Simplifying NHS reports for practices in England and Wales

Our goal in this blog is to highlight the key distinctions between the NHS UDA Report and the NHS Claims Report, making it easier for you to navigate the NHS tools in Dentally. 

Navigating the NHS dental system in England and Wales can sometimes feel like a complex puzzle, especially when dealing with different reports across various systems. To make your journey smoother, let's break down two crucial reports that can be immensely helpful directly in Dentally: the NHS UDA Report and the NHS Claims Report. 

Understanding the NHS UDA report 

This report is particularly essential for those practitioners focusing on hitting their UDA targets.  

What it does…

The NHS UDA Report gives you a top-level overview of the number of claims submitted and their current status, categorising them based on status and individual practitioners. It’s important to note that this report focuses on the start date of a treatment plan rather than the submission date.   

How to use it… 

• Set your filters, including the Location (if needed), Date Range, Activity Type and the NHS Contract you wish to report on if you are running multiple. 
• To get detailed information, you can click on the bar representing each status. 
• You can return to the full UDAs report by clicking the "Back to UDAs" button, as demonstrated below. **(INCLUDE GIF)**  

Understanding the statuses… 

• Completed means 'Paid.' Claims marked as completed indicate they will be included on the next monthly schedule. 
• Pending claims have been sent to the NHS but have not yet received a response, usually expected within the next working day. 
• Error/Invalid claims are those with issues that couldn't be processed. These should be resolved using the NHS Claims report. Once fixed and re-sent, they return to 'Pending' 
• Queried claims are those that have returned on a schedule with UDAs that differ from the initial claim. These can be dealt with using the NHS Claims report or marked as complete. 

To make corrections and see your claims in more detail you can use the NHS Claims Report in Dentally, filtering by status. Let’s dive into how you can use your NHS Claims Report.  

Using the NHS claims report 

The NHS Claims Report gives you a detailed view of each claim and its status and is crucial for staying on top of your NHS claims to ensure timely payments.  

How to use it… 

• Access it in the Reports > Treatment section. 
• Consider making it a Favourite for quick access. 
• Use the status filter to find specific claims that need additional actions to be paid. 
• Use practitioner filters to highlight to each provider their own claim statuses.  

Read more about the individual statuses and what these mean over on our help centre here.

Top Tip! The NHS Claims report is a great report to use to encourage dental practitioners to take responsibility for making sure their own NHS claims are sent to the board in a timely fashion!

Why is my NHS claims report and NHS UDA report showing different figures?  

 It’s important to note that the NHS Claims Report will report, and filter claims based on your filter selection of either ‘Treatment Completion’ or ‘Claim Submission’ both of these dates are different to that of the NHS UDA report. The NHS UDA report looks at the start date of a treatment plan and therefore can mean the figures differ slightly,  

For example, when running the NHS UDA report against todays date and a clinician submits a total of 15 UDAs. If one of the claims worth 3 UDAs was actually started yesterday, the number of UDA’s in the status pending will show as 12.  

This is because the NHS UDA report only looks at the start date of the treatment plan rather than the submission date. You can easily find all claims in a pending status by checking the NHS Claims report instead and filtering it as such.   

NHS EDI platform  

For more accurate and up-to-date reporting, you can enable daily reports directly from your NHS account using the WebEDI platform. Instructions on how to enable this can be found here, or you can reach out to your local NHS team for help enabling this. 

We hope this has helped clarify the differences between the NHS UDA Report and the NHS Claims Report for our NHS practitioners in England and Wales.  

These reports are valuable tools to ensure your dental claims are managed effectively. If you have any further questions, don't hesitate to reach out to our team via Live Chat in Dentally, or browse through our dedicated help centre collection here.