What's new in Smart Dentist 5.0

The single-doctor assumption was baked into Smart Dentist from the start. One iCloud account, one set of records, one practitioner who owned everything. For most users that was exactly right. But a two-doctor clinic had to pick a single Apple ID to own the data, which meant one doctor's devices worked seamlessly and everyone else's didn't — or they ran separate databases that never talked to each other.

Version 5.0 replaces that assumption with a real multi-doctor architecture. Most of what else shipped this cycle follows from that decision.

Sharing the practice

The feature runs on CloudKit sharing. One doctor owns the practice and invites staff by Apple ID. Everyone then works on the same patients, appointments and invoices, live, on their own devices. Remove someone's access and they're out immediately — no data migration, no account deletion, no waiting for a sync to propagate.

That sounds simple. It required rebuilding the data model to track authorship on every row. Every record added, edited or deleted is now stamped with the person who made the change. That attribution surfaces in a new Audit Log inside Reports — scoped to the whole practice, listing changes across all devices. I added it partly because shared data needs accountability, and partly because even a solo practice benefits from knowing which device made a change when something looks wrong and iCloud is in the middle of a sync.

Two AI features with different jobs

5.0 ships two Apple Intelligence integrations. They solve different problems and have different risk profiles.

Visit Brief is the faster one. Tap a patient before they walk in and the app generates a bullet-point prep summary: history, follow-ups, allergies, outstanding balance. It runs on Apple Intelligence through Apple's Private Cloud Compute. The goal was a quick scan rather than a two-minute chart review. It doesn't replace reading the record; it replaces the moment where you've forgotten you saw this patient eighteen months ago and you have thirty seconds before they sit down.

Clinic Assistant is the longer conversation. You type a question — "How much am I owed?", "Who's in today?", "What did I bill last month?" — and the app runs live queries against your records, then hands the results to the model to summarise and respond. I was cautious about shipping an AI chat that could hallucinate financial figures. Every number in a Clinic Assistant response comes from a query the app ran itself, not from something the model inferred from your question alone. The model formats and explains the answer; it doesn't produce the numbers.

Both features require Apple Intelligence, which means a supported device. The app tells you this at the entry points rather than letting you tap through to a spinner.

Siri and Search

Six App Shortcuts ship with 5.0 — next appointment, today's schedule, unbilled this month, find a patient, among others. They appear in Spotlight and Siri without any setup from the user. Patients and appointments are also indexed for system Search, so a name search from the home screen can surface a patient record directly.

"Zero-setup" is harder than it sounds. The intents need to expose enough entity information for the system to understand what they can do without the user having configured anything. The Shortcuts infrastructure was in place from earlier work; getting the Spotlight indexing right and making the intents actually discoverable was the remaining piece.

The Live Activity and the iPad widget

The Clinic Day Live Activity runs throughout the day in the Dynamic Island — current patient, who's next, time remaining. It also shows on the Lock Screen throughout clinic hours.

The extra-large iPad widget, "Today at the Clinic," is designed for a front-desk iPad: the full day's schedule, follow-ups due, and the month's numbers, without unlocking the device. It's the same information a receptionist opens the app to check, now displayed passively on a screen that just sits there.

Scan to record

Two things you can now photograph rather than type.

Receipts: point the camera at a paper receipt and the expense form fills in — vendor, amount, date, a category guess. Vision handles the extraction; you confirm before saving. It's faster than manual entry and cuts the typos in financial records that surface later when you're reconciling.

Referral letters and insurance cards scan straight into the patient's file as documents. They land in the patient record where staff can read them in context, next to the appointment or procedure they arrived with.

Backup

Clinic Backup exports the entire practice — patients, records, x-rays, invoices — into a single file, optionally encrypted, that you can save to Files or share anywhere. Restoring it rebuilds the practice from scratch on any device or iCloud account.

The previous state was several separate export paths that didn't add up to a real "move everything" option. Switching iPhones was manageable. Switching iCloud accounts was genuinely painful. This fixes that.

X-rays

X-rays were stored at a compressed size that was fine for thumbnails but lost detail when zoomed in — which matters when you're reading them clinically. New attachments are stored at document quality. Existing x-rays aren't retroactively upgraded; that would require re-importing from the original photos, which the app doesn't have access to.

Design and accessibility

The app icon is new, and the interface is updated for iOS 27's Liquid Glass visual language. The dashboard's Billed card, which was removed in an earlier cleanup, is back.

Accessibility got a real pass this release. VoiceOver now covers the 3D teeth chart and the periodontal grid — the two screens that were hardest to reach because they're built on custom drawing code rather than standard UIKit controls. Dynamic Type applies to all clinical forms. The app runs fully right-to-left in Arabic.

Those two screens were the most visible gaps in VoiceOver support. Closing them took longer than I expected. I'm not going to call it done — accessibility debt accumulates — but they were the gaps I was most aware of.

The social engineering warning

There's a small addition worth naming. The app now shows a heads-up if a bulk data export or large deletion looks like it might be socially engineered — the scenario where someone on the phone walks a staff member through wiping records they shouldn't touch. It's private, optional, and doesn't block the action. It just asks you to pause.

This came directly out of thinking through shared-practice scenarios. When multiple staff members have legitimate access to sensitive operations, the threat model changes slightly.

What changes for you

If you run a solo practice, the most immediately useful additions are probably Visit Brief, the Live Activity and the receipt scanner. The multi-doctor and audit log work won't touch your day-to-day, but the data model changes they required make the rest of the app more solid underneath — per-record attribution and more careful sync handling benefit everyone.

If you run a multi-doctor clinic, this is the version Smart Dentist was missing.