Charting normalisation
A mapping layer that converts between FDI and Palmer notation so charts recorded in either format can be displayed and audited consistently across a group.
Healthcare software development
Dental software development company
Dental practices run on a small number of well-established practice management systems — Dentally, SOE Exact and R4 are the ones we are asked about most — and the work a group actually needs is rarely a replacement for any of them. It is a layer that makes NHS UDA delivery, FP17 claims, private billing, recall compliance and chair utilisation visible and manageable across more than one practice, and that keeps imaging attached correctly to the right patient and treatment plan.
We build for multi-practice dental groups, corporate dental bodies and single practices scaling into a small group, where the pain is specifically the gap between what one practice management system reports for one site and what the group needs to see across all of them.
The workflow this replaces
What a growing dental group manages by hand today
A single-site practice can run entirely inside its practice management system. A group of five, ten or thirty practices, especially one built by acquisition, ends up with a mixed estate and a set of manual reconciliation tasks that grow with every site added.
Step 01
Charting recorded differently at different sites
Some clinicians chart in FDI two-digit notation, others still use Palmer notation on paper or in older systems, particularly where a practice was recently acquired and has not yet migrated fully. A group trying to run consistent clinical audit or treatment planning oversight across sites has to normalise between notations manually, which is slow and error-prone when done by comparing screenshots or printouts.
Step 02
Treatment plans staged without a shared view
A treatment plan that spans several visits — a course of periodontal treatment followed by restorative work followed by a review — is tracked inside the practice management system at the individual practice level. A group clinical lead trying to see which staged plans are stalled, or which patients have an open plan with no booked next appointment, has no cross-practice view without exporting and merging data by hand.
Step 03
UDA banding and contract delivery tracked in a spreadsheet
NHS-contracted practices deliver Units of Dental Activity banded by treatment complexity — Band 1, Band 2, Band 3 and urgent treatment — against an annual contract value. Tracking whether each practice is on pace to deliver its contracted UDA volume, and what the financial exposure is if it under-delivers, is typically assembled monthly from separate exports per practice management system rather than visible in real time.
Step 04
FP17 claims submitted and then chased manually
Each completed course of treatment generates an FP17 claim submitted to the NHS Business Services Authority. Claims that are rejected, queried or left pending are tracked, if at all, by a member of staff periodically checking a claims list per practice, with no group-level view of claims value stuck in a non-paid state or approaching a query deadline.
Step 05
Private billing reconciled separately from NHS income
Practices running mixed NHS and private lists, or private-only sites with capitation plans, reconcile monthly plan payments, one-off private fees and NHS UDA payments through separate processes, often in different software, which makes it hard to produce a single accurate revenue picture per practice or per clinician.
Step 06
Recall cycles run inconsistently against clinical guidance
NICE guidance sets recommended recall intervals based on individual caries and periodontal risk rather than a flat six-month rule for every patient. Practices without a system enforcing risk-based recall either default everyone to six months, which is not evidence-based and wastes chair capacity, or leave recall timing to clinician memory, which produces gaps in compliance that only surface at inspection.
Step 07
Chair utilisation is not visible until the month is over
Whether a practice's chairs are running at capacity, and where the gaps are by day of week or by clinician, is usually reconstructed from the appointment diary after the fact rather than monitored as the month progresses, so underutilisation is corrected too late to affect that month's numbers.
Step 08
Imaging filed manually against the wrong record
Where imaging equipment is not integrated with the practice management system, radiographs and photographs captured on Carestream and similar systems are exported and attached to the patient record by hand, which is slow and occasionally results in an image being filed against the wrong patient.
Individually, each of these is a manageable inconvenience for one practice. Multiplied across a group with a mixed estate of practice management systems, they become a material drag on both clinical governance and the finance function's ability to close the month.
What we build
Modules in a typical dental build
Treatment plan tracking
A cross-practice view of staged treatment plans, flagging plans with no booked next appointment and plans that have stalled beyond a configurable threshold.
UDA banding and contract delivery dashboard
Real-time tracking of Band 1, Band 2, Band 3 and urgent UDA delivery against each practice's NHS contract, with forecast pace against annual target.
FP17 claim monitoring
A group-level claims register showing pending, queried and rejected FP17 submissions pulled from each practice management system, with deadline alerts.
Private billing and capitation reconciliation
Consolidated reconciliation of capitation plan payments, one-off private fees and NHS UDA income into a single revenue view per practice and clinician.
Recall engine
Risk-based recall scheduling aligned to NICE recall interval guidance, generating recall communications and flagging patients overdue against their assigned interval.
Chair and clinician utilisation reporting
Live and historical utilisation by chair, practice, day of week and clinician, sourced from appointment diary data across the group's practice management systems.
Imaging integration
DICOM connectivity to Carestream and comparable imaging systems so radiographs and photographs attach automatically to the correct patient and treatment plan.
Integrations
Named systems and interfaces
Practice management systems
DentallySOE ExactR4practice diary exports
NHS claims and contracting
FP17 submission via CompassNHS Business Services AuthorityUDA contract data
Imaging
CarestreamDICOMintraoral sensorspanoramic imaging
Billing and payments
capitation plan providerscard payment processorsdirect debit collectionaccounting software
Patient communication
SMS gatewaysemail deliveryrecall reminder services
Each practice management system exposes a different level of read access to charting, claims and appointment data, and none currently offers a fully open write-back interface; we confirm what is achievable per system during discovery rather than assuming parity across Dentally, SOE Exact and R4.
