame can be logged (usually 24 or 48 hours) For example a practice then set their policy at 48 hours, and the system then flags any cancels in that time frame as a short notice cancel regardless of appointment reason, and this could then be reported on within the appointments report.  This would allow a practice to see top level information around how many cancellations are potentially negatively Impacting their chair time. This would als

Moved from SOE to dentally. Having alot of issues. SOE had its good bits and bad but the good bits were really good.Feature 1.-bring in a drag and drop function, we have to press reordering to chnage treatment round, we have to do a bunch of extra clicks for moving and appointment time. Allow a drag and drop its much quickerFeature 2.-ACORN needs refining-its messy and really time consuming. Two tabs, repeating information twice, its a waste of time. The layout is also more difficult to follow. Instead we really need one tab that autopopulates the PR form. Also separate the information by just adding a line to aid viewing. For example put a line between the caries portion, perio portion etc. Colour code it so we know what we need to fill in quick. Highliting is fine. Also each data point should only allow one tick. Why can i tick yellow and green for medical, social and dental. This will save admin time!!Feature 3-automatic tooth count for acorn- if this autopopulates, saves so much wo

On Exact, we used to be able to click create and estimate select all COTs and it would generate all estimates accordingly. On dentally not only do you need to do it per COT you have to make sure you've selected the correct estimate type (NHS / Private). Dentally doesn't clearly separate NHS and Private treatment. Having the option to limit / label a COT as private or NHS like what was possible on EXACT would be incredibly helpful. 

Can dentally be linked and integrate with VOIP phones? This would hopefully allow caller ID to be displayed, ie when Mr Daniel Smith calls the practice, with his patient file already in Dentally, his name would pop up on the display to give a personal touch.VOIP also can allow a phone transcript to be created and so when Daniel Smith calls, a text file would get saved under the correspondence tab in dentally when the call took place and the details.Is this possible, easily done?