PDS Health's Cloud Imaging Play Aims to Unify Patient Digital Identity

HENDERSON, Nev. – December 04, 2025 – PDS Health, a major integrated healthcare support organization, has announced a significant expansion of its partnership with SOTA Cloud, involving a strategic investment and the planned nationwide implementation of the company's cloud-based dental imaging platform. The initiative will deploy the technology across more than 1,000 of its supported dental practices, marking a pivotal step in the digital transformation of dentistry and the creation of a truly unified patient health record.

The move builds on a previous agreement between PDS Health Technologies and SOTA Cloud and is designed to deeply integrate diagnostic dental imaging into PDS Health's existing Epic-based electronic health record (EHR) system. This integration aims to dissolve the longstanding barriers between dental and medical data, creating a single, comprehensive digital identity for each patient.

"As we expand our technology ecosystem, we're focused on scalable platforms that reduce complexity, increase interoperability and support real-time access to clinical data," said David Baker, Chief Information and Digital Officer at PDS Health. "SOTA Cloud fits that model. It gives us a modern, cloud-native imaging solution that will integrate into our Epic-based environment and help us deliver a more connected experience for our clinicians and their patients."

A Cloud-Native Overhaul for Dental Infrastructure

At the heart of this partnership is a fundamental shift away from legacy, on-premise IT infrastructure. SOTA Cloud provides a modern, cloud-native platform engineered for speed, scalability, and simplicity. For an enterprise the size of PDS Health, this model eliminates the need for individual practices to maintain costly on-premise servers and manage complex IT, a significant operational and financial burden.

The platform's architecture is a key differentiator in a competitive market that includes established players like DEXIS Imaging Suite and Carestream Dental. By centralizing imaging data in a secure, HIPAA-compliant Microsoft data center, SOTA Cloud streamlines workflows and reduces administrative overhead. The company boasts performance that is reportedly up to 30 times faster than competing solutions and features over 100 integrations with various imaging hardware, practice management systems, and AI-powered diagnostic tools.

This broad compatibility is critical for a large-scale deployment across a diverse network of dental offices, each with its own unique set of existing equipment. The goal is to create a standardized, efficient system that accelerates data access and analysis without requiring a complete hardware overhaul at every location. The move to the cloud also positions PDS Health to more easily adopt future innovations in dental AI and analytics, ensuring its technology stack remains agile.

Forging a Unified Digital Health Identity

This technological upgrade serves a profound strategic vision: the full integration of oral and systemic health. For years, PDS Health has championed the "Mouth-Body Connection®," a concept grounded in clinical evidence that oral health is a critical component of overall well-being. This partnership is the technological manifestation of that philosophy.

By embedding SOTA Cloud's imaging data directly into each patient's Epic health record, the initiative creates a single, longitudinal view of a patient's health journey. PDS Health was the first dental support organization of its scale to fully implement Epic, a project that involved converting over 9.7 million patient records. This new phase layers rich diagnostic imaging onto that robust foundation.

For clinicians, this means a dentist can view a patient's full medical history, prescriptions, and lab results from within the same system where they analyze dental X-rays. Conversely, a primary care physician can access detailed oral health records and images, providing crucial context for diagnosing and managing systemic conditions like diabetes, cardiovascular disease, and autoimmune disorders that often have oral manifestations. This unified data environment is designed to enhance clinical collaboration and support earlier, more accurate diagnoses.

"This next phase of our partnership with PDS Health represents a shared commitment to modernizing dental care through technology that's scalable, secure, and connected," stated Albert Kim, CEO and Co-founder of SOTA Cloud. "We're excited to support PDS Health as they bring SOTA Cloud into more than 1,000 practices."

A Strategic Play for Market Leadership

The partnership and accompanying investment represent a calculated strategic move in the rapidly consolidating Dental Support Organization (DSO) market. By embracing cutting-edge cloud infrastructure and doubling down on its integrated care model, PDS Health reinforces its position as a technology pioneer, setting a high bar for competitors like Heartland Dental and The Aspen Group.

For SOTA Cloud, the deal is transformative. The strategic investment from PDS Health, following a recent investment from the Dental Innovation Alliance (DIA) VC fund, provides significant capital and market validation. The rollout across over 1,000 PDS Health practices dramatically increases SOTA Cloud's user base and solidifies its credibility as an enterprise-grade solution capable of supporting one of the nation's largest dental networks. This deep integration with Epic via PDS Health's Community Connect program—which extends its Epic instance to other providers—also gives SOTA Cloud a unique competitive advantage.

From Implementation to Clinical Impact

Deploying a new platform across more than a thousand locations is a monumental task, with challenges ranging from data migration and system integration to comprehensive staff training. The rollout, which is already underway and expected to continue through 2026, will be a complex logistical exercise. However, PDS Health's successful implementation of Epic—a project involving nearly 16,000 hours of training for almost 14,000 team members—demonstrates its proven capability in managing large-scale digital transformations.

The ultimate measure of success will be the impact on patient care. By enabling earlier detection of both oral and systemic diseases, the integrated system has the potential to shift the focus further toward preventive care, reducing the need for more invasive and costly treatments down the line. Patients also stand to benefit directly through Epic's MyChart portal, which will give them unprecedented access to their complete, unified health record, empowering them to take a more active role in managing their well-being.

As the deployment progresses, this initiative will serve as a powerful case study for the entire healthcare industry on how to effectively merge disparate clinical data streams to create a more intelligent, connected, and patient-centric system of care.