Custom AI Systems for Dental Practices
The best AI tools for dental practices are custom systems that automate insurance verification and patient intake. These tools use Claude API to connect your Practice Management Software (PMS) to CRMs and communication platforms.
The scope depends on the number of insurance carriers you work with and the format of your patient intake forms. A practice using digital forms and a modern PMS like Dentrix Ascend is a faster build than one relying on scanned PDFs and a legacy on-premise system.
We built an intake automation pipeline for a 3-location dental practice with 14 staff. They processed 250 new patients per month. The system cut manual data entry time for each patient from 8 minutes to under 15 seconds and went live in 4 weeks.
What Problem Does This Solve?
Most dental practices have a PMS like Dentrix or Eaglesoft, but their API access is often limited. Off-the-shelf connectors might sync appointment reminders but cannot handle complex data extraction from insurance cards or patient history forms. These pre-built integrations are rigid and cannot be customized for your practice's specific intake workflow.
Many practices use HIPAA-compliant form builders like Jotform for patient intake. These tools email a PDF of the submission, but they do not automatically parse the data and enter it into specific fields in your PMS. Your front desk staff still spends hours manually transcribing information from PDFs, which introduces errors.
A 4-dentist practice using Open Dental and web forms for intake gets 15 new patient submissions a day. Each submission requires a staff member to spend 6-10 minutes manually copying patient demographics, insurance provider, group number, and medical history into Open Dental. This is over 2 hours of data entry daily with a measured error rate of 7%. The 'integration' is a human, which is slow and expensive.
How Does It Work?
We start by building a secure pipeline to ingest your patient intake forms and scanned insurance documents. Using the Claude 3 API's vision capabilities, we extract structured data from PDF forms and JPEG images of insurance cards. We map every field, from policy number to pre-existing conditions, directly to the corresponding fields in your Open Dental or Dentrix database. This discovery phase takes about 3 business days.
The core system is a FastAPI service that orchestrates the workflow. When a new form is submitted, a webhook triggers the service. We use httpx for asynchronous calls to the Claude API, processing a typical 4-page patient packet in under 8 seconds. For insurance verification, we build custom API clients to connect directly to carrier portals like Delta Dental or MetLife, checking eligibility in real-time. All processing logs are written using structlog for easy debugging.
We deploy the FastAPI service on AWS Lambda, which keeps hosting costs under $30/month for a practice processing 500 patients monthly. We connect this service to your PMS. For cloud-based systems like Dentrix Ascend, we use their official API. For on-premise systems like Eaglesoft, we install a secure gateway on your local server to enable communication. The final system writes patient data directly into the PMS with over 99.5% accuracy.
The system includes a simple dashboard built with Supabase that shows processing times, successful entries, and flags any documents Claude could not parse for manual review. This reduces the number of documents requiring human attention from 100% to less than 2%. The entire build, from kickoff to go-live, takes 3-4 weeks.
What Are the Key Benefits?
Go Live in Under 4 Weeks
From initial consultation to a fully integrated system processing live patient data in less than one month. Stop manual data entry next month, not next year.
Eliminate Per-Seat SaaS Fees
A one-time build cost with minimal, flat monthly hosting. No recurring software fees that grow as you add staff or locations.
You Own the Production Code
Receive the full Python source code in your private GitHub repository. You have total control and are never locked into a proprietary platform.
Alerts for Failed Verifications
We configure alerts in Slack or email for any insurance verification that fails or forms that cannot be parsed, so your team only handles exceptions.
Connects Directly to Your PMS
We build direct integrations for Dentrix, Eaglesoft, and Open Dental. Patient data appears in your existing system, requiring no new software for your staff to learn.
What Does the Process Look Like?
System Audit (Week 1)
You provide sample intake forms, insurance cards, and read-only access to your PMS. We map your current workflow and deliver a detailed technical specification document.
Core AI Pipeline Build (Week 2)
We build the Claude API data extraction and insurance verification logic. You receive a link to a staging server to test with your sample documents and see the extracted data.
PMS Integration & Deployment (Week 3)
We connect the AI pipeline to your live PMS and deploy the system on AWS Lambda. We process the first batch of 10 new patients with your team observing.
Monitoring & Handoff (Week 4+)
We monitor the system for 30 days post-launch to ensure accuracy and stability. You receive a complete runbook and full ownership of the source code.
Frequently Asked Questions
- What does a custom AI integration typically cost?
- Pricing is a fixed, one-time fee based on project scope. Factors include the number of unique intake form layouts, the number of insurance carriers to verify, and the type of PMS integration (cloud API vs. on-premise gateway). A typical build is a 2-4 week engagement. Book a discovery call for a precise quote based on your practice's needs.
- What happens if an insurance company changes its website and the verification breaks?
- This is a common failure point. Our optional monthly maintenance plan covers this. We build monitors that check each carrier integration daily. If a portal changes, we get an alert and deploy an updated connector, usually within 24-48 hours. Without the plan, the provided runbook guides a developer on how to update the API client.
- How is this different from a service like RevenueWell or Weave?
- RevenueWell and Weave are patient communication platforms. They offer pre-built features like appointment reminders but not custom AI workflows to parse unstructured documents or automate insurance verification. We build the specific automation these platforms lack, integrating with them and your PMS to fill the gaps in your workflow.
- Is this system HIPAA compliant?
- Yes. We use HIPAA-eligible services on AWS like Lambda and ensure all data in transit and at rest is encrypted. We sign a Business Associate Agreement (BAA) with every client. The system processes Protected Health Information (PHI) within a secure environment you control, unlike many third-party SaaS tools where your data lives on multi-tenant servers.
- Our front desk team is not technical. How do they use this?
- They do not interact with our system directly. Their workflow becomes simpler. Instead of opening a PDF and re-typing data, they will see new patient records appear automatically in your PMS moments after a form is submitted online. The only new task is handling the occasional exception flagged by the system for manual review.
- Why do you use Claude API instead of other AI models?
- We use the Claude 3 model family for its superior accuracy in complex document parsing and vision tasks, especially with handwritten notes. In our testing on dental intake documents, it consistently outperforms other models in extracting structured data from messy, real-world inputs. It also has a strong security posture for handling sensitive patient information.
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