Dental schools have taught students that oral health and overall health are inseparable — that a cleaning appointment is also an opportunity to catch a warning sign about a patient’s heart, blood sugar or bone density. But belief in that model and the ability to practice it are two different things, according to Preston Raulerson, president of PDS Health Technologies.
The company built the first dental-optimized version of Epic, the electronic health record platform, in 2020. Since then, PDS has increasingly turned its attention to dental schools — not just as customers, but as the starting point for a workforce that already knows how to use integrated medical-dental records before it ever sees its first patient as a licensed dentist.
The problem: belief without practice
PDS Health Technologies built its Epic instance to give dentists direct access to a patient’s full medical record, aligning oral health treatment with a patient’s broader health picture. But when the company hired dental school graduates who had trained on the philosophy of medical-dental integration, it found a consistent gap.
“We had a lot of dental school students that we were hiring who believed in what we believed in, that dental care, oral health care, empowered by access to the patient’s medical record and medical chart, is better dental care,” Mr. Raulerson told Becker’s. “But what we were seeing is that we had a lot of these dental school students who believed in it, but had never practiced it.”
The gap wasn’t about clicking the right buttons, he said. It was a clinical instinct — knowing how to open a conversation with a patient differently once a dentist can see, for example, that the patient has diabetes or high blood pressure before ever walking into the room. PDS found itself retraining new hires not just on the software, but on a new way of thinking about a dental visit. That learning curve, Mr. Raulerson said, “increases the distance between a fresh dental school graduate and how we are hoping to have our clinicians operate.”
The fix: putting the tool in the classroom
The natural next step, according to Mr. Raulerson, was making sure dental schools that were already teaching the integration philosophy also gave students hands-on access to the technology behind it. PDS found its first dental school partner in 2024 and has extended its Epic instance to a handful of dental schools since.
Mr. Raulerson said the schools leaning hardest into the partnership are betting that graduates trained on a real integrated record — not just the concept of one — will be more prepared on day one.
“What we see is that students who have had access to Epic during their dental school careers are coming out not just ready to ramp up more quickly, but in the way that they adapt to having this information and treating patients,” he said.
Beyond the chair: an operations gap, too
The pipeline problem PDS is trying to solve isn’t purely clinical. Mr. Raulerson pointed to a second, related gap: dental schools train students well on clinical skills but rarely teach the business and reimbursement mechanics that determine whether a practice survives — regardless of whether that graduate ends up at a private practice, a federally qualified health center, a nonprofit or a health system.
“It’s really hard to perform your mission without having the associated margin,” Mr. Raulerson said. “You have to be able to operate and understand the drivers that are going to make you a successful clinician.”
Because PDS built its Epic instance to also be optimized for dental operations and revenue cycle — including how X-ray attachments flow into insurance claims to help control denials — schools partnering with PDS get exposure to that operational layer as well.
What the gap could look like in five years
Not every dental school will adopt this model, and Mr. Raulerson said that’s a legitimate outcome. Schools are weighing real capital trade-offs — competing investments like simulation labs or physical space needed to grow class sizes — against a technology upgrade.
Still, Mr. Raulerson expects the trend toward integrated dental-medical records to keep accelerating as value-based care models increasingly tie oral health and medical health incentives together. PDS Health Technologies built its own inventory management tool to fill a gap Epic doesn’t yet cover. Mr. Raulerson said he expects the next wave of adoption to come not from dental schools with a sister medical school already on Epic, but from smaller, standalone dental schools gaining access to Epic for the first time through partners like PDS.
The bet, from PDS’s perspective, is straightforward: graduates trained inside a fully integrated, operationally aware system will be more prepared — clinically and financially — the moment they leave school.
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