Glossary

Italian dental practice comes with a vocabulary of its own. Each term below is explained once, in plain language, and linked to from the guides that use it.

FSE (Fascicolo Sanitario Elettronico)

The electronic health record that follows the patient, collecting documents from every provider who treats them.

The Fascicolo Sanitario Elettronico is the health record that belongs to the patient rather than to any one provider. Documents from the clinics, hospitals, and labs that treat them collect in a single file, which the patient — and, with consent, other clinicians — can consult.

What Kairo prepares for it is the RSA (Referto di Specialistica Ambulatoriale), the outpatient specialist report for a care event. Kairo builds it, renders a PDF, and has it signed — only the clinician who performed the treatment may sign their own report.

A report cannot be produced until five things are in place:

The patient’s feeding consent.
The patient’s FSE identity, keyed on their codice fiscale.
The practitioner, designated as FSE author, with qualification and albo enrolment.
The branch’s structure identity, including its regional structure code.
An FSE code on every procedure involved.

Each document carries a submission deadline and a full trail of its transitions. Publishing to the regional FSE is configured per region.

The patient's recorded decisions about their health record — one of which decides whether your clinic may publish to it.

The patient controls what happens in their fascicolo. Kairo records four separate decisions, each an append-only log with an effective date, so you can always show what was in force on a given day. A withdrawal is a new entry, never an edit.

Consenso all’alimentazione — feeding consent. The one with teeth: without it, Kairo will not produce the report.
Consenso alla consultazione — whether other clinicians may consult the fascicolo.
Intento di oscuramento — the standing wish to obscure documents, recorded per document category.
Presa visione informativa — that the patient was shown a given version of the privacy notice.

Consent may be given by the patient or by a representative: a parent, a tutore, or an amministratore di sostegno.

Feeding consent is checked against the date of care, not today — and “not recorded” blocks publishing exactly as a withdrawal does.

Sistema TS

The national system that collects patients' healthcare spending so it can appear in their pre-filled tax return.

Sistema Tessera Sanitaria gathers the healthcare expenses individuals pay, so they turn up in the patient’s pre-filled tax return (730 precompilato). Clinics are required to report the healthcare expenses they charge to private patients.

In Kairo, every invoice takes one of two fiscal rails, decided by who you billed. A private patient, billed under a codice fiscale, goes to Sistema TS. A recipient with a partita IVA goes to electronic invoicing instead. If the recipient’s tax identity was never classified, the invoice is unresolved and takes neither rail until you fix it.

Each reportable invoice becomes an expense with its own state — awaiting transmission, transmitted, failed, cancelled, corrected, or suppressed — and every attempt is kept in a transmission history. Sending needs a sender identity on the branch: its structure code, fiscal details, and Sistema TS credentials.

A patient can object to the detailed reporting of a given invoice. See opposizione and consent.

Electronic invoicing

Issuing invoices as structured electronic files through the Sistema di Interscambio (SdI).

In Italy invoices are not sent straight to the recipient. They travel as structured electronic files through the Sistema di Interscambio (SdI), the Revenue Agency’s clearing house, which checks each one and either delivers it or rejects it.

Kairo does not talk to SdI itself. You connect a billing provider; Kairo hands it the invoice, and the provider produces the electronic file and transmits it. What comes back is an outcome shown on the invoice:

Consegna — delivered.
Mancata consegna — accepted, but SdI could not deliver it to the recipient.
Scarto — rejected. The reason is shown so you can correct and reissue.

Which invoices take this rail depends on who you billed: a partita IVA goes to SdI, a private patient to Sistema TS instead.

Invoices must also be kept in long-term storage (conservazione sostitutiva). Kairo records the archival reference your provider reports back, and flags those still missing it as an evidence gap.

Natura VAT code

The code on an invoice line that explains why that line carries no VAT.

When an invoice line carries no VAT, the electronic invoice has to say why. That reason is the natura code, and without it SdI rejects the invoice.

It comes up constantly in dentistry, because healthcare provided to patients is VAT-exempt — so nearly every patient invoice line is a zero-VAT line that needs a natura.

The three you will meet most:

N4 — Esenti. Exempt: ordinary dental care.
N1 — Escluse ex art. 15. Used for the marca da bollo.
N2.2 — Non soggette, altri casi. Used under the regime forfettario.

