The Group Dentistry Now Show: The Voice Of The DSO Industry

Eric Giesecke, CEO of Planet DDS, and Wardah Inam, CEO of Overjet, join the GDN Show. They discuss AI imaging trends and opportunities for DSOs and emerging dental groups.

Topics include:

Planet DDS and the acquisition of Apteryx imaging
Overview of Overjet’s AI technology
DSO trends and how cloud technology can help
Clinical streamlining and consistency through AI
How Overjet AI works with Denticon and Apteryx
AI technology and patient treatment, care, planning and outcomes
Much more

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Our podcast series brings you dental support organization and emerging dental group practice analysis, conversation, trends, news and events. Listen to leaders in the DSO and emerging dental group space talk about their challenges, successes, and the future of group dentistry. The Group Dentistry Now Show: The Voice of the DSO Industry has listeners across North & South America, Australia, Europe, and Asia. If you like our show, tell a friend or a colleague.

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Full Transcript:

Bill Neumann:

I’d like to welcome everybody to the Group Dentistry Now Show. I’m your host, Bill Neumann. And as always, thanks everybody for listening in today or you may be watching us on YouTube. So however, you are consuming this podcast, we really appreciate it. Always learn a lot when I’m doing these podcasts. And actually both individuals that we have on today are both CEOs and they were both on the podcasts before, separately though, so now we’ve brought them together. So we have the CEO of Planet DDS, Eric Giesecke. So welcome back Eric, thanks for being here.

Eric Giesecke:

Thanks for having me, Bill.

Bill Neumann:

And we have the CEO of Overjet, Wardah Inam. She is back. So Wardah, thanks for being here as well.

Wardah Inam:

Thank you, Bill.

Bill Neumann:

Yep. So maybe we’ll kind of go back in time a little bit and talk briefly about the podcast we had on previously and then we can get into the questions because I was looking back through my notes and going back through our library and so Eric, you were on back in September of 2020 where things looked a little bit different then.

So when we were talking last, you had just completed the acquisition of Apteryx, so that was pretty interesting because at that time there weren’t a lot of acquisitions going on. You think of September 2020, COVID was still a pretty big thing. So you were able to get an acquisition done during that time. And we talked about how that was pretty unique doing a lot of the calls over Zoom, the meetings over Zoom versus in person. But can you give us an update on Planet DDS in September of 2020 and maybe talk a little bit about how that Apteryx acquisition’s gone and how you’ve rolled that into the company.

Eric Giesecke:

Yeah, well thanks Bill again for having me. Yeah, it was a unique experience doing an acquisition in the middle of COVID. It was hard but thankfully we knew the Apteryx team fairly well, being their largest reseller of XVWeb cloud-based imaging software. So it’s gone really great. Cultures have been very similar in spite of the challenges of integrating during a time when you really can’t visit. Although we did some visiting towards the end of that phase of non-visiting I’d say. We were able to integrate the products in the teams pretty seamlessly. It’s elevated kind of Apteryx as a key brand within our portfolio of brands as a company, which as you know is Denticon, our practice management software, kind of the core system of record software. Apteryx, our imaging software legwork, which is kind of a patient acquisition, patient relationship management software and most recently CloudNine.

So we acquired CloudNine for those that are multi-specialty, it’s the leading practice management software for ortho and pedes and multi-specialty with a primary focus on ortho. Roughly 800 customers serving thousands of orthodontists across the country. So we’re really excited about that and that, from our perspective kind of rounds out very much our product suite as an integrated solution, which our intention is to integrate both Denticon and CloudNine such that if you are a multi-specialty office you can use kind of best of breed. But we’ve been really excited about that and we also were very fortunate enough to acquire the customers of QSI Dental, which I think everybody knows QSI from years ago as being the largest kind of on-prem provider of product management software for some of the really big DSOs. And so we brought 20 members of that team over and some really great customers. So we’ve been pretty busy, but things are going well.

Bill Neumann:

That’s great. Thanks for the update. So Wardah, last time we had you on it was April of 2021, so you were still in startup mode then, but you were on with Dental Care Alliance and Heartland Dental on that podcast. So maybe give the audience a brief overview of Overjet’s dental AI technology and then just maybe some of the updates since then. That’s almost two years ago.

