Epic Systems, the EMR, practice management, and revenue cycle platform dominating mid-size and large healthcare organizations in the U.S., now has a growing dental footprint. Its largest single deployment came through one partner, PDS Health. The Henderson, NV-based DSO – formerly known as Pacific Dental Services, has deployed Epic across its entire supported network. Alongside PDS sits Wellfit Technologies, an Irving, TX fintech which offers dental plans, patient financing, and payment processing and which built the payments layer connecting Epic's patient portal to PDS dentists.
In 2024, Pacific Dental Services announced its transformation into PDS Health. The new PDS Health represented more than just a new name – the rebrand signified a move to become a comprehensive healthcare support organization, and expansion beyond dentistry into medical primary care and dental-medical integration. Stephen E. Thorne IV, who founded Pacific Dental in 1994, remained as CEO.
PDS Health has significant scale, supporting more than 1,000 dental and primary care practices across 24 states and over 15,000 clinical and support team members. Revenues topped $3.1 billion in 2025. The PDS Health organization now includes:
PDS Health began implementing Epic Wisdom – Epic's dedicated dentistry module – in April 2020, becoming the first DSO in the world to do so. The system is now live across more than 1,000 locations. Patient-facing operations run through Smile Generation MyChart, where patients schedule, complete paperwork, message their care team, and pay bills. PDS also has had a formal seat at Epic's product table. Charles Rodgers, DDS, PDS Health's Vice President of Clinical Quality, has served multiple terms on Epic’s Dentistry Steering Board, a 12-member advisory panel drawn from dental schools, DSOs, FQHCs, and community and research hospitals.
PDS Health Technologies now resells its dental-optimized Epic instance to third parties through Epic's Community Connect program. As of late 2025, this platform served over 13 million unique patients and processed more than half of all dental visits recorded in Epic globally. Its academic partners include the University of Michigan School of Dentistry, the University of the Pacific's Arthur A. Dugoni School of Dentistry, and Roseman University of Health Sciences College of Dental Medicine.
Wellfit and PDS Technologies are closely linked. Stephen Thorne was Wellfit's founding board chairman, and PDS was the first organization in dentistry to implement both Epic Wisdom and Wellfit. Wellfit’s Epic integration delivers unified payments, financing, and dental plans, with near real-time settlement.
Wellfit works with other dental providers as well. According to the company, it has deployed across more than 900 practices, sold over 355,000 dental plans, and processed more than $2 billion in payments. It partners with Patterson Dental on CarePay+, an integrated financing, dental plan, and payment processing bundle for Eaglesoft practices (an alternative for Eaglesoft users to Patterson's incumbent Global Payments Integrated solution).
With the introduction of Wellfit, the patient financing ecosystem shifted at PDS Health. CareCredit, which has anchored dental financing for decades and is still accepted at PDS Health-affiliated practices, no longer appears among the financing options listed on Smile Generation's website. Instead, within the “Smile Generation Financing Marketplace”, patients see a Wellfit-powered prequalification portal used in-office at treatment planning, where a soft credit pull returns offers from the Smile Generation Financial Credit Card (issued by Comenity), Proceed Finance, OneMain Financial, and HFD.
PDS is Epic’s largest dental deployment, but not the only one. Epic has said its dental use now extends to roughly 1,800 dental practices and multiple dental schools. Academic dentistry has been an early adopter: UT Health San Antonio's School of Dentistry went live on Wisdom in December 2024, replacing axiUm across its UT Dentistry clinics, and The Ohio State University College of Dentistry migrated to Wisdom within the Wexner Medical Center's Epic environment. The University of Kentucky College of Dentistry moved to Epic in conjunction with UK HealthCare. Community health centers in the OCHIN network and hospital-based dental programs have added Wisdom as well. The emerging pattern is that when a health system or academic medical center already runs Epic, they often shift their dental care to Epic so patients are on the same chart.
Epic’s natural entry point into dentistry has proceeded slowly through existing Epic hospital and university customers adding its dental module. Now – in addition to PDS Health’s 1,000+ dental practices – it is gaining access to more dental schools and health systems through PDS Health Technologies. This seeds Epic and its workflows into the training of the next generation of dentists. Epic appears poised to challenge Henry Schein’s Dentrix, Patterson’s Eaglesoft, and a few other leading dental platforms. Which DSO will be next up to partner with Epic?