Data and compliance
Requirements written into the build
- NHS contract data
- UDA banding definitions and each practice's contracted annual UDA value are held per practice and reconciled against delivered activity, not assumed to be constant across sites.
- Special category data
- Patient clinical charts, treatment plans and imaging are special category data under UK GDPR Article 9 and are handled with the same access control and audit standard as medical records.
- DSPT alignment
- Where a group holds NHS contracts, the platform is built to align with Data Security and Protection Toolkit expectations for handling patient data.
- DICOM conformance
- Imaging integration follows the DICOM standard for image storage and transfer, preserving the study, series and patient association metadata attached by the imaging device.
- Data residency
- Consolidated group data is hosted in UK regions with encryption at rest and in transit, independent of where each source practice management system stores its own data.
- Audit trail
- Every claim status change, recall communication and billing reconciliation event is logged against the patient and practice for later audit and dispute resolution.
Architecture note
How the system is put together
The platform sits above the group's existing practice management systems rather than replacing them, connecting through each vendor's available data access route and normalising the result into a common group-level data model for charting notation, UDA banding, claim status and appointment activity.
Charting and clinical data remain the system of record inside Dentally, SOE Exact or R4; the group platform holds a read-optimised, normalised copy used for reporting and cross-practice workflows, refreshed on a schedule appropriate to how time-sensitive each data type is, with claims and utilisation refreshed more frequently than historical treatment history.
Imaging integration runs as a separate DICOM-aware pipeline that associates incoming studies with the patient record using the identifiers available from the imaging device and the practice management system, with a manual matching queue for studies that cannot be associated automatically.
The recall engine runs its own scheduling logic independent of the source systems' native recall features, because those are typically limited to fixed intervals rather than the risk-based intervals NICE guidance recommends, and writes the resulting recall date back to the source system where a write-back interface exists.
Timeline
Build phases in weeks
Discovery and system access mapping
Weeks 1–4
Confirm exactly what each practice management system in the group exposes for charting, claims and appointment data, and agree the normalisation model.
UDA and claims foundation
Weeks 5–11
Build the UDA banding dashboard and FP17 claim monitoring register across the practices in scope.
Billing reconciliation
Weeks 12–17
Consolidate private billing, capitation plan payments and NHS UDA income into a single reconciliation view.
Recall and utilisation
Weeks 18–24
Build the risk-based recall engine and the chair and clinician utilisation reporting layer.
Imaging integration
Weeks 25–29
Connect DICOM imaging sources and build the patient and treatment plan association pipeline.
Phased practice rollout
Weeks 30–36
Onboard practices in batches, starting with a single practice management system before extending to the mixed estate.
Indicative cost
Budget bands, not quotes
- Discovery and system access mapping
- £30,000 to £45,000, fixed fee, credited against the build.
- Single practice management system group
- £280,000 to £420,000 where the group runs one practice management system across all sites.
- Mixed-estate group
- £420,000 to £650,000 where the group runs two or more practice management systems requiring normalisation.
- Imaging integration add-on
- £60,000 to £120,000 depending on the number of imaging sources and sites to connect.
- Managed run
- Priced as a monthly retainer covering source system change monitoring, reconciliation support and release management.
Bands assume UK hosting and practice management systems already in production use across the group; migration from paper charting or unsupported legacy systems is scoped separately.
Where this sits
Related pages
Questions
Frequently asked
Do you build charting from scratch or integrate with an existing dental system?
Almost always integrate. Dentally, SOE Exact and R4 already hold the chart, the treatment plan and the claims workflow for most UK practices, so the work is usually to extend group-level reporting, imaging or billing around one or several of those systems rather than to replace the charting engine itself. A from-scratch chart is only justified for a genuinely new clinical product.
Can you consolidate reporting across a group running Dentally in some practices and SOE Exact in others?
Yes, and this is one of the most common requests from acquisitive dental groups. We build a normalisation layer that maps each system's UDA banding, appointment types and patient identifiers to a common group-level model, so utilisation, UDA delivery against contract and recall compliance can be reported consistently regardless of which practice management system a given practice runs.
How does FP17 claim submission fit into a custom build?
FP17 claims are typically submitted from within the practice management system to the NHS Business Services Authority via the Compass system, so our work is usually to ensure treatment data is captured completely and coded correctly at the point of charting so the claim that gets generated is accurate the first time, and to build reporting that flags claims stuck in a pending or rejected state before they age past query deadlines.
Do you handle private plan billing and capitation schemes?
Yes. We build the billing logic for monthly capitation plans, pay-as-you-go private pricing, and mixed NHS and private treatment plans within a single patient record, including the reconciliation that separates NHS UDA-banded income from private fee income for accounting purposes.
What imaging systems do you integrate with?
Most commonly Carestream for intraoral and panoramic imaging, connected via DICOM so images attach to the correct patient record and treatment plan automatically rather than being filed manually. We also handle imaging migration when a practice consolidates onto a new system after acquisition.
Tell us what your systems are doing wrong.
Send the problem, not a brief. We will tell you whether it is a project we should be involved in.
Talk to us