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Migration · Dentrix to Open Dental
Open Dental is cheaper, open, and you own your data on the far side. None of that matters if the migration drops perio charts, garbles clinical notes, or leaves insurance plans in a state where nothing bills correctly on Monday.
A dental migration is really four migrations wearing one coat: the financial ledger, the clinical record, the insurance layer, and the imaging. They fail in different ways and they have to be validated separately.
Dentrix stores its data in a proprietary engine rather than an open database, so extraction runs through a combination of the Dentrix API where it is licensed and available, structured report exports, and direct reads of the underlying tables where access permits. Open Dental, by contrast, runs on MySQL with a published schema — which makes the destination side of this migration unusually transparent and is a large part of why the pair is worth doing properly.
Each of these gets its own record count in the assessment and its own line in the reconciliation report. Depth of history is a scope decision made with real numbers in front of you, not an assumption baked into a quote.
Patients and family structure
Demographics, contact details, guarantor relationships, and the family groupings that determine how statements and balances behave. Dentrix and Open Dental model families differently; this is mapped explicitly, not guessed.
Ledger and account balances
Charges, payments, adjustments, and running balances reconciled against a Dentrix-side aging report before load. Depth of transaction history is a scope decision.
Procedures and treatment history
Completed procedures with ADA / CDT codes, surfaces, quadrants, dates, and provider attribution — the clinical spine that treatment planning and recall both depend on.
Treatment plans
Planned but uncompleted procedures, with their phasing and fee estimates, so nothing presented to a patient last month disappears this month.
Insurance plans, subscribers, and benefits
Carriers, plan definitions, subscriber and dependent relationships, annual maximums, deductibles, and used-to-date benefit figures. Deduplicated across patients rather than imported once per subscriber.
Appointments and recall
Future scheduled appointments, appointment types and lengths, plus continuing-care and recall due dates so the hygiene schedule survives the move.
Clinical notes and perio charts
Progress notes carried as structured text against the right patient, visit, and provider. Perio exams carried as measurement data where the source stores them as data — see below.
Images and attachments
Radiographs and intraoral images are usually held by a separate imaging system rather than by Dentrix itself. Whether these move, get bridged, or stay in place is determined in the assessment.
Written down before you spend anything, because the alternative is finding out in week six. This list is specific to Dentrix to Open Dental; the assessment turns it into your list, with record counts attached.
— Perio charts migrate as measurement data only where the source stored them as measurement data. Where they exist only as rendered images or as free text inside a note, they come across as exactly that — an image or a note, not a chartable exam. This is the single most common surprise in dental migrations and it gets answered in the assessment, before you commit.
— Rich formatting inside clinical notes. The clinical content moves. Bold, tables, and embedded layout generally do not survive intact.
— Dentrix-specific customizations — custom procedure buttons, practice-specific macros, custom note templates. These get rebuilt in Open Dental, and that is separately scoped work.
— Insurance claim history as live, resubmittable claims. Historical claims come across as records; open claims in flight are handled by a deliberate cutover strategy, usually by working them to completion in Dentrix before the switch.
— Third-party module data that never lived in Dentrix in the first place — imaging systems, patient communication platforms, payment processors. Each of those is its own conversation, and the assessment names them rather than letting them surface at cutover.
None of this is in either vendor's documentation. It is the category of thing that looks fine in a test load and produces a wrong number in month two, which is why the process puts a full sandbox load and a reconciliation you sign in front of any production cutover.
01
Dentrix's family and account structure and Open Dental's guarantor model diverge in ways that quietly change who owes what. Mapped explicitly, signed off in writing before the test load, and reconciled against an aging report afterwards.
02
The same employer plan often exists in Dentrix as dozens of near-duplicate records created one patient at a time over a decade. Migrating them as-is imports the mess. Deduplicating them changes benefit tracking. Which way you go is a decision you make with the data in front of you during mapping.
03
Historical procedures are attributed to providers who left years ago. They still need to exist as records on the far side or the production reporting breaks retroactively. Inactive-provider handling is part of the mapping document.
04
Open Dental offers a conversion service and it is legitimate — for a straightforward single-location practice with clean data, it may well be all you need, and I will say so. The engagements where an independent migration earns its fee are multi-location groups, practices with messy or long history, practices carrying data from a prior system already, and anyone who wants the reconciliation and rollback plan in writing.
01 — 02
A read-only audit of your Dentrix instance produces record counts, a risk register, and a fixed quote. Then a field-by-field mapping document you sign before any code runs.
03 — 04
The complete migration runs into a Open Dental sandbox — not a sample. You spot-check records you choose, and sign a written reconciliation. If the counts don't tie, we don't cut over.
05 — 06
Scheduled around your calendar with the rollback plan written in advance, followed by 30 days of included corrections for the things that only surface in real use.
A single clean location typically lands in Standard Migration. Multi-location groups, practices with a prior conversion already in their history, or anything with imaging bridging in scope generally land in Complex. The assessment is what makes a fixed migration price possible, and its fee is credited toward the migration if you proceed.
Tier
Scope
Price
Migration Assessment
A read-only audit of your source system.
$1,500 – $2,500
Standard Migration
One source system to one destination.
$6,500 – $15,000
Complex / Multi-Entity Migration
Multiple locations, systems, or long history.
$18,000 – $40,000
The honest answer is that clinical completeness is determined by how your practice recorded things, not by the migration. Structured data moves as structured data. Anything recorded as an image or as free text moves as an image or as free text. The assessment inventories exactly which of your clinical data is which — before you spend anything on the migration itself.
Yes, and for at least the first year I recommend it. A read-only Dentrix instance is cheap insurance and it is the reason a migration can be reversible. The rollback plan assumes it exists.
PHI is handled under a signed BAA, work happens in an environment scoped for it, and test data is destroyed at the end of the engagement on a documented schedule. The BAA is signed before any data moves, not after.
Cutover is scheduled for a closed weekend. The practice opens Monday on Open Dental. Nothing touches production until the sandbox load has been validated and you have signed the reconciliation report.
The assessment is the read-only audit — what data exists, what is extractable, what will be lost, and a fixed-price quote for the migration itself. It is priced at $1,500 – $2,500 depending on scope, fixed before anything starts, and the report is yours whether or not you go further.
Tell me what you're moving. I read every one of these personally and reply within one business day, usually with a couple of specific questions about your source system — the answers change the price, so it's worth asking early.
Nothing is committed by this form. No payment, no contract, no scheduling sequence. It starts a conversation.
If your destination vendor can handle it, I'll say so. Some conversions genuinely don't need an independent migration.
Standard – Complex
The account-versus-patient split.
Standard
A cloud target with a fixed importer.
Every pair
Twenty-odd pairs are written up across seven industries — and the written ones are not the limit of the work. Search the full list, or just ask.
Dentrix and Open Dental are trademarks of their respective owners. This page describes independent data migration work involving those systems and does not imply any affiliation with, partnership with, or endorsement by either vendor.
Before you give notice on Dentrix
The most expensive mistake in this category is losing source-system access before the extraction is done. The assessment is read-only, fixed-price, and yours to keep either way.
I respond personally within 1 business day. No pitch — just a real conversation.