Every dental software pitch eventually arrives at the same fork: "switch everything to us." We think that pitch is wrong, and the data agrees — moving a practice off its PMS costs five figures, takes a quarter, and breaks insurance claims history on the way out. Practices know this, which is why they don't switch.
The orbital layer is where the pain actually lives
But the tools around the PMS — the website, booking, communications, reviews, recall — aren't sticky at all. That's where practices churn vendors, juggle logins, and pay $800–2,000 a month for software that doesn't share a database. That layer is what DreamCRM consolidates. The PMS keeps the chart; we run the relationship.
Official APIs or nothing
The dental integration world has a dirty open secret: several well-known vendors sync by writing directly into PMS databases. Open Dental has publicly cautioned its customers about exactly this. Our position is simple: DreamCRM talks to Open Dental exclusively through its sanctioned API. Every write we make — a booking, a cancellation, a message mirrored to the CommLog — lands in your audit trail with our name on it. Slower to build? Yes. But your database integrity isn't a growth hack.
What two-way actually means
Patients, appointments, providers, balances, and recall due dates flow in on a schedule. Bookings made on your website or portal push back instantly, cancellations clear the slot in the PMS so nobody gets reminded about a dead appointment, and the comms we send appear in each patient's chart. If a sync stalls, you get a banner on your Overview — never silence. That's the whole philosophy: the integration should behave the way you'd build it if you had time.