Your Practice Data Isn't Really Yours—And That's a Problem

Most dental practices operate under a reasonable assumption: the data they enter into their practice management system belongs to them. After all, practices pay licensing fees, maintain servers, and employ staff to meticulously record every patient interaction, treatment plan, and financial transaction.

But what happens when a practice wants to connect that data to another service—say, a patient communication tool, a billing optimizer, or an analytics platform?

Here's where things get uncomfortable.

We recently explored an integration with a well-known PMS vendor. The conversation started promisingly. Then came the pricing sheet: thousands of dollars upfront, plus an uncapped per-location fee that scales indefinitely as adoption grows. This isn't a one-time setup cost. This is rent—charged to third-party developers who want to help practices use their own data more effectively.

Let's be clear about what's happening here. A practice already pays for their PMS. They already pay for the services they want to connect. Now they're being asked to pay again—indirectly, through vendors who have no choice but to pass these costs along—just to move data from one system to another.

This model creates three serious problems.

First, it stifles innovation. Developers building genuinely useful tools for practices face prohibitive costs before they've signed their first customer. The result? Fewer choices, less competition, and practices stuck with whatever the dominant players decide to offer.

Second, it creates misaligned incentives. When a PMS vendor profits from integration fees, they have little motivation to make integrations easy or affordable. The more friction in the system, the more leverage they hold.

Third—and this is the part that should concern every practice owner—it reveals who actually controls your data. If accessing your own patient records requires paying a toll to a software vendor, do you really own that data at all?

This isn't about one vendor or one pricing model. It's a systemic issue across healthcare software. Data portability is often treated as a premium feature rather than a basic right.

We believe practices deserve better. They deserve to know exactly who accesses their data and for what purpose. They deserve the ability to connect their systems without hidden fees cascading through their vendor relationships. And they deserve partners who view data access as a service to practices, not a revenue extraction opportunity.

The practices paying for these systems—and the patients whose information lives inside them—didn't sign up to have their data held behind a tollbooth.

Something needs to change.