Manage your cases — the clinician dashboard

The dashboard is where a clinician follows every submitted case in Cympha dental lab case management software, from the KPI buckets to the Shared badge and notifications.

Audience: Clinicians (dentists, orthodontists) who already have one or more cases on Cympha. You're past the first-submission learning curve and want to know how to find a case in a hurry, follow it through its statuses, chat with the lab, and handle the rare cases that go sideways.

You'll come away knowing: how the dashboard at app.cympha.com/ is laid out, what each KPI bucket counts, how to filter by status and category, the difference between your own cases and ones a colleague has shared with you, where the chat lives, when Cympha emails you, and how to escalate or stop sharing a case.

Time required: Five minutes to read. About three seconds to find any specific case once you know the filters.

Before you start

You need:

A Cympha account with the Clinical role. Lab-side roles see a different dashboard layout (the queue) — they're covered in the lab manager's morning and adjacent docs.
At least one case in your history. If your dashboard is empty, the filters and KPI cards still render but every count reads zero — submit a case first (submit-alignerbot-case or submit-a-non-alignerbot-case).

Step 1 — Open the dashboard

Sign into app.cympha.com and you land on / automatically. The page header reads Dashboard with the subtitle Manage your dental cases and track progress.

Top right of the header you'll see two controls: the Refresh button (circular arrow icon — forces a re-fetch if you suspect the table is stale) and + New Case (only visible on the Clinical role, the entry point for submit-a-non-alignerbot-case).

Step 2 — Read the KPI cards

Four cards across the top summarise your case load. The numbers come from a separate stats endpoint, so they reflect every case you own — not just what's visible after a filter.

Total Cases — the grand total of cases you've ever submitted that haven't been deleted. Drafts (cases you opened and abandoned without submitting) are excluded.
Pending — cases waiting on someone before work can proceed. Status is one of: Submitted (waiting on lab triage), Awaiting Approval (waiting on you to review a deliverable), Waiting on Customer (the lab is blocked on more info from you), Changes Requested (you sent it back), Escalated (you flagged it to the lab manager).
Processing — active work in flight on the lab's side: Intake Review, Designing, Approved, In Manufacturing, Shipping.
Completed — Delivered, Finished, Cancelled. Only Finished and Cancelled are truly closed; a Delivered case keeps its holder on the lab side so follow-up questions can still be fielded.

Every selectable case status maps into exactly one bucket so the three coloured KPIs plus drafts add up to the grand total. See case-status-glossary for the full breakdown.

Step 3 — Filter and search

Below the KPIs sit three controls.

Search box — placeholder reads "Search by patient, doctor name or email...". It matches the patient name on the case (and on shared cases, the originating doctor's name). Server-side; it filters across your entire history, not just the visible page.
Status dropdown — shows the human-readable statuses (Submitted, Designing, Awaiting Approval, Changes Requested, Delivered, etc.) — see the full glossary doc. The dropdown only lists statuses that actually appear in your case history, so a brand-new account won't see implant-only statuses, and so on.
Category dropdown — also derived from your history. For lab-service cases the option matches the service name verbatim (e.g. Crown PFM); for native categories you see Orthodontics, Implant, AlignerBot. Pick All categories to clear.

The two dropdowns combine (AND). Search applies on top.

Step 4 — Read the case table

Each row is one case. Columns from left to right:

Patient — the patient name as you typed it on submission. Click the patient name to open the case detail at /cases/<id>.
Status — a coloured pill (see case-status-glossary for the colour-to-state mapping).
Category / Service — Orthodontics, Implant, AlignerBot, ClearAligner.AI, or the lab's specific service name.
Lab — which lab is handling the case.
Created / Updated — when you submitted it and when something last happened.
Actions — a chat icon (opens the in-page chat sheet).

Click anywhere on a row (outside the action icons) to open the case detail.

"Shared" rows look different

If a colleague has shared one of their cases with you (via the Share button — see Step 7 below), the row shows a small Shared badge next to the patient name. Shared cases are strictly read-only:

You can view the case, its files, and its history.
You cannot write anything — no uploads, no chat messages, no status changes, no approvals or rejections, and no sharing controls. To weigh in, contact the case owner directly (outside the platform) or ask them to relay your notes to the lab.

If your dashboard is empty when you expected to see a shared case, the most common cause is that you signed up with a different email than the one the share was sent to. Sign out and sign in with the address the share email was addressed to.