Wardah Inam:

No, absolutely, Bill. And I would say one of the reasons when I connected with Eric was actually the acquisition as well. I think it was one of the smartest moves I’ve seen in dentistry made and I don’t think anybody is doing acquisition the way Eric is doing in Planet DDS. So, kudos to you Eric, I don’t think I’ve said it to you in person before and I didn’t even know the CloudNine strategy here as well. So that’s pretty cool. And in terms of our podcast, I think you were absolutely right, we were just even educating people around what they will be able to see in the future. And I think in a very short amount of time, I would say quite a few of your viewers and listeners are probably customers, if not of our technology, of other dental AI as well.

But I think it’s happened extremely fast. It was actually Mitch Oland who basically said 2022 will be the year for dental AI and I think he was absolutely right on that. I thought it’ll take a little longer for the DSO’s to get behind that. But just in general to recap around what dental AI is and how it is being utilized in practices right now, what Overjet does is we use computer vision in practices to understand dental x-rays, similarly how dentists would look at a dental x-ray. The difference is it’s more quantitative and we can do it across huge amount of data and it’s consistent. So every time we look at an X-ray we’ll have the same kind of output and that helps us look at all practice data and identify areas where you can have clinical improve improvement. But also more importantly it provides a tool to practices to provide a more comprehensive diagnosis and then be able to communicate with patients more effectively.

That really changes the game in terms of treatment acceptance rate and how patients understand their oral health as well as are more informed and are able to make better decisions about their health, which of course leads to overall health improvements as well. So that’s a short summary of it. I think just one thing to add is for people who have not seen this before, think about this as if you were a dentist and you went on an x-ray and marked up disease and what the tooth numbers were, et cetera, that’s what it can do, but do it automatically and do it pretty accurately as well. But yeah, that’s how I’ll summarize it.

Bill Neumann:

Thank you. And we’ll get into a lot more detail there. So that was perfect. Back to Eric. So we know you and Planet DDS, you work with a lot of DSOs emerging groups and large platforms as well. Wardah talked about 2022 being the year of dental AI. So let’s talk about some 2023 DSO trends and what you’re seeing, Eric, with some customers and maybe how cloud technology fits into some of those trends and challenges you may be seeing.

Eric Giesecke:

Sure. So I think AI is obviously a hot topic and we’ll dig more into that from a practice management and imaging perspective, I’m sure. But outside of AI, the trends that we’re seeing from a DSO perspective is really around patient experience, which I think people are starting to really focus on particularly as I think a younger generation starts to care more about convenience technology, how do we make it easy for people to appoint, reappoint, how do we make it easy for people to find financing options, all of those things, treatment plan acceptance, all those things are something we hear quite a bit about. I think the cloud helps with that in terms of obviously being able to deliver that easily as a patient experience. Obviously you can be on a tablet, you can access things, the text message which everyone likes to communicate by is easier I think done through a centralized cloud solution.

The second trend I would say is centralization. I think RCM is becoming more of a focus and how do we think about data standardization, which results in fewer adjustments, how do we build automation into the platform so we don’t have as many errors in standardization. I think being on a single system that you can access from anywhere really kind of helps either centralize and standardize. And then the third one I think is around, and this is something we’ve focused quite a bit on actually, is how do we make it easier for people in an office to provide the same standard of care or experience for patients?

So if you think about things like Four Seasons or Enterprise, big brands that you think about where you go to rent a car from Enterprise and the experience is always great and similar, how do you make sure across all of your offices that when you check in, the front desk person is asking you for all of the same information in all the offices and the software should help people do their jobs better in terms of making sure that they do that. It gives a sense of control from a DSO perspective, particularly as DSOs are scaling and acquiring and training and there’s turnover.

How does the software make the DSO able to provide a standard of patient experience that is consistent across all of its offices? So those are the three things, I think, if you think about what we’re hearing from a product perspective that are most prevalent.

Bill Neumann:

Wardah, from a clinical perspective, can you talk a little bit about Overjet’s technology and really maybe focus on streamlining and then how do you provide consistency when it comes to diagnosis and treatment planning?

Wardah Inam:

Yeah, so in terms of consistency, first of all, if you take 10 different dentist this, you’re going to have different diagnosis and treatment plans. Here of course, I think when people hear that for the first time they think, oh, it might be that dentists don’t know what they’re doing and that’s not true. You could have different treatment plans for the same disease that everybody is seeing the same way and you could have it because you might be optimizing for cost or you might be optimizing for time in terms of doing all the treatments at the same time or different treatment options that people might have. So there should be some variation as well in treatment planning. However, that information should be made more transparent.

