Migrate from Open Dental to HighLevel

Each Open Dental patient record maps to one HighLevel contact. The contact's email address (or phone number if email is absent) is used as the primary key for deduplication during bulk import. If a patient has no email or phone, we generate a placeholder and flag the record for manual review after migration.

Open Dental stores street, city, state, and zip in the Patient record. These map to the standard address fields in HighLevel Contact. If a patient has multiple addresses (billing vs. home), the primary address maps directly and any secondary is appended to a contact note.

Open Dental distinguishes between home, work, cell, and emergency phone numbers stored across separate fields in the Patient record. HighLevel supports phoneNumber1 and phoneNumber2 on contacts. We map the primary phone (typically home or cell) to phoneNumber1 and write any secondary numbers to phoneNumber2 as a comma-separated value. During post-migration review, your admin can split phoneNumber2 into individual entries or update contacts manually if the secondary number is important for outreach. Unmapped phone types (such as emergency numbers) are appended to the contact note field for reference.

Open Dental providers (dentists, hygienists, assistants) are staff records with ProvNum. In HighLevel, we create a Company record per provider with the provider's name and specialty. This gives front desk staff a contact company to reference when booking or confirming appointments.

Open Dental appointments have a rich schema: date, time, operator, operatory, provider, procedure codes, and confirmation status. HighLevel has no native appointment object. We convert each appointment into a Task or Note record attached to the corresponding Contact, preserving the original date, provider, and procedure description. This keeps appointment history visible in the contact timeline.

Open Dental procedure logs store tooth number, surfaces, ADA procedure code, fee, and provider. Since HighLevel has no clinical procedure object, procedure history becomes a formatted Note attached to the Contact, with the procedure code, description, date, and fee preserved as readable text. Treatment plan items are stored as a separate note block.

Open Dental PatFieldDefs define per-patient custom fields of type Text, PickList, Date, Checkbox, or Currency. Each PatFieldDef becomes a HighLevel contact custom field with the matching type. We create the field in HighLevel before import and map all values field-by-field. If a picklist in Open Dental has values that don't match a HighLevel picklist, we create a new picklist option in HighLevel.

Open Dental stores insurance plan details, subscriber ID, and coverage percentages. HighLevel has no insurance object. We preserve the carrier name, group number, and subscriber ID as a formatted contact note. Coverage percentages and remaining benefits are stored as custom text fields for reference — they do not drive any HighLevel automation logic.

Open Dental claims carry claim status, service date, tooth, procedure code, and fee. HighLevel has no claim object. We convert each claim into a Note on the associated Contact with the status, date, and fee, preserving the billing history for front-desk reference without requiring access to Open Dental.

Payment records in Open Dental include date, amount, payment method, and provider. We convert these to Notes on the Contact with the date, amount, and payment type. The note format includes the provider name so the payment attribution is visible in the HighLevel contact record.

Open Dental recall entries track when a patient is due for a hygiene visit or specific procedure. We convert active recall entries into Tasks in HighLevel with the recall due date and description, so staff can act on them in the HighLevel task list after cutover.

Some Open Dental practices track how patients heard about the practice in a PatField or provider-defined field. We migrate this as a custom field on the Contact so referral source data is available for HighLevel workflow segmentation and reporting. Once imported, your team can build HighLevel automations that tag contacts by referral origin, trigger personalized follow-up sequences for specific referral channels, and generate reports on which marketing sources drive new patient volume. This preserves attribution data that would otherwise be lost during the migration and enables your HighLevel admin to recreate any referral-based routing logic from Open Dental.