Digital Rx: customise your lab's intake form

Your intake form is your digital Rx: it decides what a clinic tells your lab when it submits a case in Cympha dental lab case management software, and this guide replaces the default with your own.

Audience: Lab managers who have already finished onboarding and now want clinics to submit cases through their own order form — not the GuideMia default Ortho / Implant / AlignerBot intakes. If you haven't onboarded yet, do lab-onboarding-wizard first.

You'll come away knowing: how to add a custom service to your lab, how to upload your existing PDF order form, how the AI extracts the form fields, how to preview what clinics will see, when to use a custom form versus the GuideMia native intake, and what changes for the clinician when you publish a new service.

Time required: About ten minutes per service the first time. Two minutes per service after you've done one.

Before you start

You need:

A lab on Cympha with onboarding marked Completed. Check on app.cympha.com/lab — if you see a red dot and an Onboard My Lab button in the top right, finish lab-onboarding-wizard first.
An order form to upload, as a PDF. It must be a typed, text-based PDF — a scan of paper or a photo (JPG / PNG) won't extract, because the extraction reads the PDF's text; there is no image path. If all you have is a scan, re-export the form from Word/Pages as a text PDF first.

The custom intake form is per-service, not per-lab. If you offer five services and each has its own order form, you'll upload five forms — one against each service.

Step 1 — Open the Services section

Sign into app.cympha.com and click My Lab in the sidebar. You land on /lab. Three cards stack down the page:

Lab Info — name, address, phone, intro.
Services — what this doc is about.
Payment Options — how clinics pay you.

Scroll to the Services card. Existing services list in a table with columns Service, Pricing, Order Form, and a small actions column on the right.

Note: the Services management lives on /lab. The /team page is for managing team-member approvals (see team-and-roles) and intentionally does NOT have a services tab even though both are lab-manager-only pages.

Step 2 — Add a custom service

At the top of the Services card there's an add-service row.

Service / Product Category — a text field with a built-in dropdown (datalist). Common categories are pre-suggested: Clear Aligners, Crown & Bridge, Implant Prosthetics, Full Dentures, Partial Dentures, Night Guard / Occlusal Guard, Orthodontic Retainer, Veneers, Inlays & Onlays, Surgical Guide, Diagnostic / Study Models, Digital Smile Design, Custom Impression Trays, Bleaching Trays, Sleep Apnea Appliance, Removable Appliance, Fixed Appliance, Splint / Bite Plane. You can type your own name if none of the suggestions fit (e.g. Wax-up for Aesthetic Mock-up).
Price (USD) — optional. Leave blank to display "Contact for pricing".

Click Add. The new row appears in the table below with no order form attached yet. Note that a service's name and price can't be edited after creation — to change either, delete the service and add it again.

Step 3 — Upload your order form

In the Order Form column on the new row, click Upload form. A file picker opens. Choose your PDF.

The text is read out of the PDF right in your browser — the file itself never leaves your machine; only its extracted text is stored when you save.

A textarea appears showing the raw text the browser read off your file. Read through it. This is what the AI will work from in the next step. Nothing is stored until you click Save below the textarea, which stores the raw text against the service. Then:

Extract fields (button next to Upload form) — runs the AI pass that turns the raw text into a structured field template. This is what turns your form into an actual web form for clinicians.

Step 4 — Extract fields

Clicking Extract fields runs an AI extraction over the saved text. One pass returns three things at once:

The form fields — one entry per question on your form. Each has a label, a field type (text, number, boolean, select, or textarea), a required flag, any choices it inferred from your form, and the section heading it sat under on the paper form (sections are kept and rendered as grouped blocks).
An example order — a populated sample showing what filled-in values look like. This appears as an example block when a clinician submits a case.
An expected-files checklist — a list of files your form implies the clinician should attach. Upper arch scan, Lower arch scan, Bite registration, Photos, etc. Each entry on the checklist becomes a row that ticks off as the clinician uploads a matching file.

The row then updates: the Order Form column shows an order_form ✓ badge (a fixed marker that a form is attached — not your file's name) and N fields extracted.

Step 5 — Preview what clinicians will see

Click Preview form (eye icon) on the service row. A dialog opens titled Service preview — <your service name>.

Two sections inside:

Form fields — the fields the AI extracted, rendered as the actual form the clinician will fill. Disabled inputs so you can read but not type.
Expected files — the suggested-files checklist, also editable from the same place.

Walk through it as if you were a doctor submitting their first case to you. Two questions to ask yourself:

Is the field order natural? If the fields come out jumbled compared to your paper form, the AI got it wrong — see Step 6 for fixing.
Don't worry about the language. The fields keep your form's original language, and Cympha translates the labels automatically when a doctor switches the form language on their side — there's no translate button on your side, and you don't need one.

Note that patient-identity and due-date questions from your paper form (patient name, date of birth, delivery date and the like) are deliberately stripped from the rendered form — Cympha already collects those as standard case fields, so the doctor isn't asked twice.

Close the preview when you're done.

