Online booking app dubbed ‘the Uber of dental appointments’

A web app which connects patients to available dental appointments has been compared to the convenience and immediacy of Uber.

Barnsley dentist Tristan Tinn created HelpDental to act as a ‘single direct-booking layer’ for dental appointments, avoiding the need for patients to trawl through practice websites, comparison sites, NHS portals and Facebook groups looking for availability.

The web app allows patients to type in their postcode and see every NHS and private dentist near them with real fees, ratings, opening hours and live availability where the practice’s booking software supports it. Where supported, the patient’s chosen appointment is booked directly into the practice’s diary.

Tristan agreed that HelpDental could fill a similar niche for dental bookings that Uber corned for taxis. He said: ‘Uber didn’t fix taxi dispatch, it replaced the phone call with a direct-booking layer. That’s the layer dentistry never grew. The clinical work happens at the practice, exactly as it always has. We just remove the friction in front.’

How many practices and patients is the dental booking app helping?

The team behind HelpDental said it had aggregated data from over 11,000 practices in more than 250 locations to put together the app’s listings. Practices have the option to claim their listing on the website and add further information.

Since its launch in November 2025, the current iteration of the site has been visited by roughly 500 patients.

‘The supply picture is more nuanced than the headlines suggest’

The motivation for creating the app came from Tristan’s discussions with patients who were constantly struggling to find appointments, particularly through the NHS. He said: ‘There were dentists with slots and patients with pain, and the two weren’t connecting. I built HelpDental to close that gap.’

He felt that when it comes to dental access, ‘the supply picture is more nuanced than the headlines suggest’. He continued: ‘With current technology it would be entirely possible to maintain a live national database of available appointments – what’s free, what’s not – and to match patients to last-minute cancellations and failures to attend in real time. Just like Uber would reroute a driver if a passenger cancelled.

‘The slots already exist somewhere most days. The problem is they sit in 11,000 separate systems and patients can’t see them. NHS capacity has its own contractual constraints that we can’t fix on our own, but a live discovery layer would make better use of every slot the system already pays for.’

For patients, Tristan hopes HelpDental will provide a single search pathway, honest pricing, education and a clear comparison between NHS and private options. While for practices, he foresees a commission-free route to more bookings.

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