How the connection to your practice software works
Practice Evolved reads your practice management system. The connection runs from a small program on a computer inside your office, outward to us. We never connect inward to your network, and your database credentials never leave your building.
The four things owners ask first
Not on our own, and never a figure we invented. We do not write a balance, a claim status, or any amount we calculated. Where you have asked us to, we can enter an insurance payment a payer has stated against the claim it belongs to, and your own software then recalculates exactly as it would if a member of your team had keyed the same payment, so a balance moves and a claim status can change. That is your software's arithmetic following from the entry, not a separate instruction from us, and we would rather tell you than let you find it. Every query the reading connection sends is still checked before it is sent, and anything that is not a read is refused, in code rather than by policy.
No. Credentials stay on the office computer that runs the sync program. They are never sent to us, never stored in our systems, and never appear in a log.
No. The connection is outbound only. The program in your office sends us what it read; nothing of ours dials in, so there is no port to open and no inbound rule to add.
Yes. Where we handle protected health information on a practice's behalf we act as a business associate under a written agreement with that practice, and the agreement governs.
What we read
The financial and operational side of your practice: insurance claims and their status, adjustments, accounts receivable balances, appointments and recall, provider production, and the reference data that makes those meaningful, such as your insurers and fee schedules.
So your own staff can work that data, a limited set of patient identifiers travels with an open claim: a name, and where it is needed to talk to a payer about that claim, a date of birth and a member number. Those reach your authenticated dashboard and nowhere else. They are never written to a log, an email or an export.
What we never read
Clinical charting beyond what a claim carries, imaging, Social Security numbers, and patient contact details such as home addresses and telephone numbers. We do not use practice data for advertising and we do not sell it.
What can be written back, and who decides
What the Service can write into your practice software is a short, named list, and clauses 5 and 6 of the Business Associate Agreement are the full description of it.
Today that list is a note. When your team writes a note in the dashboard, it can be posted back into the patient's record so the practice software stays the single record of what happened. On Open Dental that is on by default and your practice can turn it off at any time by telling us; on every other practice management system it is refused outright.
The agreement also permits one more, and it is off for every practice until that practice asks for it: entering an insurance payment a payer has stated, against the claim it belongs to. We enter what the payer said. We do not decide what you are owed and we do not write a figure we calculated.
Nothing else is written. Not a fee, not a treatment plan, not a clinical record, not a patient record, not a schedule, not a statement. We delete nothing and we change nothing a person at your practice entered. The write path is separate from every read path and cannot be reached from one.
Questions we have not answered here
Real ones get a real answer from a person. The full legal detail is in the privacy policy, and anything it does not cover you can ask us directly.