Step 5 — Follow a case through its statuses

Open any case. The header shows the patient name, status badge, category badge, and a few action buttons. Below it sit the case details, the file list, the activity log, and the chat panel.

A normal case walks this path:

Submitted → the lab manager holds the case and triages.
Intake Review (only if the lab has a case intaker on staff) → an intaker checks files and prescription completeness.
Designing → the designer (or AlignerBot) does the work.
Awaiting Approval → you get an email. Open the case and click Review and Approve in the header (you'll land at /cases/<id>/approve). See approve-or-reject-a-design for the approve / Request changes / Escalate to lab manager decision.
Approved → a pivot, not a resting state. If another approval cycle remains (Ortho, AlignerBot, and Implant cases have two — Treatment Plan, then Appliance Design), the case goes back to Designing for the next cycle. On the final cycle, digital categories advance straight to Delivered — there is no manufacturing step. Physical lab-service cases stop at Approved and wait for the lab to manually move them into In Manufacturing on its own schedule.
In Manufacturing → Shipping → Delivered (physical cases only).
Finished → the case is archived. The lab marks it Finished when you (or they) decide there's no follow-up coming.

Cases can also branch into Waiting on Customer (the lab is asking you for something), Changes Requested (you sent it back), or Escalated (you flagged it to the manager).

Step 6 — Chat about a case

Two places. Each row in the table has a chat icon — clicking it opens a side sheet without leaving the dashboard. Inside the case detail page, the Case Chat panel is one of the main sections.

The chat is between you and the lab — the participants are you (the case uploader), the assigned lab manager, and whoever currently holds the case on the lab side. Whoever is currently working the case reads your messages.

Tips:

Quote a status name in your message — e.g. "While we're in Awaiting Approval, can you also confirm the IPR on tooth 13?" — to keep the conversation anchored.
If you've uploaded a new file, mention it in the chat. A sentence pointing at the file helps the lab find it.

Step 7 — Share a case with a colleague

In the case detail header, click the Share button (share-arrow icon). A dialog opens labelled Share this case. Type the colleague's email and click Share. They get an email; once they sign in (or sign up) with that exact email, the case appears on their dashboard with the Shared badge. The share is read-only — they can view the case and its files but cannot write to it.

You can add multiple recipients to one case — call Share again with a different email.

Stop sharing revokes everyone at once — there is no per-recipient revoke. Click the Stop sharing button in the dialog and confirm; every colleague it was shared with loses access. Any participant on the case (not only whoever created the share) can do this. Stopping colleague shares does not affect a patient share.

This is different from Share to Patient, which only appears on aligner cases — see share-treatment-plan-with-patient.

Step 8 — Escalate when something goes wrong

If a deliverable is wrong (poor quality, missed brief) and a normal Request changes doesn't feel right, use Escalate to lab manager. The button lives on the /cases/<id>/approve page next to the approve and Request changes buttons.

Request changes sends the case back to the designer who built it for another round.
Escalate to lab manager routes the case to the lab manager. They'll review it personally and decide whether to reassign, take it themselves, or call you.

The case status flips to Escalated and the lab manager is notified. You'll see the same status on your dashboard.

What success looks like

A healthy dashboard tells a story at a glance:

Pending count low — most of your cases are moving on the lab side.
Awaiting Approval rows have small "review now" age (you respond within a day or two of the email).
No "Escalated" cases — escalations are rare in healthy lab partnerships.
Completed count growing — work is finishing cleanly.

Notification emails (what triggers them)

Cympha emails you at the key moments that need your attention — for example when a case you submitted reaches Awaiting Approval, when the lab proposes a price, or when a colleague shares a case with you (see got-cympha-case-share-email). If an expected email hasn't arrived, check your spam folder for messages from Cympha.

Troubleshooting

A case I submitted isn't on my dashboard. Click Refresh first. If still missing, the case may still be a draft because you closed the new-case tab before pressing Submit Case — the submission never completed. Open the new-case page and submit again.

The KPI count and the table count don't match. That's expected. KPIs cover your full history (excluding drafts). The table shows the currently-filtered page. Clear all filters to see the full picture in the table.

The "Shared" row I expected isn't there. Sign out, then sign in with the exact email the share invitation went to. Capitalisation doesn't matter, but mary.smith@hospital.org and mary.smith@clinic.org are different addresses.

I can't find the chat for a case. Open the case detail and scroll down — the chat panel is below the file list and activity log. Alternatively, click the chat icon on the dashboard row to open it in a side sheet without leaving the dashboard.