Effective management of your NHS contracts

If you are an NHS dental practice or mixed (private and NHS) practice in England and Wales, then working with a practice management software that has been designed with the complexities of the NHS claims process in mind is essential. 

Submitting, managing and reporting on your NHS work can easily be done with Dentally, from identifying patient exemptions, submitting claims directly from the patient chart, managing the status of claims and tracking your UDAs with accurate real time reporting - ensuring you get paid in a timely manner.

But how does it work?   And how can it benefit your practice day to day?

Claims submission

First let’s look at the Claims submission process. If you chart a NHS treatment for a patient and then complete that work, you are shown a ‘Submit’ button on the treatment plan.   This will then create a NHS claim and begins the submission process.

It is a simple staged process:  Step one shows you all the information about the claim including the patient’s details, UDA value and patient charge. Step two is about specific treatment details, such as the start and end date and whether the treatment is a continuation.  Step three allows you to complete all the clinical data set to show the treatment you have completed for the patient and the DMF table which pre-populates from your base chart.  Finally step four asks you to check all your declarations and click submit. Claims are queued for one hour to allow for any amendments to be made, then automatically sent. Learn more.

What about issues?

If a claim has been submitted, you may receive a message from the NHSBSA stating an issue - these claims are shown as invalid and you will be notified within Dentally and your notification centre.  Daily schedules keep you right up to date about the current state of your claims.

Simply click on any claim response message and the relevant claim will open for you to see the issue and then take appropriate action to amend. You can then resubmit the claim which should then be marked as settled in your daily responses from the NHSBSA.  Take a look at our guide here. 

NHS claims queries

Occasionally claims can be returned with queries, this tends to be for two main reasons; NHS claims are submitted too late or the Practitioner has not received the UDAs expected.  Dentally tracks this for you and there are options you can take to address these.  Find out more.

Tracking and reporting

There are three key reports for NHS contracts:

NHS Claims Report

NHS UDA's Report

UDA Forecast Report

The NHS Claims report means that you can keep on top of your NHS claims to ensure they are processed in a timely manner. The report allows you to track claim status and includes the following labels:  New, queued, received, submitted, queries, error, invalid and completed.  This ensures you can track the status at each stage of the submission process.  Learn more.

The NHS UDAs report will show you how many claims you have submitted and their status, along with details for each practitioner.  Use the filters to view data by location, date range, activity type and NHS contract.  

And finally the UDA Forecast report shows you all the plans that are ongoing and provide appropriate warning if they are due to run out of their two month time-frame, again allowing you to follow up and take appropriate action. Find out more.

Effective management

Dentally allows you to reduce the admin with a flexible and easy to use approach to managing your NHS contracts while ensuring effective reporting at every stage.

Whatever your practice size, whether you are an NHS only or a mixed practice, Dentally can help you save time managing your NHS work.  To find out more about visit our online support guide here.

Or take a look at the software for yourself and talk to our team to arrange a demo.  Email us hello@dentally.co