From Scanner to Lab in 90 Seconds: A Clinician's Day on Cympha

The doctor in this cookbook works on the clinic side of dental lab case management software: one case form, one status, one place for the lab's reply.

The case form used to be the worst part of the day. Twenty fields, half of them irrelevant to whatever case you were actually submitting, a free-text "notes" field that nobody at the lab read carefully. Scans went in a separate email. Cases went missing. You called the lab a week later to ask where it was.

Here's how the same case looks on Cympha — from the doctor's chair, end to end.

Hour zero — signing up

You go to app.cympha.com and sign up. Email + password, or Google — whichever you already use.

You get 15 days of full access for free. After that, a subscription keeps your access — monthly or annual, your choice. No per-case fees from Cympha to the clinician; the lab pays the platform fee when they invoice you.

A small banner at the top of your dashboard counts down the trial days. You can ignore it until day 12 and decide then.

Your first submission, chairside

A patient is in your chair. You've just finished an intraoral scan. The scanner exported two STL files and a bite registration to its export folder.

You open Cympha on the chairside laptop or tablet. Dashboard. Click New case.

What you see:

Patient. Enter the patient: name, gender, date of birth, and free-form notes that stay attached to the case. You type it once, here, instead of retyping it into an email.
Choose a lab. You connect with your lab offline first, then find them here by lab name, or by your lab manager's name or email. Cympha does not list labs publicly — this is your relationship, not a marketplace. Tick Remember my lab and the next case opens with them already selected.
Choose a service. The lab you picked shows the services they offer — their services, with their fields, their pricing. You're not looking at Cympha's defaults; you're looking at what this specific lab actually does.
Describe the case in your own words. A single free-text field. Type the case the way you'd say it out loud. "Patient has decay on 26, needs a zirconia crown, digital impression already taken, gums healthy, no allergies." Cympha's AI parses your description and fills the lab's structured fields automatically. You read what it filled in; if anything's off, you fix it in one click.
Attach the scans. Drag the two STLs and the bite from the scanner's export folder. If you have the Cympha Agent installed, its File Monitor will already have noticed the scans landing in the export folder: a New files detected popup lists them, and Create a Case carries them into Cympha in your browser. Nothing leaves your machine until you choose it — the agent lists what it found and waits.
Submit.

Wall-clock: about 90 seconds. Most of it is typing the description.

Show the patient before the lab even sees it

While the patient is still in the chair, open the case you just submitted and click Open in Cympha Studio.

Cympha Studio is the web app: it renders STL, PLY, CBCT scans, and face scans in your browser. No install, no plugin, no CAD seat. You spin the model on the chairside screen, point at the tooth in question, walk the patient through what's happening. If you want to compare against a previous scan, open both in adjacent tabs.

Studio also generates a shareable link. You email it to the patient afterwards so they can rotate the 3D plan on their phone at home. No login required on their side — the link is scoped to that specific view.

If you want a second opinion from a specialist before letting the case proceed, share the same link with them. They look at the data in their browser — no Cympha account, no software licence. If you'd rather they saw the whole case, Share gives a colleague read-only access by email: they can view the case and its files but cannot upload, and it works even if they have not signed up yet. That is the People Dimension of a Living Case — the right people around one case, each with exactly the access they should have.

What happens while you're seeing the next patient

The case moves through statuses without you touching it. Cympha pushes live updates to your dashboard — the case arrives as Submitted, moves to Intake Review if the lab employs an intaker, then to Designing. Every one of those moves is written to the case's own event log: an append-only history of status changes, files added and removed, labels, comments and approvals, with who did it and when. Nothing is edited in place, so a week later there is nothing to argue about. No refreshing, no checking email.

If the lab has a question, they message you on the case itself. The thread lives with the case, not in your inbox.

Approving and paying

The lab finishes the design. Status flips to Awaiting approval. You see it on your dashboard.

Click in. The finished design files are attached to the case. Open them in Studio again to inspect — rotate the crown, check the margin, check the occlusal clearance, compare against the original scan if you want. If you have the Cympha Agent installed, the files are also synced to your local workspace folder for use in your other software.

If something's off, Request changes with a note and the case bounces back. The lab sees it, fixes it, sends it back.

If you're happy, Review and Approve opens a dedicated approval page. Studio is where you look at the design; approval is recorded on Cympha, on a page built so you see the files and the lab slip before you sign off. Cympha then generates a Stripe Checkout link for the case price you accepted earlier. You pay there and then with whatever card you'd use anywhere else. Receipt by email.

That's the full clinician loop — from scanner to delivery to payment — all inside one browser tab.

Multi-clinic, multi-doctor, multi-language

If your practice is more than one chair:

There is no clinic-wide account to administer and no permission matrix to configure. Each doctor signs up, picks their role once from a fixed list, and works from their own dashboard; bringing a colleague in on a case is the read-only Share described above.
Each case carries its own event log and its own chat thread, so the next conversation about it starts from the record rather than from somebody's memory.
Switch the UI to whichever of six languages your team prefers. You and the lab each work in your own interface, and both sides see the same structured fields on the case.

What this collapses

The clinician's part of the old workflow was a string of small frictions:

Filling out a 20-field paper or PDF form per lab, each lab different.
Emailing files separately from the form — guess which inbox they ended up in.
Calling the lab to check status.
Calling the lab to ask why the case is overdue.
Showing the patient a still image because there's nowhere to render the 3D model.
Cutting a separate check or invoice for each lab at the end of the month.

Cympha collapses (1) into one form per lab in your language; (2) into one upload that lands attached to the case; (3 + 4) into a live dashboard that updates itself; (5) into Studio; (6) into one Stripe link at approval time.

What used to be a form, a separate email and a follow-up phone call is now one chairside pass. The patient walks out of the chair with the plan in their hand — and that is the part they tell other people about. The lab gets the case with the scans attached, the fields already structured and the expected-file checklist already ticked, which is why fewer cases come back asking for something you thought you had sent.

Time and money are the easy part of that. The rest is peace of mind — knowing where every case is without chasing it — and pride in what the patient sees on the screen.

That's what the platform is for.

Cookbook #2 in our series. Next entries: the lab manager's view (orchestrating dozens of cases a day), and how Cympha's AI proposals actually work under the hood. Open Cympha at app.cympha.com; review files in Cympha Studio.