Patient portal: share a treatment plan with a patient

Inviting a patient by email gives them a patient portal account where they view their treatment plan in the browser; this guide shows which file from the dental case to share and how the invite starts Ortho Monitoring.

Audience: Clinicians (orthodontists, general dentists running aligner cases) who want the patient to see their own treatment plan.

You'll come away knowing: how to invite the patient by email, which file to share, what the patient sees on their side, and how this action overlaps with enrolling them in Ortho Monitoring.

Time required: Around two minutes per patient the first time. Thirty seconds once the workflow is muscle memory.

Before you start

You need:

An aligner case in Cympha — category Orthodontics, AlignerBot, or ClearAligner.AI. The Share to Patient button does not appear on implant or generic lab-service cases; the patient-facing workspace only loads aligner plans.
A saved .gvw file on the case. This is the finished treatment plan exported from OrthoPlus or Cympha Studio. If the case has no .gvw yet, the dialog will tell you and you'll need to upload one first.
The patient's email address.

If you've already shared this case with the patient previously, sharing again is harmless — the existing invitation is reused. The patient will not get a duplicate account.

Step 1 — Open the case in Cympha

Sign into app.cympha.com and open the case from your dashboard. For example, case 149 for patient Jose Bend.

The case must be in a state where the .gvw exists. That's typically anytime after the designer has clicked Request approval on Phase 2 — but you do not have to wait for full APPROVED status. As long as the file is uploaded and confirmed, you can share.

Step 2 — Click Share to Patient

On the case detail page, look at the header row near the patient name and status badges. The Share to Patient button (with a user-plus icon) sits beside the Share button — it only appears on Orthodontics, AlignerBot, and ClearAligner.AI cases. Click it.

A dialog titled "Share with patient" opens with two fields:

Patient email — for example, jose.bend@example.com.
Which .gvw to share — a dropdown of every confirmed .gvw file on the case. If there's only one, the dropdown is short. If you've iterated through several Phase-2 revisions, pick the latest. The dropdown filename matches what's in the file list (e.g. case_149_appliance_v3.gvw). If there are no .gvw files yet, the dropdown is replaced by the message "This case has no .gvw files yet. Upload one first."

Type the email, pick the file, and click Send invitation. While the invitation is going out the button reads Sending invitation….

Step 3 — Confirm the invitation went out

You'll see a confirmation that the invitation went out to that address.

What happened: an invitation email from Cympha went out. New patients get an invitation pointing to app.cympha.com/patient/sign-up with their access embedded in the link. Returning patients (the email already has a Cympha patient account) get a notification email linking to /patient/sign-in.

If the patient already has a Cympha patient account on that email (because you previously shared a different case), the invitation reuses that account. They sign in with their existing password; no new account is created.

Step 4 — What the patient sees

The patient clicks the invitation link. Their flow is intentionally narrow:

They land at /patient/sign-up with their email pre-filled from the invitation link. They set a password — patient sign-up does not offer OAuth.
After sign-up they land at /patient — page title "My cases" — a stripped-down workspace listing only the case (or cases) you shared with them. No case folder, no lab tools, no Studio chrome. Each share appears as a card with an Open button.
They click Open on the card. A short-lived presigned URL is fetched and Cympha Studio opens in a new tab with the .gvw loaded, scoped to the patient view.

The patient cannot see your other patients, your case folder, your colleague shares, or anything outside the specific plan you shared with them. The chrome that a doctor or designer sees on app.cympha.com is hidden.

How this relates to Ortho Monitoring

Share to Patient is the same action used to enroll a patient in Ortho Monitoring. There is one button, one share, one patient account — but two different downstream experiences depending on what the patient does on their side:

If you stop after this doc, the patient simply has read access to their plan. They can open it, rotate it, scrub through the staging, and re-read it as often as they like.
If the patient starts taking monitoring photos through the same share, those photos land on the case and you can review them against the plan in Cympha Studio's Ortho Monitoring workspace.

The doctor side has no separate "enable monitoring" toggle in the dialog — sharing a .gvw is the enrollment step for monitoring too.

So this doc gets you "patient can see their plan." If your intent is recurring photo capture for aligner cases, see Related how-to at the bottom.

What happens next

Re-sharing is safe. If you want to share an updated .gvw after a Phase-2 revision, just open the dialog again and pick the new file. The patient's existing share updates in place — they always open the latest export, with no duplicate cards and no new invitation needed.
You can share more than one case with the same patient. Subsequent invitations reuse their existing account; their /patient page lists every case you've shared with them.

Troubleshooting

I don't see a Share to Patient button. The case is not in an aligner category. Share to Patient is gated to Orthodontics / AlignerBot / ClearAligner.AI cases. Implant guides, generic lab services, and CBCT-only reads do not have this button — the patient-facing workspace only knows how to load aligner .gvw plans.

The dialog says "This case has no .gvw files yet. Upload one first." The case has no confirmed .gvw. Either the designer has not yet exported the final plan (in which case ask them to Request approval with the export attached) or the file is still uploading. Refresh the file list on the case detail page.

The patient says they got the email but can't sign in. Verify the email matches what you typed in Step 2 exactly. The invitation is keyed on that string — a typo (jose.bend@example.co instead of .com) sends the invite into a void. Resend by re-opening Share to Patient with the corrected address.

The patient signed up with a different email. They will see an empty /patient page. Have them sign out and use the original invitation link, or re-issue the invitation to whatever address they actually use.

I shared the wrong .gvw. Open the dialog again and pick the correct one. The patient's link updates automatically to the latest share row; they don't need a new invitation.

I want to share a .cyp or full case bundle, not just a .gvw. Not supported by design. The patient view is intentionally a single plan viewer, not a case folder. Use the colleague share (the Share button in the case header) for case-level access to a fellow clinician.

Related how-to: see How to enroll a patient in Ortho Monitoring for the follow-up step that turns this share into a recurring photo-capture protocol.