Kairo only accepts a natura on an exempt line: set a VAT rate above zero and the code is cleared. You can give each procedure in the catalogue a default so it lands on the invoice by itself.

The code matters beyond SdI: it travels to Sistema TS with the expense, and an N4 line is what marks an invoice as a reportable healthcare expense.

Codice fiscale

The Italian tax code identifying a person — the key both FSE and Sistema TS are built on.

The codice fiscale is the sixteen-character code that identifies a person to the Italian state. Both FSE and Sistema TS are keyed on it, so for those obligations the code — not the name — is the patient’s identity. That is why Kairo is strict about it.

Kairo checks the code in full: its shape and its check character. It also decodes what the code carries — date of birth, sex, and place of birth — fills those fields in and locks them, since an editable field could only hold the decoded value or a contradiction. Country of birth follows from the place of birth.

Names are treated more carefully, because the code encodes them lossily:

The surname is checked, and a real disagreement is refused: it means the record is wrong.
The given name only raises a warning. Italians often have more than one, and the code cannot reliably tell that from an error.

Branch

A physical location of your clinic, with its own staff, calendars, and fiscal settings.

A clinic in Kairo can operate from more than one location. Each is a branch: it has its own calendars, its own staff assignments, and — importantly for Italian reporting — its own fiscal and billing configuration.

Branches matter for two reasons:

Visibility. Staff are assigned to branches, and most screens show only the branches you are assigned to.
Compliance. Settings that carry a legal identity, such as Sistema TS credentials or FSE structure identifiers, belong to a branch rather than to the clinic as a whole, because the authorities identify each location separately.

Care plan

A patient's treatment programme, grouping accepted quotes and tracking what has actually been carried out.

A care plan gathers one or more quotes for a single patient and follows them through to completion. It belongs to the patient and is issued by one branch — once the plan is saved, that branch is fixed.

Plans arrive two ways: you create one and attach quotes to it, or Kairo creates one automatically when a patient accepts a quote.

Inside a plan, each quoted treatment gets an execution record once it is carried out — who performed it, who recorded it, the date, and an optional note. Marking a treatment complete requires naming the person who performed it, and that link is what feeds staff commission.

A plan has no “finished” switch. Progress is derived from the treatments completed and the invoices paid.

Medical quote

A priced treatment proposal for one patient — the document they accept before treatment starts.

A medical quote lists the treatments you propose for a patient, with prices. It is what the patient reviews and accepts before work begins.

A quote is Planned, Rejected, or Accepted. Accepted is final: you cannot move a quote back out of it, so if it was wrong, delete it and issue a new one. A quote can carry a valid-until date; once past, Kairo shows it as expired — that is a display state, not a status of its own.

You can email the quote to the patient as a PDF with a private signing link. The patient signs on their own device, and signing accepts the quote — which is what creates the care plan. A quote can also be linked to an appointment and to an invoice.

Where a quote carries VAT-exempt amounts, Kairo accounts for the €2 stamp duty (marca da bollo) above the threshold at which it applies and shows it on the PDF.

Questionnaire

A form you send a patient to fill in — including the anamnesi, which expires and is asked again.

A questionnaire is a reusable form. You build it once as a template — free-text, single-choice, and multiple-choice questions — and send it to patients. Editing a template raises its version, and forms already sent keep the version they went out with, so an edit never changes a form a patient is part-way through.

Sending is by email: the patient gets a private link, answers on their own device, and signs. Kairo emails back a PDF receipt. Links are short-lived and expire if unused.

A template can carry a validity duration in months. Those are the anamnesi — the medical-history forms that go stale and have to be refreshed. Kairo tracks each one per patient as valid, expired, awaiting re-confirmation, or not yet collected, and re-asks automatically once it expires. A template with no duration never expires.

Patient recall

An automatic email inviting a patient who has not been in for a while to come back for a check-up.

A recall chases patients who have stopped coming. Unlike an appointment reminder, which fires off an event, recalls are time-based: once a day Kairo sweeps for patients whose last completed appointment is older than the threshold you set.

