Today these handoffs run on fax machines, phone calls, and X-rays burned to a CD. Conduit connects the software each office already uses, so a referral reaches the right office with its records and images, and the clearance comes back, even when no two systems match.
Conduit connects the systems that run medical and dental care, so a referral reaches the right provider, the clearance comes back, and the documentation that gets care paid for travels with it. One connection, every direction.
Physicians refer patients to dentists and get documented clearance returned. Dentists refer to specialists and the records follow the patient. Bidirectional, structured, and tracked to completion instead of lost to fax.
CMS now reimburses dental care that is integral to a covered medical procedure, but only with documented coordination. Conduit produces the FHIR documentation chain that makes those claims auditable and payable.
Medical EHRs, dental practice management systems, payers, patient apps, and AI platforms. Conduit handles the connections, the data translation, and the compliance work, so each side plugs in once and reaches the rest.
Physicians refer to dentists and get clearances back. Dentists refer to other dentists and records follow. Payers see documented coordination. Patients see their full history. Pick your side.
Refer patients to a dentist from your EHR and get documented clearance back, with the trail Medicare needs to pay before treatment starts.
Send a referral to another dentist or specialist on any software and have it arrive, with records and images attached. Coordinate clearances with your patients' physicians, and keep records following the patient.
Add medical and dental FHIR data to your product through one API. We handle the connections, the translation, and the compliance work.
Cleaner data and documented coordination today, on a path toward FHIR-native prior authorization ahead of the 2027 mandate.
Medical and dental systems were never built to talk to each other, or to the rest of healthcare. Referrals get lost, clearances never arrive, and patients pay for it. No one connected them. Until now.
Cardiologists and oncologists have no electronic way to send referrals to dental PMS. Clearance travels by fax, or not at all.
Medicare now covers dental "inextricably linked" to medical care, but only with a digital coordination trail. That trail doesn't exist today.
A GP refers a patient to an oral surgeon or endodontist, often an independent practice on different software, and the referral gets faxed or printed. No tracking, no confirmation. In 25–50% of cases, nobody knows the patient never arrived.
A DSO growing through acquisition inherits a patchwork of PMS, so a patient's record can't follow them between the group's own locations. X-rays get repeated.
Apple Health, Google Health Connect, MyChart all carry medical records. Not a single dental PMS publishes to any of them.
Every health AI launched in 2026 has the same blind spot. Dental data is missing from all of them.
Every referral, record, and clearance problem across medical and dental reduces to one of four patterns. Conduit handles all four, through a single FHIR R4 layer. Below is the architecture. See it play out in real patient workflows in the next section.
Physicians send referrals to dentists directly from Epic or Cerner via SMART on FHIR launch. Dentists return clearances, consult notes, and treatment summaries as structured FHIR data, with a full audit trail that satisfies CMS documentation requirements for "inextricably linked" dental coverage.
A dentist refers a patient to another dentist. A GP to an oral surgeon, an independent practice to a specialist across town. The referral arrives with records, imaging, and treatment history attached, even when the two offices run different software. Conduit translates between systems through a FHIR R4 canonical center, so the referral, the records, and the result all come back. The cross-PMS translation is the engine. The dentist just sends a referral.
Prior auth requests, claim submissions, and payer responses flow between dental systems and insurance carriers. Today: BridgeLink translates PMS → FHIR → X12 278/837D through existing clearinghouse infrastructure. Tomorrow: FHIR-native prior auth under CMS 2027 mandates.
// FHIR Claim · 837D-equivalent { "resourceType": "Claim", "use": "preauthorization", "patient": { "reference": "Patient/4471829" }, "provider": { "reference": "Practitioner/dds-lee" }, "item": [{ "productOrService": { "code": "D7240" // CDT } }] }
// X12 278 · payer-bound ST*278*0001~BHT*0007*13*REF12345*20260514~ HL*1**20*1~NM1*X3*2*DELTA DENTAL*****PI*1234~ UM*HS*I*35***Y~DTP*472*D8*20260514~ SV3*AD:D7240*RC~
Patient dental records published to FHIR patient-scoped APIs with CARIN Blue Button alignment and TEFCA/QHIN participation. Patients see their dental records in Apple Health and ChatGPT Health. Developers and AI companies call the Conduit API to access the entire connected dental network through a single integration.
Five clinical workflows that show how the four exchange patterns above play out for actual patients. Step-by-step, from referral to outcome.