Step 6 — Edit fields or re-extract

If the extraction was off, you have two options.

Re-extract (full redo). Click Re-extract fields on the service row. If the service already has cases, a confirmation dialog appears: "Replace extracted fields?" — the existing cases' saved data is safe and won't change, but the field template and example order will be updated for all future cases. Click Re-extract anyway to confirm. This is useful if you replaced the order-form PDF with a cleaner version — upload the new file (the button says Replace once a form already exists), then re-extract.

There is no per-field editor for the form fields — if a field is wrong, fix the source PDF and re-extract. The expected-files checklist, by contrast, is fully editable by hand (see Step 7).

If you want to start over completely, click the trash icon at the end of the service row to delete the service, then add a fresh one — but read the deletion warning in Troubleshooting first: deletion is not blocked even when live cases reference the service.

Step 7 — Set or update the suggested files

The Expected files section inside the preview dialog is editable directly. Each row has:

A Name — what the clinician sees, e.g. "Upper arch scan".
A Required toggle — whether the file is mandatory or optional.
A Description — a short helper line, e.g. "Full-arch intraoral scan".
Accepted extensions — comma-separated, with leading dots, e.g. .stl, .ply, .obj.

Use Add file slot to add rows, remove the ones you don't need, then click Save expected files. The save replaces the whole list, and the new checklist appears on the submission page for the next clinician who picks this service.

Step 8 — Activate or deactivate

By default a new service is active — visible to clinics on /cases/new. The actions column on each row has a power icon ("Deactivate — hides from new cases") on active rows, and a lightning icon ("Reactivate") on inactive ones.

Deactivating hides the service from new submissions but keeps existing cases intact. Use this if a service is temporarily unavailable (out of materials, staff sick) rather than deleting and losing the configuration.

What success looks like

A well-configured service:

Has a sensible name from the dropdown (or a custom name that matches what your customers ask for).
Has a clean form with five to fifteen fields (more than twenty starts to feel like a tax form).
Has an example order block that shows realistic values.
Has a suggested-files checklist with the four or five core files your designers need.
The clinician fills it in two minutes flat and uploads files that the designers can use without follow-up.

When to use a custom form vs the GuideMia native template

Use the GuideMia native template (the Ortho / Implant / AlignerBot services every new lab starts with) when:

You offer a standard ortho or implant service and the GuideMia AI extractor already knows your terminology.
You want the structured form fields the doctor can complete in minutes.
You're new to Cympha and want to ship fast.

Use a custom service when:

You have an existing paper or PDF order form that your customers know and trust.
Your service is non-standard (sleep apnea appliances, custom prostheses) and the GuideMia categories don't fit.
You charge a fixed per-case price that you want shown explicitly at submission.

You can mix. Note that every new lab starts with the three GuideMia native services (Orthodontic Planning, AlignerBot Planning, Implant Guide Planning) already attached and active — they stay on the menu alongside your custom services unless you explicitly deactivate them. If you want clinics to see only your own services, deactivate the native ones you don't offer.

What clinicians see on `/cases/new` after your changes

When a clinician submits a case and searches for your lab (by name or lab manager email), the Service picker shows tiles for every active service you've published. Each tile shows the service name and either the price you set (e.g. $85.00) or "Contact for pricing" when you left the price blank.

When they click your service tile:

The Patient Information block is unchanged (always the same — name / gender / DOB / complaints).
The Treatment Parameters block reshapes to your extracted fields, with your example order block on top.
The Files section adds the suggested-files checklist.
The Pricing & Terms block at the bottom shows your price and a consent checkbox.

A clinician submitting through your custom service can also type free-text into the Treatment Parameters field instead of using the structured form (one of the differences from the AlignerBot intake — there is no XML or GPK requirement). Your designers will read whichever they typed.

Troubleshooting

Extract fields returned junk. Two common reasons: (1) the source PDF is a scan or photo of a paper form — there is no image extraction, so the raw text comes out empty or garbled; or (2) the form has a very dense multi-column layout that the text extraction can't linearise. Re-export a typed, text-based PDF and try again.

The fields look right but the labels are in the wrong language. The extractor keeps the language of the source PDF, and that's fine: when a doctor switches the form language in the app, Cympha translates the field labels for them automatically. You don't need to upload a translated form.

A clinician submitted a case and the form was blank. They probably submitted in General Instructions mode (the textarea you see when a service has no template). Confirm the service has fields extracted — the Order Form column on the row should show N fields extracted. If not, re-run Extract fields.

I want to charge different prices for different complexities. Leave the service price blank — clinics see "Contact for pricing". Pricing then happens on the case itself: once you triage a case, you enter its price and the clinician approves it before being charged.

I'm about to delete a service — is that safe? Be careful: deleting a service removes it outright, even when live cases still reference it — nothing blocks the deletion. The row shows an "N cases" badge, so check it before you click the trash icon; if the service has cases, prefer Deactivate. If you deleted by mistake, add the service back with the same name and re-extract from the form — the original service configuration is gone.