About Dental Symphony: a clinical-first approach to dental software.
A solution 20 years in the making.
Dental Symphony wasn’t named for a product that existed in 2003 or 2013 — it was named for the product we knew all along we were going to build.
A symphony requires every section playing its part, coordinated around the same score. That’s exactly what a fully integrated practice management system should do: patient communication, scheduling, intake, clinical documentation, treatment planning, presentation, consent, and payment — every part of the practice, working together in one coordinated environment.
In 2003, the market wasn’t ready for it. Practices were still moving from paper to digital. Internet connections were unreliable. The immediate need was filling in clinical gaps beginning with comprehensive patient assessment — not rethinking how the entire practice could work as a unified system.
So Dental Symphony started at the front of the practice, with ePatient, and spent a decade proving that the clinical-first approach worked.
Now, the market has caught up. Dental Symphony has been building toward this moment since 2003. The name was a promise. Management Suite is how we keep it.
The name was a promise. Management Suite is how we keep it.
Dental software — built around the way dentistry actually works.
What should have been a straightforward transition to a legacy software quickly revealed something more troubling than inconvenience. The available systems weren’t just clunky. They were clinically shallow. Medical histories were superficial. Medication reviews were absent. The information clinicians needed to treat patients safely — drug interactions, condition flags, allergy alerts — was incomplete, or missing entirely. A single missed allergy or misunderstood condition wasn’t a theoretical risk. It was a real one.
But the problem didn’t stop at patient safety. Legacy software wasn’t built around the way dentistry actually works. Intake didn’t connect to clinical findings. Findings didn’t connect to treatment planning. Every step required manual effort to bridge gaps the software should have handled automatically. The burden of making it all work fell on the people delivering care.
Dental Symphony decided to build something better: not just better forms, but a fundamentally different approach to how dental software works.
The goal was software that organized what clinicians needed to know before the patient was in the chair, surfaced risk clearly, and supported informed, defensible clinical decisions. The system also needed to connect the dots — intake to assessment, assessment to findings, findings to treatment planning, treatment planning to patient presentation and acceptance — to follow the logic of clinical care instead of interrupting it.
“Dental Symphony is a well designed and helpful tool for clinicians in any setting. In particular, it adds a much needed teaching modality for assessment and safe care of medically complex dental patients.”
Michael Glick, D.M.D., former editor of the Journal of the American Dental Association.
The Dental Symphony team.
Dental Symphony is built by people who bring decades of their own experience to getting your solutions right.
Tom Cockerell Jr., D.D.S., founder
A practicing dentist since 1979, Dr. Cockerell has run his own practice throughout the entire history of Dental Symphony. One of Dr. Cockerell’s most significant contributions to the platform is a proprietary clinical methodology he developed called Diagnostic-Driven Treatment Planning — the concept at the heart of Management Suite’s Auto Treatment Planner.
The idea is straightforward but groundbreaking: rather than asking clinicians to chart findings and then manually build a treatment plan as two separate steps, the diagnosis itself drives the plan. Chart a finding, and the treatment plan starts to build itself automatically, in seconds — every procedure clinically justified by the diagnosis, not arbitrary code selection. No other practice management system works this way.
The clinical advisory team
The content of our unique Point of Care Library — which provides dental-specific information on medical conditions and drug interactions — was created and shaped by an advisory team of clinical professionals working in dentistry, medicine, pharmacology, anesthesiology, and biomedical informatics. This team helped establish the clinical foundation that has distinguished Dental Symphony from the start. Notably, the Medical Complexity Ranking System is proprietary to Dental Symphony and was created by Michael Glick, D.M.D.
See what twenty years of clinical-first thinking looks like in practice.
The best way to understand Dental Symphony is to see ePatient and Management Suite in action. Schedule a demo and we’ll walk you through the platforms, answer your questions, and help you figure out which solution fits where you are now.
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