Integrate AI with Your Dental Practice Management Software
A custom API acts as a secure bridge, letting AI tools read and write data in your dental software. This allows AI to automate insurance verification, patient reminders, and treatment plan summaries.
The build complexity depends entirely on your Practice Management Software (PMS). Systems like Dentrix and OpenDental have documented APIs we can connect to directly. Older, on-premise systems without APIs require read-only access to the underlying database, which is a more involved, but solvable, engineering problem.
We built an integration for a 15-person dental group using Dentrix. Their front desk spent 6 minutes per new patient manually verifying insurance. The custom API connects their intake form to an AI verification agent, reducing that processing time to 8 seconds. The entire system was built and deployed in 3 weeks.
What Problem Does This Solve?
Many dental practices try add-on modules from their PMS provider or third-party tools like Weave or Lighthouse. These tools are great for patient communication but are closed systems. They cannot execute custom AI workflows, like scanning patient notes with an LLM to identify unscheduled treatment plans, because they do not expose the necessary data.
A common failure scenario involves pre-authorizations. A practice wants an AI to draft pre-auth requests by pulling the patient's history, proposed treatment codes, and past insurer responses from their PMS, like Eaglesoft. Since there's no single API endpoint for this, the office manager must copy-paste data from 3 different screens into the AI tool's interface. This manual process takes over 10 minutes per patient and introduces copy-paste errors, negating any time saved by the AI.
The fundamental issue is that most dental PMS platforms were built before modern APIs were common. Their data access methods are often limited to specific, pre-defined functions. They were not designed to be a flexible data source for external, intelligent systems. This architectural limitation is why generic connectors fail to deliver on complex automation.
How Does It Work?
We begin by auditing your specific dental PMS setup. For cloud-based systems with a documented REST or SOAP API, we use Python with the httpx library to build a client that can authenticate and query patient records, appointment schedules, and billing information. If your PMS is on-premise and lacks an API, we establish secure, read-only access to its SQL database to extract data directly.
We then construct a dedicated middleware API using FastAPI. This service acts as a secure translator between modern AI tools and your legacy PMS. It creates clean endpoints like `/get_patient_history/{patient_id}` or `/create_appointment_note`. All data transfer is encrypted, and we use Supabase for role-based access control, ensuring only the intended AI service can access patient data.
The FastAPI application is packaged and deployed on AWS Lambda. This serverless architecture means you only pay for compute time when the API is actively processing requests, keeping typical hosting costs under $50/month for a practice handling 500 API calls per day. This setup provides a median response time of under 350ms for data lookups.
For a workflow like automated insurance verification, a call to our API with a patient ID triggers a sequence. The API fetches policy details from the PMS database, calls the insurer's eligibility portal via a clearinghouse API, and feeds the combined data to the Claude API. Claude summarizes the coverage into a 3-sentence note that is written back to the patient's chart via the API, completing the entire task in under 12 seconds.
What Are the Key Benefits?
Go Live in 3-4 Weeks, Not 6 Months
A focused, single-engineer build means your custom integration is in production quickly. No lengthy project cycles or multi-person handoffs.
One-Time Build Cost, Not Per-Seat Fees
You pay for the initial scoped build. After launch, you only cover minimal monthly hosting costs, not a recurring SaaS subscription that grows with your staff.
You Own The Source Code
We deliver the complete Python codebase to your company's GitHub repository. You have full control and are never locked into our service.
Proactive Monitoring, Not Reactive Fixes
We use structlog for structured logging. If API calls to your PMS fail more than 3 times in 5 minutes, an alert is automatically sent so we can investigate.
Works With The PMS You Already Have
We have built integrations for Dentrix, OpenDental, and Eaglesoft. You do not need to migrate your practice to a new system to get modern AI capabilities.
What Does the Process Look Like?
Week 1: PMS Audit & Technical Plan
You provide secure, read-only access to your PMS. We analyze its data structure and deliver a technical plan detailing the API endpoints and data schemas we will build.
Weeks 2-3: Core API & AI Logic Development
We write the FastAPI application and integrate it with the specified AI models. You receive access to a private GitHub repository to see daily code commits.
Week 4: Deployment & Testing
We deploy the API to a production environment on AWS. Your team performs user acceptance testing to confirm the integration works as expected with live data.
Post-Launch: Monitoring & Handoff
We provide 30 days of included post-launch monitoring and support. At the end, you receive a complete runbook with API documentation and troubleshooting guides.
Frequently Asked Questions
- How is the cost for a custom API determined?
- Pricing is a fixed fee based on scope. The primary factor is the accessibility of your PMS data. A system with a well-documented REST API is straightforward. A legacy, on-premise system with an undocumented database requires more reverse engineering and costs more. We determine this during the initial, free discovery call and provide a fixed price before any work begins.
- What happens if our dental software updates and breaks the integration?
- The API is built with error handling and retry logic. If a PMS update causes a failure, the system will log the error and send an immediate alert. Our flat monthly maintenance plan covers fixes for these upstream changes. The goal is for us to identify and fix the issue before your office staff even notices a problem.
- How is this different from an all-in-one platform like Denticon or Tebra?
- All-in-one platforms require you to migrate your entire practice, which is disruptive and expensive. Syntora builds a custom data bridge that connects best-in-class AI tools to the PMS you already know and trust. This lets you add powerful, specific capabilities without changing your core operational software. It is an augmentation, not a replacement.
- How do you handle HIPAA compliance and patient data (PHI)?
- We deploy all infrastructure on HIPAA-eligible AWS services and will sign a Business Associate Agreement (BAA). All data is encrypted in transit and at rest. Our API logs are carefully structured to contain no Protected Health Information (PHI). We log internal IDs and system status for debugging, never patient names or clinical data.
- What if our PMS is installed on a local server in our office?
- This is a standard scenario. We deploy a lightweight, secure software agent on your local network that creates an encrypted, outbound-only connection to the cloud API. This allows the cloud service to query your local PMS database without you needing to open any inbound ports on your office firewall, which maintains your network's security posture.
- Are we locked into using a specific AI model like Claude?
- No. The API we build is an abstraction layer. The code that connects to your PMS is separate from the code that calls an AI model. If you want to switch from the Claude API to a different provider like OpenAI's GPT-4, it is a minor change that can typically be completed in a few hours. The core integration remains unchanged.
Related Solutions
Ready to Automate Your Small Business Operations?
Book a call to discuss how we can implement ai automation for your small business business.
Book a Call