NHS Wales 2026/27 · Built for Dentally
The NHS Wales dental contract, while the month is still open.
Dentavector turns the claims and appointments in your Dentally account into your position against the NHS Wales 2026/27 contract: the value of every care package, £ per hour for each dentist, where you will land at year end, and the claims worth a second look. Before the statement, not after it.
Wales only. Built for Dentally. Trials open 30 October 2026.
See it running
Five minutes, three logins, no cuts in the data
Recorded on a live NHS Wales practice in demo mode: practitioner names and patient details are masked, and the practice's totals are blurred, because its NHS contract is confidential.
A five-minute walkthrough of Dentavector, recorded on a live NHS Wales practice in demo mode: the practice manager's contract view, claim checks, care packages and forecast, the front desk's two lists and a dentist's own page.
How it works
Connecting a practice, in about a minute
How an NHS Wales practice connects Dentavector to its Dentally account: accepting the data processing agreement, pasting an API key from its own Dentally account, choosing the site and NHS contract, and confirming how its treatment codes make up each care package.
01 Integration model
A read-only reader — nothing written back
The integration only ever reads. It never changes anything in a practice's Dentally account, and it reads only what the dashboard needs:
- Practice & sites — label the practice, pick the site
- Contracts — the NHS Wales contract to track
- Practitioners — per-dentist attribution
- Appointments — chair time and £ per hour
- Treatment plans — work in open courses, valued before it is claimed
- NHS claims — the charges and codes we decompose into care packages
- Treatment catalogue — the practice's own treatment codes, mapped to care packages
- Practitioner diaries — rota hours, for chair time and the hours left empty
- Invoices and payment plans — what each dentist was actually paid, shown beside the contract value
- Patients, without names or contact details — date of birth, gender, family link, postcode, locality and county, recall dates and contact preferences. Name, email and telephone fields are never collected.
02 Sync behaviour
Light on Dentally's platform
One full sync, then a weekly check
A complete history pull happens once, when a practice connects. A weekly integrity sync, early on Sunday, catches anything an incremental run missed.
Incremental only
Per-entity watermarks fetch just what changed since the last run, about every two hours.
Rate-limit aware
Back-off and retry when Dentally asks us to slow down, on each practice's own key.
03 Architecture
One schema per practice
Each practice's data lives in its own PostgreSQL schema, selected for every request. Patient, claim and appointment data is never stored in a table shared between practices.
Stack. Node.js 22 / Express 5 · Next.js · PostgreSQL · Docker and nginx on AWS in London (eu-west-2).
04 Security & data protection
Handled like the health data it is
- Residency — hosted and stored in London (
eu-west-2); our directors may access the service remotely from the UK and from Portugal, in the European Economic Area - Encryption — each practice's Dentally key is stored encrypted, with the means to decrypt it held outside the database; backups are encrypted at rest; every connection over the internet uses TLS
- A record of access — a log of which patients' data each person was shown, readable only by an administrator and kept twelve months
- Rate limiting on every route — counted per user rather than per address; every rejection logged
- Logs without identifiers — neither the application log nor the web server log records a value that points at a patient
- Minimisation — patient name, email and telephone are never collected
- Fail-safe start-up — production refuses to start with a missing or weak signing or encryption secret
05 The hard part
The decomposer — care packages from treatments and charges
A claim records what was charged and the codes behind it. Work in an open course has no claim yet, and that is where a practice's year is won or lost. The decomposer takes the treatments and the £ and works out the NHS Wales care packages they add up to, with their value and chair time, so open work counts before it is claimed. It is the engine that turns Dentally data into a contract position, and it is ours.
06 Why it fits Dentally
For Dentally's NHS Wales practices
- Complements, never competes — contract analytics read from Dentally; nothing written back, no overlap with practice management
- Sends practices back to Dentally — from a claim, an appointment or a treatment plan, one click opens the patient's record in Dentally. The analysis happens here; the work happens in Dentally.
- Timely — NHS Wales practices are in the first year of a care-package contract
- The contract inside the system they already use — practices get their contract position from their Dentally data, not from a spreadsheet beside it
- Low integration risk — reads only what the dashboard needs, writes nothing at all
07 Status
Where we stand
- ✓Read-only, minimal scope
Reads only the entities listed above; writes nothing. - ✓Schema per practice, hosted in the UK
London region. - ✓Incremental sync
Watermarked, rate-limit aware. - ✓Patient-data access log
Which patients each user was shown, and when. Administrator-only. - ◇NexGen OAuth2 migration
Planned for when NexGen covers NHS claims and treatment plans, before v1 is discontinued. No shared keys.
For practices
01 The problem
The contract counts care packages. Your diary doesn't.
Under the NHS Wales 2026/27 contract, delivery is measured in care packages of fixed value. Your claims sit in Dentally one at a time, and the position they add up to arrives in the NHS statement, a month later.
- Claims are recorded one by one, not as a contract position
- The statement looks back, not forward
- Work already done in open courses of treatment does not count anywhere until it is claimed
- A new contract model, in its first year
02 What you get
Your contract, while there is still time to act on it
Where you will land
How much of the contract is delivered so far and where the year is heading, recalculated every time your data syncs.
Work not yet claimed
Courses still open are valued as care packages before they are claimed, so the forecast counts the work already in the chair.
£ per hour, by dentist
Contract value per hour of chair time for each dentist, and the care packages it comes from.
Credit where it is due
When more than one dentist works on a course, each care package is credited by the chair time each one gave it.
The right view for each person
The practice manager sees the whole contract. Each dentist sees their own numbers, and nobody else's. The front desk gets two lists: who to reschedule, and who still needs booking.
