Troubleshooting Recalls

Hints & Tips if Recalls do not appear to be giving you the results you expect

Shelley Withington avatar
Written by Shelley Withington
Updated over a week ago

Here are a few hints and tips for things to check if you are not getting the results you expect from your Recalls.

A patient has not received a recall.

Check the patient’s next due date and recall interval against their last appointment. Unless their Next Due date has been set manually, it should be scheduled for the amount of months after their last Exam appointment, dictated by their recall interval.

It is also worth checking the patient’s appointment history. If the patient had an Exam appointment booked at the time their recall would have been produced, Dentally will not have produced a recall for them. If that appointment was subsequently cancelled or failed to attend, the patient will not be recalled again until their interval comes around again. If the Exam appointment was created but cancelled before the recall would have been produced, Dentally will see this and still produce a recall.

A patient has received a recall, but has an appointment booked.

The dental recalls are dependent on the patient having an Exam type appointment booked. If the patient is in the middle of a course of treatment and has a treatment appointment booked, Dentally will still recall the patient to make an Exam appointment when they are due. Similarly, a hygienist recall looks for an appointment of type Scale & Polish.

A patient has received a recall but their due date is in the past.

If a patient fails to respond to a recall, they will be picked up again when their interval comes round.

For example a patient with a 6 month interval who was produced a recall in January will be produced another recall in July if they failed to book from the previous attempt.

A patient will continue to be picked up in this manner for 2 years.

The Preferred Recall Contact Method is wrong

If a patient’s recall contact method was changed after their recall was produced, the recall information will be out of date. Users with a security level of 3 or higher can check when their contact details were changed in the Patient Audit.

The Patient’s Recall shows Unbooked, but an appointment has been made

Check the appointment reason - only Exam appointments update the patient’s Dentist recall status and Scale & Polish ones update the Hygienist.

My Recall Report is not showing any results for the date range I have selected.

Firstly, remember that your recalls are created weekly and a set number of weeks in advance. If you are looking further ahead than your recalls are created, you will not see any results.

You can set how far in advance they are created here.

Secondly, make sure your filters at the top of the columns are not removing any recalls that you might wish to see. For example, are you filtering for patients that have already been contacted, or Booked recalls only? Start by setting these filters as generically as possible.

A patient was booked in for an appointment under an exam service e.g. "new patient exam" but still received an exam recall.

Check the appointment reason has been coded correctly to not trigger the recall workflow. To do this go to Settings then Diary and select Appointment Reasons.

Now find the code in the list and click on the edit button to the right hand side. The 'Triggers a exam recall'' box should be ticked if they shouldn't receive a recall if this service is booked in.

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