I’ll be honest: when I first read this case study, I had to stop and read it again.
I’ve wrestled with messy integrations before, and as someone who cares about patient experience (PX), yet feel distanced from it when I’m trying to get all of the PMSs to work together, this story stopped me. It made me realize how our decisions show up even for ourselves as patients, as well as our friends and family.
Here’s what impressed me:
- A solo founder shipped in 2 months what most teams would scope for a year.
- He integrated with 15+ practice management systems without drowning in one-off connectors.
- Oh, and he’s not just a software engineer. He’s also a practicing dentist.
The problem
Dr. Peter Gabbay noticed something most people would overlook: nearly 40% of calls to dental offices were going unanswered.
That’s patients not getting through, practices were losing revenue, and staff had to do manual call backs. As we all know if the front desk is calling someone back, they’re not checking on you or making sure you have what you need when you’re a patient. If I take my mom to an appointment, I don’t want her waiting for 30 minutes if she arrived on time because the front desk is distracted.
The biggest challenge in this story wasn’t just calls, it was integration.
Each dental PMS (Dentrix, Eaglesoft, Open Dental, etc.) had its own quirks — different slot formats, record structures, and sync behavior. Writing one connector per system would’ve buried him before he could even start working on the actual product.
The approach
Instead of maintaining 15+ custom integrations, he leaned on the Synchronizer API by NexHealth.
One integration layer instead of many
- Clean, well-documented endpoints
- Sandbox environment to get started quickly
- This gave him space to focus on what mattered: the AI receptionist workflows that improved the patient journey.
The results
From the Dentina case study:
- 2 months from first API call to launch
- 15+ PMS systems unified through one API
- 1-hour onboarding for new practices
- 40% of inbound calls handled by AI
- 24/7 virtual receptionist — no more missed patient calls
What I want you to take from this
In this article, I want you to know that:
You don’t always need to brute-force integrations, sometimes the right layer saves you months.
Being both a clinician and a developer gave this founder an edge: he lived the problem and had the skills to fix it.
Technical choices weren’t just abstract here. Cleaner integrations meant fewer missed calls, which meant patients actually getting care.
That’s why it resonated with me.
Full case study is here if you want the details:
Discussion
Have you ever had to choose between building a connector yourself or leaning on an API layer? How did it go?
For those in healthcare: do you think clinician-founders building tech is the future, or just a rare exception?
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