A 65-year-old patient scheduled for cardiac valve replacement. Cardiologist must rule out oral infection to prevent endocarditis. Surgery cannot proceed without documented dental clearance, and CMS now requires digital coordination for reimbursement.
Dentist identifies a suspicious lesion during a routine hygiene visit. Without Conduit, this finding travels by fax, if it travels at all. With Conduit, it triggers an immediate, structured referral to oncology with the intraoral image attached.
Every day a dentist refers a patient to another dentist, a GP to an oral surgeon, an endodontist, a periodontist. Between 25–50% of those referrals never complete. The patient doesn't arrive, results never come back, and nobody knows the loop broke.
A 50-location DSO runs Open Dental at 30 sites and Eaglesoft at 20, following acquisitions. A patient who moved across town visits their nearest location, which runs the other PMS. Their full history is invisible. X-rays are repeated. The patient's trust in the brand erodes.
OpenAI, Google, Apple, and hundreds of AI health companies are building comprehensive patient health assistants. Every one of them has the same problem: when they query health data, dental records are missing. Conduit is the only API that solves it.
# Patient-scoped FHIR query · OAuth bearer · illustrative $ curl https://<your-conduit-host>/v1/Patient/4471829 \ -H "Authorization: Bearer eyJh..." \ -H "Accept: application/fhir+json"
{
"resourceType": "Patient",
"id": "4471829",
"name": [{ "family": "Hutchinson", "given": ["J"] }],
"meta": {
"source": "OpenDental://practice-014",
"profile": ["http://example.org/fhir/StructureDefinition/dental-patient"]
},
"extension": [
{ "url": "...dental-chart", "valueReference": "Composition/dc-9921" }
]
}
CMS now covers dental services that are integral to the clinical success of a Medicare-covered procedure: exams, diagnostics, infection elimination, and treatment. The catch: Medicare won't pay without documented care coordination between the medical provider and the dentist. A referral qualifies, and that's exactly what Conduit provides. Less than 50% of cancer patients currently receive dental clearance before cancer therapy. That's the gap.
Dental exam and infection elimination prior to valve replacement or valvuloplasty. Cardiologists need documented clearance. Conduit provides the audit trail.
Oral care before chemo, CAR-T therapy, radiation, or high-dose bone-modifying agents. CMS requires documented coordination. Conduit makes it happen in real time.
Dental workup prior to organ transplant to eliminate oral infection risk before immunosuppression. Digitally documented for CMS reimbursement.
Oral exam and treatment for ESRD dialysis patients to clear infection. Digital referral and clearance documentation satisfies CMS requirements.
The unlock is documentation + coordination. Dentists must be Medicare-enrolled. The referral chain must be documented. Conduit provides the FHIR-based transformation service that makes it all auditable, and reimbursable.
OHIA is a cross-industry coalition bringing together the dental industry, standards organizations, government observers, EHR vendors, and technology partners to solve dental data isolation. HeyDonto is a founding contributor, building the infrastructure that turns OHIA's vision into production reality.
Conduit addresses all five OHIA priorities through a single production platform.
Conduit never translates directly between two proprietary formats. Every exchange passes through FHIR R4 first. Your PMS needs one connector, not one for every other system in the network.
Source integration is the variable. Everything downstream follows OHIA's implementation guides uniformly, regardless of which PMS a practice runs.
| PMS Platform | Vendor | Architecture | Connectivity Method |
|---|---|---|---|
Open Dental | Open Dental Software | On-Prem · MySQL | HeyDonto Synchronizer |
Eaglesoft | Patterson Dental | On-Prem · SQL Anywhere | HeyDonto Synchronizer |
Dentrix | Henry Schein One | On-Prem · Proprietary | HeyDonto Synchronizer |
Dentrix Ascend | Henry Schein One | Cloud-Native | Customer API |
CareStack | CareStack | Cloud-Native | Customer API |
Curve Dental | Curve Dental | Cloud-Native | Customer API |
tab32 | tab32 | Cloud-Native | Customer API |
Epic / Cerner | Epic Systems / Oracle Health | EHR · FHIR-Native | SMART on FHIR App |
Conduit integrates with your system in the way that works for you. Additional PMS integrations delivered on request.
Tell us about a referral you lose today, medical to dental, dentist to dentist, or provider to payer, and we'll show you it run end to end on the software your offices already use.