If you are considering stopping the sending of automated recalls, there are a couple of things to consider:

❓Are you intending on starting the service again at a later date, or do you intend on sending recalls manually from now on?

❓When you decide to start resending recalls, do you want the backlog of recalls due while the option was turned off to be sent automatically?

Our best advice is to turn off automatic recalls to halt the patients currently in a workflow and then to turn off recalls altogether to pause the creation of new recalls. This means that when the system is told to start sending recalls again, any patients then overdue for recall will be picked up and placed back on the automated workflow.

This is set in the system settings, so a level 4 Administrator user will need to do this:

The reverse of this procedure will start Dentally producing recalls again.

Once the recalls option is re-enabled, we will start to produce new recalls for patients who are now due or overdue. The new recalls are calculated out of office hours on Mondays, so the next time recalls will be added to the list will be the next Monday following the option being re-enabled.

The automated messages will then start sending depending on the settings you have in your recall workflows.

There will be a backlog of recalls to send.

When recalls are sent automatically, we deal with a certain number each day, during your opening hours, so that the patients receiving the correspondence are able to contact you immediately. If there are too many to send on a given day, you may well end up with a backlog of recalls to send. We usually deal with these along with the normal daily ones to send, but following the setting stating how many can be sent per day - this is the 'Daily Dispatch Cap'. This can be amended by changing the value to increase the number that is able to be sent each day in order to deal with any backlog.