You configure recall per branch:

Inactivity threshold — how many months without a visit before a patient is recalled.
Cooldown — the minimum months before the same patient is recalled again.
Subject and body, with placeholders for the patient’s name, last visit date, clinic, and branch.

Nothing goes out until you set a threshold. Patients with no email address are skipped, and anyone who unsubscribed from recalls is excluded before a message is prepared. Where WhatsApp is set up, recalls can travel that way instead.

Evidence gap

An invoice sent through SdI that is missing its proof of delivery or its conservazione reference.

Issuing an electronic invoice is not the end of it. You also need the evidence that it arrived and that it is being preserved. An evidence gap is an invoice where that proof is missing.

Kairo reports two kinds, per branch:

Delivery gap — no confirmed final outcome has come back from SdI yet.
Conservazione gap — the invoice was delivered, but no archival reference has been recorded and enough time has passed that one should exist. A recent invoice still inside that window is shown as in progress, not as a gap.

A simulated result never counts as evidence: an invoice whose only outcome came from a test run is still a gap.

Only invoices on the SdI rail appear here — a Sistema TS invoice has its own transmission history instead. The list is a review tool: it tells you which invoices to chase, it does not fix them for you.

Commercial pipeline

A board for tracking prospective patients — leads — from first contact through to a decision.

The pipeline is a board of leads: people who have shown interest but are not patients yet. Each lead carries a name, contact details, the channel they came from, the colleague responsible for it, and free-text notes.

Each branch has its own board, and you define the columns yourself — there are no fixed stages, so the board can match how your clinic actually works. Dragging a lead into another column restarts its time-in-stage clock, which is what lets you see where leads are stalling. A column has to be empty before it can be deleted.

Tags are a shared catalogue you attach to leads for filtering. A tag that is in use cannot be deleted.

One thing worth knowing: a lead does not turn into a patient by itself. Moving a lead into a column you have named “won” records the decision on the board, but the patient record is still something you create.

Staff commission

What each practitioner has earned, counted from the treatments they performed on invoices that are fully paid.

Commission answers “what has this practitioner earned?”. Kairo builds the figure from a chain of facts rather than from the calendar:

The invoice must be paid. Work that has not been paid for earns nothing.
The invoice’s quote says which treatments were sold, and for how much.
The treatment execution on the care plan says who performed each one.

So commission follows the person recorded as having performed the treatment — not whoever the appointment was booked with, and not whoever is assigned to the procedure in the catalogue. A completed treatment with no performer recorded is left out of the figure entirely.

The rate lives on the procedure, not on the person: a percentage, a fixed fee, or no payout — the default, so commission stays at zero until configured. With a percentage, lab and material costs can be deducted first. Two practitioners performing the same procedure therefore earn the same.

Medical procedure catalogue

The list of treatments a branch offers, with durations, costs, and fiscal defaults.

The catalogue is the menu of treatments a branch offers. Everything downstream draws on it — appointments, quotes, and care plans all start from a procedure.

Each procedure carries:

A name, description, category, and the expected duration, which is what the calendar reserves.
Fiscal defaults: a VAT rate and a natura code that land on the invoice line.
A cost profile: expected lab and material costs, plus the practitioner payout that feeds staff commission.
The staff assigned to it — who may perform it. This drives the performer picker; it does not decide the payout.

The price sits with billing rather than on the procedure itself.

Catalogues belong to a branch, and you can export and re-import one as a spreadsheet to set it up or make bulk edits. Procedures are deactivated rather than deleted, so the history that refers to them stays readable.

Roles and permissions

What a staff member is allowed to do, granted through roles that apply to a whole clinic or to a single branch.

Every action in Kairo is checked against the permissions the person holds. Permissions are worked out fresh on each request, so a change to someone’s access takes effect straight away rather than at their next login.

Permissions reach a staff member through roles. Belonging to the clinic grants very little on its own — mostly read-only lookups. Meaningful access arrives when a role is granted, and every grant names a scope: a whole clinic, or one branch.

Kairo ships two roles:

Clinic Admin — granted across the clinic.
Clinic Branch Manager — granted on a single branch.

Both carry the same set of permissions. What separates them is the reach of the grant, not the list of things they can do: a branch manager does the same work, but only where they are granted it.

You can also create your own clinic roles carrying any subset of permissions, and grant them to staff branch by branch.