Connected labs

A connected lab takes your orders online. You fill in the order on the lab's own order form, which opens inside Smileline, and the order then shows on the patient's record as a lab case: the lab's stage, what the lab needs from you, the due date and the invoice, kept up to date as the lab works. Everything a lab case already does keeps working for these orders, including the To do lab lists.

Connect a lab

Open Settings → Connected labs (under Clinical catalogue). Everyone who can read the clinical catalogue sees it: owners, managers, agency staff, the front desk and clinicians. Your labs lists every lab linked to the practice with its status.

Find a lab

Under Find a lab, search by the lab's name, its city or what it makes. Each result shows the lab's city and country and the work it takes, with its status if the practice is already linked to it. Show more loads the next results.

Ask to connect

Click Ask to connect on a lab. The lab is asked to accept the practice as a customer, and it shows as Asked until it answers. If the lab is already in Professional contacts — you have been sending it work by hand — choose that contact in Link to an existing contact first, so its past lab cases stay under the same contact.

There is no way to disconnect from the practice's side: ask the lab.

Invitations from a lab

A lab can also invite your practice. Smileline emails the invitation to the address the lab entered:

• If that address has a Smileline account, click Sign in to accept in the email. Connected labs opens on the invitation.
• If your practice is not on Smileline yet, click Join Smileline in the email, create your account and your practice, and the invitation opens in Connected labs.
• In the app, the invitation also shows in the notifications bell when your verified email address is the one the lab invited.

Click Accept to connect, or Decline. Answering needs the right to manage the clinical catalogue: owners, managers and agency staff.

An invitation link stops working when the invitation expires — about a week after the lab sent it — or when the lab sends it again: only the newest email works. Ask the lab to resend it if your link no longer opens.

One address gets at most two invitation emails a day from the same lab: the invitation and one resend. A further resend that day is emailed the next day (UTC), so nobody's inbox is flooded.

Send an order

The panel closes and the order appears on the patient's record as a lab case, Sent, dated the day it was sent at its site. If the lab's system is slow to answer, Smileline says Sent — it will appear shortly and the case appears on its own. If the order can't be added to the record as it is — for example, the patient is being erased — Smileline says Sent to the lab — it needs a review before it shows in this record, and the order waits in Settings → Review queue. If Smileline couldn't record the order at all, it says Sent to the lab, but this record couldn't be updated yet: the lab has the order, and its case appears when Smileline next hears from the lab, which it checks every few minutes.

The due date, the lab's order number (shown as the lab's reference) and the fee — when the lab prices the order in your practice's currency — come from the lab and change when the lab changes them.

• A lab that asks to be paid upfront takes the card payment inside its form.
• If the panel sits idle too long, it reconnects by itself and keeps your draft order.
• If the lab's form does not load, click Retry.
• The patient needs a first name before an order can be sent: add it on their details first.

Each time the panel opens an order form or an order page for a patient, the activity log records that the patient's details were shared with the lab.

Follow an order

An order sent to a connected lab shows on the patient's Documents tab, and on its treatment plan row when it was sent for a treatment, with:

• the lab's stage as a coloured pill, in the lab's own words;
• Lab needs you when the lab is waiting for you: an approval, a report, files, a reply or an invoice to pay;
• an invoice chip when the lab's invoice has money to pay;
• Open order, which opens the lab's order page in the panel: its messages, approvals, files, holds, remakes, and the invoice with paying it.

Orders whose lab needs you are also listed on Lab needs you in To do, and the person who sent the order is told in the bell.

Cancelling an order and ordering a remake happen inside the lab's order page, so Cancel and Re-send are not offered on a connected order's row. A cancellation reaches the record by itself, and a remake arrives as a new lab case linked to the original.

Mark received, Mark fitted and Returned to lab stay your own steps, as for any lab case: the carrier marking the parcel delivered does not mark the work received. Edit on a connected order changes only its fit visit and its note; everything else is the lab's.

Lab invoices

On the Lab page, Lab invoices opens a connected lab's invoices for the practice in the panel. Seeing them needs the right to read the accounts (owners, managers, agency staff and the front desk); paying them needs the right to manage the accounts (owners, managers and agency staff).

Who can do what

Notifications

Connected labs have their own notifications group, Lab: an order that needs you, an order dispatched or cancelled, and a lab's invitation or its answer to your request to connect. See Notifications.