Over the past few years, dental AI has become more widespread throughout the industry, with more dentists and practices choosing to integrate the technology.
The initial response has been overall positive, with practices and DSOs improving the patient experience and increasing efficiency.
As dental AI continues to mature, AI automation of the backend dental practice tasks are next on the list for VideaHealth, a dental AI developer.
Florian Hillen, the company’s founder and CEO, recently connected with Becker’s to talk about where VideaHealth is aiming to advance AI next.
Note: Responses were lightly edited for clarity and length.
Question: With dental AI becoming more established, where do you see it heading next?
Florian Hillen: I think the market will continue to adopt clinical AI and X-ray overlay technologies. Once you’ve used the AI, it becomes obvious that it’s good for your patient, it’s good for the practice, it’s good clinically and economically. I think we will see a massive influx and adoption of additional AI products, which will help you to navigate your practice better. Since COVID, it has become very hard to hire the right talent and there’s a lot of talent shortages. Leaning into AI products that can help you give back time for you to do some of these tasks or spend more time with your patients will be very relevant.
Our hope is that dental AI can automate a large portion of the manual labor prone and error prone tasks in the dental office. Things like submitting claims, charting treatments and taking notes. We believe that we can automate the large majority of manual, redundant, labor intense tasks. Our mission is for the dentist to be able to spend their time on the things they love doing and not so much on the things they need to do.
Q: What hurdles do dental practices and DSOs face when integrating AI, and how does VideaHealth help solve them?
FH: The most important thing is to get the entire team behind the why of integrating AI into the practice. You know, it’s not like, you know, hey, ChatGPT is there. The why is not just to adopt AI, the why is to make the job easier, better and more streamlined. Also, making continuous change management, especially the first 30 to 90 days, that is really where it matters. We have an entire training, onboarding and customer success team. We also have continuous check ins, post launch. The dentists and practices who integrate our technology have access to a huge online library of training. At this point, we have over 50,000 dental clinicians using our platform every day.
Q: How are payers responding to AI-supported diagnoses in dentistry today?
FH: At this point AI is considered supportive additional evidence, but it still hasn’t fundamentally changed the process. I do think we are going to see this process change, especially over the next few years. We are working with partners and large DSOs to change the overall process to make the back and forth between payer and provider more streamlined.
Q: What are some capabilities you hope dental AI can do for dentists and practices in the future?
FH: Insurance companies accept the AI-supported diagnosis becoming the new standard of care and reject less claims. At the end of the day, dentists are not over diagnosing, they are typically under diagnosing. That’s what insurance companies always get wrong, and so ideally that they accept that and the payouts to dentists is faster and higher.
