Dental practices need to cater to increasingly strict rules around patient data collection and management, as formulated in each regions regulations:

• UK and Ireland: the EU-driven General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) (Regulation (EU) 2016/679).
• Australia: The Spam Act 2003.
• New Zealand: The Unsolicited Electronic Messages Act 2007.

To facilitate dental practice regulatory compliance for business communications, including marketing activities, EXACT can record, track and report on recorded patient contact preferences and consent for communications.

Patient contact preference recorded statuses

EXACT has the means for practitioners to record three states of patient Preferences that can be applied to communications.

For each communication type Patients can explicitly choose to Opt In or Opt Out.

Where they have not made an explicit choice they remain in an Unknown preference status (without contact references / without recorded consent) for business communications.

Updating patient contact preferences

1. Go to the Patients record.
2. Locate Contact Preference then click Preferences to open the Preferences to Contact Patient window.
   • Under the Contact Preferences tab you have options for Consent to send and Suppress patient communications.
   • For Consent to send, click the tick if a patient consents or click the cross if a patient does not consent.
   • You also have the option to print this information or if enabled, send to a Clinipad.
   • Ticking Stop communications other than important notifications under Suppress patient communications will stop all messages except for important notifications.

   • Important notifications are regarded as appointment reminders/recalls and anything the practice deems as important when sending mass communications via a Patient List.

   • If Patient Portal is activated you can also deactivate Patient Portal for that patient from here using the option to Stop sending this patient's information to patient portal.
     

Contact preferences audit

Many countries have regulations around direct marketing, so it is important that EXACT can track changes to patient permissions that may potentially cause patient dissatisfaction.

For this purpose the Preferences to Contact Patient window features a Contact Preferences Audit tab.

1. Go to the Patients record.
2. Locate Contact Preference then click Preferences to open the Preferences to Contact Patient window.
3. Select the Contact Preferences Audit tab.
   The audit will show,
   • The Date the patients contact prefences were updated.
   • What change was made, Opted In/Out.
   • What Type of contact was altered.
   • The User who made the change, Portal or CliniPad will be displayed if the change was completed by the relevant method.