Dental practices need to cater to increasingly strict rules around patient data collection and management, as formulated in the following regulations:
UK, Ireland and Netherlands: 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.

Patient contact preferences and consent

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

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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

To update a patients contact preferences go to the Patient Details page and click on Preferences

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The Preferences to Contact Patient window will open. You can tick or untick the Consent to send. You can opt in, opt out or leave as unknown.

Suppress patient communications stops all messages except for important notifications. Important notifications means appointment reminders/recalls and anything the practice deems as important when sending mass communications via a contact list.

If Patient Portal is activated you can also deactivate the Patient Portal for that patient from here.

Contact Preferences Audit

This is viewable by Administrator-level users.

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, accessible only to Administrator-level users:

The audit will show the date it was updated, what was done and which user did this. If the user is Portal or CliniPad then it means it was filled out via these features.