Find it here, act on it in Dentally
From a claim, an appointment or a treatment plan, one click opens the patient's record in Dentally, if you are signed in to Dentally. Dentavector shows you where to look; the work happens where it always has.
03 Beyond reporting
It flags the claims that will cost you
The dashboard also checks your claims and shows the ones that don't add up, each with the money at stake, so you can put them right while you still can.
Ten automated checks, each with the claims behind it:
- Billed short — the treatments recorded are worth more than the amount claimed
- Work done and never claimed — a recall, an exam or perio carried out with no matching claim
- ACORN with no exam — a misclassification that invites a contract query
- Root canal on the wrong kind of tooth — an anterior package on a molar, or the reverse
- Care packages nobody is credited for — two dentists on a course and no way to tell who earned it
- …and five more: claims paid with the course never closed, claims that don't decompose, correction conflicts, assumed values on ambiguous charges, and claims with no chair time behind them.
04 How we know it's right
Checked against the NHS statement, not against itself
The NHS BSA monthly statement is what a practice is actually paid on, so that is what we test against. On 7 October 2026 we reconciled the dashboard with our pilot practice's statements: across the contract year so far, the two differed by 0.14%. For one clinician, they matched to the penny.
05 Why it can tell you this
Built for one contract, not for every business
Dentavector does one thing: the NHS Wales contract. It knows what each care package is worth, which combinations are allowed and what the reform changed. That is why it can show you your contract position, not just your claims.
Who we are
01 Who we are
A dentist who owns a practice and the person who builds the software
The NHS Wales contract is not a problem you can see from outside a practice and the software it needs is not something you build by reading about it. Dentavector is one of each and that pairing is the reason it knows what it knows.
Marco Costa Leite
Dentistry · the practice side
Qualified in Dental Medicine in Porto. Six years practising in Sweden, then twelve in the United Kingdom — where he went from working in a practice, to managing one, to buying one, and recently a second.
- He is the customer — the contract is not a specification to him, it is what his own practice is measured against every month
- He has run the operation — rotas, associates, what a chair costs and what it earns
- Three health systems — Portugal, Sweden, the UK. Enough to know which parts of a contract are universal and which are local
João Damas
Engineering · the systems side
An economist first, then several years in business management, then a move into data, with training in machine learning and deep learning. Now works as a backend and database engineer.
- Economics before code — a contract is an incentive structure before it is a data model and it helps to read it that way
- Backend and databases — where this product actually lives: the decomposer, the sync, the numbers behind every screen
- Management experience — enough to know that a dashboard nobody acts on is a cost, not an asset
02 What that means for a practice
Two people, and we would rather say so
A company this size is a fair thing to ask about, so here is the honest answer.
- You get the people who built it — no support queue between you and whoever wrote the line of code you are asking about
- Every number is checked against a real contract — and against the NHS statement it is paid on
- What we cannot do, we say — we promise what two people can honestly deliver and no more. Improving that later is easy; retreating from it is not
03 Where we are
Pre-launch, with trials opening on 30 October
Today Dentavector runs at Marco's two practices, where every rule was tested before anyone else was asked to rely on it. That is not a caveat to the claim that it works; it is the reason it works at all.
A product built for one contract has to be built by somebody living under that contract. Every care-package value, every combination rule, every alert exists because a real month's claims went wrong in a particular way and had to be understood.
Where we go
01 Where we go
Narrow on purpose and widening slowly
Dentavector does one contract in one country and that is not a stage to grow out of — it is why it can tell a practice things its own software cannot. Everything below either deepens that or widens it and the deepening comes first.
02 Next
Finishing what is already half-built
- Open courses — valuing work that is started but not yet claimed is built and running. What is being finished is the shape around it: which practices need it and how it is offered
- More analysis, on data we already hold — cancellation and failure-to-attend patterns, the recall pipeline, waiting lists: answerable from what the sync already reads, without reading anything new
- Reconciliation for every practice — we reconcile against the NHS BSA statement by hand today; the next step is letting each practice run that check against its own statement
03 Wider
A second contract and other systems, once the first is right
- NHS England — a different contract that counts activity differently, so the decomposer has to learn a second model. The reading, the per-practice isolation and the reporting carry over; the decomposition does not
- More practice management systems — Dentally first, and done properly. Other systems come after, as practices ask for them: if yours runs on something else, tell us which
04 Deeper
Prediction, once there is enough to predict from
The projection a practice sees today is arithmetic on a known rate — honest and about as far as one practice's data can take it. Machine learning is the natural next layer and the honest thing to say is that it is not worth doing yet.
- What it would answer — which open plans are likely to complete and when, which patients are likely to return, where a rota will fall short before it does
- Why not yet — a model trained on a single practice learns that practice, not the contract. It needs data from many before it is prediction rather than an expensive way to restate the past
Trials
→ Trials
Free trials for NHS Wales practices on Dentally
Trials open on 30 October 2026 and are free. How long a trial runs, and what continuing would cost, are set out in the trial terms we agree with you before it starts.
- Who it is for — practices in Wales with an NHS 2026/27 contract that use Dentally. Wales only: not England, Scotland or Northern Ireland
- How it connects — your practice creates an API key in its own Dentally account. Dentavector reads with it and writes nothing back
- Set up with us — we walk you through setup ourselves; your history then loads in the background. See how setup works ›
- Paperwork first — before your Dentally key is saved, an administrator at your practice accepts our data processing agreement in the app. Before the trial starts, we also agree the trial terms with you: what it costs if you decide to continue, and what happens to your data when the trial ends
Ask about a trial Other enquiries
Both open your email app. A person answers, usually within two working days.
Contact: support@dentavector.co.uk · Privacy