Pacific Smiles Group

Pacific Smiles Group’s third-party booking software was becoming costly and couldn’t adapt as the group grew.

It replaced it with a custom booking platform it owns outright, built to work across multiple brands from one codebase.

A patient booking a check-up online sees a website, a few questions and a calendar.

Behind that experience sit practice management software, patient records, centre and location data, and the rules that determine which appointments are available.

Pacific Smiles Group needed those systems to work together across its brands, without continuing to pay for software that didn’t fit the way the business worked.

Airteam designed and built a custom booking platform for Pacific Smiles Group.

The same solution can be configured across the group’s brands, giving Pacific Smiles Group control over how the experience evolves while maintaining one underlying platform.

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  Client: Pacific Smiles Group
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  Industry: Healthcare - dental
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  Services: UX and UI design, custom software development, API integration, serverless cloud development, ongoing support and maintenance

Pacific Smiles Group operates more than 120 dental centres nationally across the Pacific Smiles Dental and nib Dental Care Centre brands, and manages HBF Dental Centres in Western Australia.

As the group grew, the limitations of its third-party booking software became more significant.

The platform was costly and couldn’t accommodate the custom requirements emerging across different parts of the business.

Pacific Smiles Group wanted to change that.

There were three priorities:

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  Streamline operations and reduce ongoing software costs.
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  Gain control over how booking worked across different business entities.
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  Give patients a clearer way to find and book an appointment.

That meant moving from configuring somebody else’s product to owning the software behind a critical part of the patient experience.

Airteam started with the existing booking journey.

Working with Pacific Smiles Group’s team, we reviewed the flow, identified where patients encountered friction and mapped a simpler path through the booking process.

The new experience was refined over several iterations before being carried into development.

But simplifying what patients saw was only part of the problem - the booking experience still needed to retrieve the right information from several systems behind the scenes.

Airteam built the platform as a series of serverless cloud applications, with a shared integration layer between the patient experience and Pacific Smiles Group’s back-office systems.

The customer-facing experience was built in React. Behind it, an Apollo GraphQL API brings together data from three systems:

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  Dental4Windows, the group’s practice management software
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  DORIS, its Dental & Oral Reporting Information System
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  Yext, which manages location information

The booking widget interacts with that API rather than integrating independently with each underlying system.

That separation gives Pacific Smiles Group a more manageable architecture. If the way one back-end system communicates with the platform changes, that integration can be handled centrally rather than rebuilt independently across each patient-facing touchpoint.

It also supports a multi-brand model.

The same underlying solution can be configured for different business entities, allowing each experience to reflect the needs of the brand while sharing the same core platform.

Pacific Smiles Group now owns the intellectual property behind its new platform. That gives the organisation control over its roadmap and reduces its dependence on the constraints and licensing model of a third-party booking product.

A shared platform also creates economies of scale across the group. Improvements to the core product can be made once and applied across the brands that use it.

And because the integration layer separates the patient experience from the systems behind it, those systems can evolve without requiring the entire booking experience to be rebuilt around them.

For organisations considering whether to buy or build, that’s an important part of the decision: the value of custom software isn’t only what it can do today, it’s the control it gives you over what happens next.

Airteam continues to maintain and support the booking platform as part of Pacific Smiles Group’s wider digital ecosystem.

The platform runs alongside the CRM foundation Pacific Smiles Group has built on Salesforce, giving the organisation ownership of a critical customer journey while retaining the specialist systems it needs behind it.

What began as a replacement for restrictive third-party software became infrastructure Pacific Smiles Group could control, reuse and continue evolving across its brands.