What is the correct workflow to follow when opening a patient through the imaging bridge?
Locate and open the patient on Dentally then click the Dentally Imaging Bridge icon located amongst your Chrome extension buttons.
The imaging bridge will now run a quick check to see if the patient ID overlaps with any others amongst the practice.
If there is NO overlap with another patient's record, the third-party software will open as usual and you can proceed to take/review images as needed.
If there IS AN overlap, you will see a pop up letting you know there is an overlap, you will be prompted to check and confirm if the images that have been opened in your third-party software are the current patients images.
This involves looking at the individual images and checking the patient name assigned rather than just the folder name that the bridge has opened.
If the correct folder has been opened, you can click 'Yes' and proceed to take/review images as needed.
If the folder is incorrect, return to Dentally immediately. Use the open prompt box in Dentally to select 'No'.
A new unique ID will be added to the patient to avoid any future conflicts.
You can now proceed to open the Software Bridge again and continue to acquire images with a new empty folder.
Why does the bridge keep pulling through the wrong patients to my third party imaging software?
This is due to the patient's ID's. A single patient can have a varying number of ID’s for the imaging bridge to sort through. Overlapping ID's occur when patients are seen across multiple practices, this can confuse the third party software into opening the wrong patient.
Its important to note that these issues are caused by the way that imaging softwares assign and use patient ID's, this unfortunately means there is nothing we can do here at Dentally to fix the root cause of the problem. We can however implement as many fail safes as possible and provide work around solutions to navigate the issue at hand 🚀
Why have I ended up with duplicate ID’s?
When practices change imaging or practice management software, databases are, in simple terms, converted and merged together.
This means a single patient can end up with many associated ID’s for different softwares all held against their record. Resulting in patients having matching numbers across those many ID’s fields.
How do duplicate ID’s affect the imaging bridge?
When the imaging bridge looks for a patient, it priorities the order that it searches each ID field e.g. Legacy ID, then the Dentally SID then Bridge ID etc.
In a scenario where the practice is a multi-site, If patient A has a legacy ID of 101 at practice C and patient B has a legacy ID of 101 at practice D, even though there Dentally SID’s are different, the bridge will confuse these patients as it looks at the legacy ID first resulting in the wrong patient being opened in the practices imaging software.
Please bare in mind this is a very simple example to help you understand the issue at hand, and that some cases are far more complex then this.
What is the scope of this issue, Does this issue only affect multi sites?
No! Even though it is likely to more apparent in multi site locations who are using the bridge, it could affect any practice, even single sites who have had data transferred in the past from on-prem databases (like EXact), or sites that use multiple imaging softwares through the bridge and can even affect merged patients at any site!
What to do when I mistakenly confirm the patients images are correct when they are actually assigned to someone else?
To correct a mistake, you will need to remove the current Bridge ID from the patients record. This can be done by navigating to the patients 'Details' screen and click the '+' button next to the Bridge IDs label in the patient details page.
From here you can remove the ID you previously confirmed as being correct. When you next go to launch the imaging bridge it will reactivate the prompt where you can choose 'No' and it will assign the patient a new folder instead.
What should I do when images have been assigned to the wrong patients?
When images are incorrectly assign to a patient we recommend rectifying this as quickly as possible. You can do this by Downloading/Exporting the images form the incorrect patient and then importing into the correct patients 'Images' tab on their chart screen.