Dental Custom Software Development

Core modules include scheduling, treatment plans, imaging integrations, patient communication, billing, insurance claims, clinical notes, audit logs, and user-role management. Optional modules include analytics dashboards, referral tracking, mobile apps, and multi-clinic support.

A simple MVP takes 6–8 months, a full multi-clinic platform typically takes 12–18 months, and enterprise-level systems with analytics and heavy integrations often extend to 24+ months.

Weekly demos, daily async updates or standups, biweekly roadmap reviews, and monthly architecture reviews. Healthcare projects require more visibility due to data security, compliance, and integration-heavy workflows.

You should expect automated tests, HIPAA-focused security checks, regression testing, integration test suites for insurance and imaging workflows, code reviews, and documented release processes with version control.

You should own all source code, architecture diagrams, designs, APIs, domains, and build artifacts. The contract must include full assignment of rights, protection from derivative works, and strict confidentiality around PHI-handling logic.

Ask about encryption in transit vs at rest, access logging, PHI segregation, secure backups, audit trails, and breach-response procedures. Their answers reveal whether they’ve built regulated systems before or are guessing.

Contracts typically include termination clauses, mediation steps, and handoff requirements. Good agencies offer code warranties, sprint-level visibility, and immediate remediation plans. Poor shops hide progress until it’s too late to pivot.

A single developer works for prototypes, but anything involving PHI, scheduling logic, or clinic operations requires a team of at least 3–5 (frontend, backend, QA, architect). Starting too small leads to poor architecture and expensive rewrites.

Vague answers about HIPAA, no audit log strategy, no previous regulated-industry work, reliance on junior developers, fixed-budget promises for complex features, or refusal to show technical documentation from past projects.

Request direct client contacts, ask for demo environments, and confirm whether the team showing the work is the same team who built it. Compare Git activity, commit history, and delivery timelines if they provide repos.

Discovery takes 3–6 weeks, development usually takes 5–8 months, and hard integrations (imaging tools, insurance, e-signature, analytics) can extend MVP timelines to 9–12 months. Anything faster than 12 weeks is unrealistic for healthcare-grade software.

Ask how they’ve handled HIPAA safeguards, multi-tenant clinic data isolation, insurance API integrations, patient communication features, and how they track audit logs. Also ask who makes architectural decisions and how senior engineers escalate security issues.

Ask to see past architecture diagrams, audit reports, logging strategies, and how they handle PHI segregation, RBAC, access logging, and encryption. A qualified team should explain these details clearly without vague “we follow best practices” claims.

An agency is usually 20–40% cheaper for the first year because you avoid salary commitments, benefits, recruiting fees, turnover risk, and management overhead. In-house teams only become cheaper after year two once you’ve built stable processes and hired a full team.

Most builds fall between $180,000 and $450,000 for an MVP, depending on appointment scheduling complexity, insurance integrations, imaging workflows, HIPAA infrastructure, and whether you need multi-clinic support. Platforms with advanced analytics, patient portals, and multi-tenant architectures usually land between $500,000 and $1.2M over the first 18 months.