Building what you need for NHS Scotland

At Dentally, we are committed to providing our Scottish customers with software that allows them to manage their practice smoothly.  We have not only worked hard to ensure that Dentally supports the existing workflows of dental practitioners but also that we are officially approved and compliant with all regulation changes and reforms for NHS Scotland

All our dental practitioners in Scotland including those whom we have worked closely with since our acquisition of Goodteith in 2018, are able to seamlessly link to NHS Scotland and manage their patients and NHS work effectively.

We thought we would take a look back at just some of the work we have undertaken for NHS and private practices in Scotland – where we have built and engineered software that Scottish dental practitioners want and ultimately makes their lives easier.

Claims Submission

All NHS Scotland claims are transmitted to the Scottish board via eDental, and we undertook all of the development work to enable this to be done through Dentally.  We have further improved this in recent weeks following feedback from dentists who asked us to disable the one-hour delay on the system. This means the Practice Manager (or whoever may be) submitting the claim can receive a yes/no response within 5-10 seconds from NHS Scotland, allowing them to close a treatment plan or add an amendment. This avoids any delays so the practice can keep on top of all claims in a simple and efficient manner.  A key benefit of using cloud-based software like Dentally is that it allows changes in response to customer needs to be made without disruption and without any server updates. So, refining the way this part of the process was working was something Dentally was able to implement quickly, to make life easier for customers using the Scottish eDental system.

Prior approvals

Dentally was officially approved and compliant to the NHS Practitioner Services Divisions (PSD) e-Dental Programme Phase 2 reforms for NHS Scotland, in line with their deadlines. We understood what an important milestone this was for this project to modernise processes, so it was crucial for us to undertake the work so that our Scottish dental practitioners could continue to manage this process.

When a prior approval is sent off, the PSD will send a link for the user to upload any supporting evidence that has been requested.  The submission of digital photographs and radiographs in support of a case can be run from Dentally. We have designed the link to work in a way that allows dentists to manage the process in a simplified way.  In essence we do not force the practitioner to submit a prior approval, as we know that some treatment items do not qualify to be counted towards the final approval amount. Therefore, given that calculating the treatment amount can be complex and the regulations that mandates prior approvals can sometimes be ambiguous, we opted to warn the user that the total was getting within £25 of the limit or needs a prior approval.  This means practitioners decide for themselves what they need to do based on their own knowledge and experience.

In recent weeks we have made improvements to the notifications that a user will receive when NHS Scotland responds to a prior approval, so that these can be more easily acted upon.

To learn more about prior approvals please read our blog here.

Reporting

Reports in Dentally not only provide information and analytics using real-time data to provide valuable insights into the business, but they are also essential tools in the streamlining of day-to-day processes and managing NHS Scotland work.   For example; recording work completed for other dentists, managing submission of claims, monitoring prior approvals and tracking treatments.

Dentally introduced a number of reports that work specifically for NHS Scotland.  Firstly the ‘Prior Approvals’ report allows practitioners to monitor the progress of a prior approval and the status of each patient so that appointments can be scheduled for treatments upon approval.

Secondly, the ‘Daybook’ is a powerful tool for dentists operating in NHS Scotland and has been based on the lessons that we have learnt from our Goodteith customers.  The ‘Daybook’  allows dentists operating in Scotland to calculate the NHS income by dental practitioner within a date range.  In addition, it provides a summary and clear breakdown of private treatment fees and value and NHS Scotland treatment fees and value.   This means work done by each dentist in the practice can be monitored, fees owed to associate dentists can be calculated and the types of treatments being undertaken can be reviewed.

We have also added a ‘Treatment plan’ report which lists all treatments plans between dates, in order to view all plans within a date range and filter the results based on the status of the items on the plan and the NHS claim status if appropriate.  The Practice Managers can track which treatment plans have been paid by the patient and then submit the claims for all outstanding plans. This report allows dentists to review all their plans and find any Scottish NHS work that has not been claimed.  Users can find open courses of treatment, regardless of whether they are part finished, not started and even treatment plans that have been finished but not closed. Plus, it will help identify plans that have been accidentally closed without submitting a claim, making it very useful tool.

Take a look at our latest blog on our updates to reporting here.

CHI Search

Searching for CHI number is obviously important for NHS Scotland practices, so we have made this process as easy as possible for users.  We added visual indicators to make it easy to identify patients who need a CHI number or a new reference number.  If a search is unsuccessful then it will prompt the software to perform a secondary search, whether it succeeds or not, it will provide you with a search reference which can be used on a prior approval submission or claim.

Changelog

Every month we summarise all our latest product developments and updates, in a changelog. Our commitment to innovation means we don’t just offer product updates but also exciting new features that make our dental practitioners’ lives easier. And remember because we are cloud-based, updates are simple, they just happen without any interruption to the practice.  Read our latest changelog here.

Talk to us

Talk to us by calling 020 3856 5610 or email hello@dentally.co to arrange a demo.