Telephone Triage

During these uncertain times as our society protects itself against the spread of Covid-19, at Dentally we completely understand and support the need for dental teams to adjust to new ways of dealing with the provision of emergency dentistry, whilst complying with social distancing measures and helping patients reduce the spread of transmission.

As dental practices focus on only staying open with a rota of skeleton staff and only seeing patients with a requirement for urgent or emergency dental work, cloud based patient management solutions like Dentally can help as practices move to a telephone triage system to advise and reassure patients.

Telephone triage allows dental practitioners to keep practices open for emergencies but avoids patients travelling to site to minimise their contact with others.  This can be done from the practice or by staff working remotely, through their secure login in to Dentally. Staff members accessing Dentally from home can be restricted to a specific location and certain hours set for their working day.

Dentally easily allows practices to record information as part of a telephone triage process.  The call handler can then make a telephone appointment for the practitioner to call the patient to talk about their dental problem and to identify help that can still be offered such as a remote prescription, analgesics and antimicrobials through local pharmacists.  Telephone appointments can easily be made in the calendar and allows the practitioner to access the information from anywhere to make the call to the patient. The calendar can be set up to show a new diary that only includes the telephone consultations - so you don’t have any confusion in your normal calendar set up.  

In addition the Dentally patient portal has offers online appointment booking and can be easily set up so that a patient could make an telephone appointment online through your website if you have this feature.  Telephone appointments can be made online for certain practitioners or call handlers, following your practice working hours or during specific periods of your day.  During this time we can temporarily suspend other usual treatments, so patients are only able to make a telephone appointment online through your website.

We appreciate these are difficult times, but our team is here to advise you on the software as they always are - so you can focus your time on your patients & your practice.  Please do email us hello@dentally.co if you would like to know more about setting this up.