Artificial intelligence will soon change how just about everything in the dental office is done, according to one executive.
Sundeep Rawal, DMD, the senior vice president of implant support services for Aspen Dental, recently joined Becker’s “Dental + DSO Virtual Event” to discuss the evolution of dental technology and how he sees it impacting patient care and practice operations.
Editor’s note: Responses were lightly edited for length and clarity.
Question: How do you see dental technology evolving over the next five years?
Dr. Sundeep Rawal: Dentistry will look nothing like it does today. There’s no other way of saying it. How we have adopted these technologies and how we’ve created use cases for these technologies — it’s just the tip of the iceberg. I think everything we do in dentistry will be touched in some way, shape or form by AI, either on the front end, on the patient-facing [and] provider-facing side of it, [or] in the back end, on the business side of dentistry. AI will pervade everything we do. When it comes to clinical care, AI is going to change how we think about design work. It’s going to obviously impact manufacturing [and] diagnostics, and so what it really means is that the dental office of tomorrow will look nothing like the dental office of today.
What you’ll see is really a complete change in the delivery of care model that we are accustomed to. When you think about what happens in the office — a patient comes in, and there’s a procedure to come up with a diagnosis, treatment plans are formulated, and then therapy is executed — a lot of that is going to be condensed. It’s going to become very standardized. Patients will expect this level of fidelity in their oral healthcare. From a provider standpoint, it’s going to really change how we’re able to deliver care, because what will happen is you’ll be able to come in and in a very short order, come up with a predictable plan that will lead to predictable outcomes based on data. Then, when you start to execute that therapy, things will happen in very short order, meaning you’ll have things like real time, actionable things that will allow you to deliver care effectively on the spot … When a patient comes to the office, the experience will be more predictable, diagnosis and treatment plans will become standardized or more objective [and] based on data that provides more predictable outcomes, decision-making will be rapid, and then on top of that, execution of care, in many respects, will become, for lack of a better word, instantaneous. Patients will be able to get the care they need in an almost instantaneous fashion, no different than where the rest of society is going.
We live in a society where everything is effectively on demand, and I don’t think healthcare in general should be any different. I don’t think healthcare has really kept up with where society’s changed. I think the model of dental care in this country being less affiliated with the bureaucracy of healthcare and more to the consumer side has allowed us to be really nimble and be able to deliver care in ways that are going to outpace the rest of medicine. So I think in five years, if you need care in a dental office, 80-85% of it will be done the same day with really objectified decision-making, really data-driven decision-making that leads to really predictable outcomes.
