Resources for Software Vendors Supporting Dentists

The Big Idea

The ACC dental process is predominantly “form” based; there are twenty (20) of them, all listed in Developer Resource Centre | Dental (DN).

 

From late April 2023, ACC is providing the ability to have a streamlined submission mechanism for Dentists to submit nineteen (19) of those forms.

  1. The service uses our Inbound Documents API.
  2. Practice management system (PMS) software vendors provide the service to their customers by adopting that API and making it intuitive to use within their user experience.
  3. The 20th “form” is “x-rays”, and until our system can accept those they need to be submitted separately via email to HnDental@acc.co.nz.

 

Benefits include:

  1. For Dentists: Simpler submission process by having “one process to rule them all”.
  2. For Patients: Speedier submission of their case information to ACC Case Managers for decision making.
  3. For Software Vendors: Do this once then as ACC improves the service (e.g. Adds x-rays; Allows for larger documents to be submitted) or changes the Dental process (e.g. less or more forms) then there is little more for you to do.
  4. For ACC: Streamlined service for Dentists and their Clients is good practice.

 

To adopt:

  1. Get Connected to ACC through  Developer Resource Centre | Inbound Documents API (acc.co.nz)
  2. Use the following detailed product support material Developer Resource Centre | uploaddocument (acc.co.nz)
  3. Link to all Dental forms to be subsumed into your solution Developer Resource Centre | Dental (DN) (acc.co.nz)
  4. For personal support, email digitaloperations@acc.co.nz

 

Some service limitations:

  1. Relies on each submission being in a PDF format.
  2. Relies on mandated metadata for each form so it is important those fields are accurately filled out; however, there are no additional data fields to what is normally collected.
  3. Allows for completed forms to be up to 20MB in size; however, ACC is working on increasing that limit to 100MB to be available sometime in 2023.
  4. Regards privacy, standard provider responsibility applies. However it is worth noting to your customers that good practice when starting any new process is to take the extra time up front to ensure patient privacy is maintained before sending a document.

 

Adoption of ACC APIs is a Well Proven and Supported Process

  1. To show how extensive, check out Developer Resource Centre | Vendor API Usage (acc.co.nz)
  2. To get an idea of how deeply our APIs support some of our processes these days, check out the stats lower down in Developer Resource Centre | home (acc.co.nz)
  3. For additional support material, check out Developer Resource Centre | Learn about APIs (acc.co.nz)

 

For Software Vendors That May Want To Go Further

As you will have seen in the above links our APIs are mature and well used by software vendors; you may be interested in some of the following ideas.

Invoices

Either of the following options would support your user base doing away with paper. 

  1. SendInvoice 

  2. Invoice API 

Queries

ACC offers Query APIs which provide answers to basic questions that providers often need to progress a claim or regards their invoice progress. Using these saves time making phone calls including the loss of time waiting in a call centre queue. Consider setting up these APIs as well to support providers; however chat with us first regards how best to use them.

  1. Developer Resource Centre | Query APIs – Detail that may assist (acc.co.nz)

  2. Developer Resource Centre | Potential Query API Solutions (acc.co.nz)

The detail for each Query API is available through our Product Search.

 

Support

If you have any questions, or would like to know more, please feel free to contact us.

777