Reverse engineering and source code recovery
Most of the practice management systems OpenCare needed to support offered developer programs with documentation for connecting to their databases. One older version, still running in roughly nine percent of dental offices across North America, had no such program, and its own vendor no longer supported it either. Ollon worked through different approaches to establish a database connection, drawing on research an independent developer had published after reverse engineering the same undocumented system. That work resulted in a working integration where OpenCare had no official path to build one.
ETL pipeline design and development
Each practice management system OpenCare needed to support returned scheduling data in its own format, with details like dentist and hygienist lists, room counts, hours, and holiday or vacation exceptions often needing separate calls to assemble. Ollon built the transformation logic to normalize all of it into a single JSON structure for the OpenCare API, since the API only needed one consistent format regardless of the source system. Some systems complicated this further: a platform could need different extraction logic depending on which version a dental office ran, so the pipeline had to detect the version before applying the right transformation. That let OpenCare onboard new systems without changing anything on the API side.
Business System Integrations
OpenCare needed patients to book appointments directly into practice management systems that were never built to talk to a web platform. Ollon built a C# system tray application that ran quietly in the background at each dental office, connecting to systems including Dentrix, EagleSoft, Softdent, PracticeWorks, and AbelDent through a secure tunnel to OpenCare's web API. The application handled customer key management, automatic updates, and remote installation, then extracted and standardized each office's calendar data so it could be transmitted to OpenCare for booking. During that integration work, OpenCare grew from 7 to more than 300 signed up dental offices across 5 supported platforms.
Phased rollout planning
OpenCare's system support grew one practice management platform at a time, starting with Dentrix, since it had a developer program Ollon could use to work out exactly what data was needed, such as provider lists, room availability, and standard hours. Ollon applied that same pattern to EagleSoft and the other supported systems, adjusting for version differences within a single platform where the connection method could change between releases. In Phase 2, Ollon extended the original calendar feed into full two way synchronization, adding write capabilities for select platforms so appointments booked through OpenCare could be created inside a practice's own scheduling system, with real time tracking of changes and cancellations.
