Built for dentists who refer.

Why we exist

Dental referrals are the second-most common patient handoff in healthcare, and one of the most broken. We routinely lose track of what specialist saw a patient, whether they were treated, and whether they ever returned to the GP. Faxes get misplaced. Patients don't schedule. Specialists never report back. Dental Refer closes that loop end-to-end.

What we built

• 153,000+ U.S. dental providers searchable by specialty + location
• 20-stage referral workflow with SLA tracking and breach alerts
• Encrypted X-ray + CBCT + clinical-photo sharing
• Secure office-to-office messaging tied to every referral
• Structured specialist report-back: diagnosis, treatment, prognosis, follow-up
• Fax + email bridge for offices not yet on the platform
• HIPAA controls: AES-256 at rest, TLS 1.2+ in transit, immutable audit log

How we treat your data

Patient-record identifiers (name, birth date, phone, email) and the free-text clinical content of referrals, letters, reports and messages are written with AES-256-GCM field-level encryption, on top of storage-level encryption at rest. We never log PHI. The integrations that need patient information — the insurance-eligibility clearinghouse, fax and email — run on vendors named on our subprocessor list that have signed a business associate agreement with us; an eligibility check, for example, has to send the patient's name and date of birth to the clearinghouse. Our AI features are off by default, and de-identify patient data before any external model call. Our access controls are role-based, session-scoped, and audited on every read or write. Read more on Security, our HIPAA posture, our Terms of Service, and our Privacy Policy.

What a referral actually does here

A referral in Dental Refer is a record, not a message. The referring practice creates it, attaches the clinical context the specialist will need — radiographs, history, the reason for referral — and sends it to a specific practice. The specialist opens the same record, and when treatment is done the report is written back against it.

That single detail is the reason the product exists. A faxed referral produces a faxed report that arrives days later as an unlabelled page, and matching it back to the case it belongs to is manual work that often does not happen. Because the report here returns against the original record, the referring office can see which of its cases are still open without asking anyone.

Practical consequences: the specialist is not chasing missing radiographs before they can schedule, and the coordinator is not reconciling a fax tray against a spreadsheet. What each specialty wants included is set out on the specialty pages.

Who it is for

Three roles, with genuinely different problems. A general dentist needs to know a case arrived and what came of it. A specialist needs referrals to arrive complete, and needs referrers to be able to find the practice at all — which is what the provider directory is for. A coordinator needs one list of everything outstanding.

It is not a patient-facing booking service. Patients reach it only through a link their own dentist sends them, and clinical records stay with the practice that holds them — under HIPAA that practice is the covered entity and the owner of the designated record set.

Where the provider records come from

The directory is built from the public National Plan and Provider Enumeration System, the registry a U.S. provider must appear in to hold an NPI, published by CMS. Each listing carries the practice or clinician name, the NPI and the registered taxonomy. Inclusion reflects that registration and nothing more — it is not an endorsement, a ranking, or a credential check, and it should not be read as one. A practice can claim its own listing to correct and extend it.