So if you are trying to make a treatment plan based on cost, that should be something that you can adjust, or the patient can ask for, and that’s how we look at the treatment plan consistency, at least as we think about the diagnosis consistency. I think one is just the extra modality where it is very hard, even you get the best dentist to be able to read incipient carious lesions, and you’re not sure, it’s not like you’ve actually drilled in the tooth and you can see the carious lesion, you are using an extra modality. So there’s definitely these challenges there that this helps the dentist provide a better diagnosis. So the way to look at it is in the end it is the dentist who makes the final diagnosis, they’re the ones who make the final treatment plan and think of it as any other technology, whether it’s the cameras that you would use to better find things that you might have not seen or to communicate with the patients.

I think the way to think about Overjet’s AI is similar. So it helps you make sure that if you are looking at every x-ray, usually what happens is if you have say five conditions or five diseases and five different x-rays that have the condition, the dentist might notice a few of them, chart them out, but miss some other conditions et cetera. So it really helps you first look at every x-ray and other data points like charts, et cetera, very carefully because a dentist has very little time to look at this information as well because the patient is in the chair, they have to come in and communicate them a diagnosis very quickly as well.

So this can help you do that. And the other piece of it is that now you have quantitative information so you can see the outline of the decay and the patient can better understand why the dentist is recommending a particular treatment as well because no patient knows why sometimes the filling is recommended or crown is recommended and being able to understand that and understand it depends on how large this lesion is and it is very important. So I think that’s how at least we look at it in terms of providing much more comprehensive diagnosis and better communication with the patient as well.

Bill Neumann:

Eric, on the Planet DDS side of things, so Denticon and then Apteryx for the imaging, so we’ve got your practice management software and then we’ve got Apteryx for imaging, talk about dental AI technology and how that works with both imaging and the practice management software.

Eric Giesecke:

Yeah, so really happy to have a partnership with Overjet. With Wardah, we’ve worked really closely with the team for many months to start on the AI imaging side of things and explained pretty well how it works in terms of some of the benefits within the radiograph itself. So currently the crux of our integration is through Apteryx XVWeb. So when you open up an image or a series of images, we pass an image over to Overjet. Overjet runs their models to identify the areas of pathologies, they return back what’s called a JSON file, so think about plotting points, and then you click a button, you can toggle on the different pathologies to actually see on the radiograph the areas of potential things like decay.

So the cool thing about it is I think what Overjet’s doing in terms of thinking about the objectivity related to having a patient in the chair and being able to say, it’s not just me who has identified this cavity that you may not have any pain and we’ve all been there and been in a chair and someone saying you have three cavities.

Well my teeth don’t hurt, so I don’t know if I believe you, actually having an objective AI engine to confirm that I think will drive things like treatment acceptance. So that’s the current integration. We also pass on some additional data or will pass on some additional data to Overjet to do some cool things that Wardah can probably explain better than I can relate it to some past treatment and some analytics. But currently right now the focus has been around the AI overlay with the imaging, which we’re super excited about and we’ve got, I don’t know, Wardah if you know, probably 50 customers out there using today with really, really great response. So we’re really excited about the partnership and there’s clearly a lot of interest in it.

Bill Neumann:

That’s great. So it sounds like it’s just going to get be more integrated as time goes on and it sounds like you’ve got a lot of things planned in the future. Wardah, we talk about Overjet and your technology, can you discuss patient care treatment planning? And then I know that you have a case study which is pretty impactful, which talks about acceptance, treatment acceptance. So I’d love for you to touch on that case study that you recently did, but just talk about it in general, treatment planning and patient care.

Wardah Inam:

Yeah, so I think acceptance probably one of the most important metrics for any practice to improve because we know where these metrics are right now. On averfage it might be about 50%, in some practices even lower. And you’re talking about medically necessary treatments that patients are not accepting because they don’t understand their oral health, they do not know what tooth number two is, they don’t know what periodontal disease is.

So there is a lot of education that has to happen in dental practices for patients to better accept the treatments and get the treatments which is needed for their improvement of their oral health. I would say one is what the technology can do so it can help in communicating and the other is how it gets implemented in the dental practices as well. What we’ve seen is, and I think that this is public information, for example, Jefferson publicly released that Overjet and one more imaging technology, I think it was the scanners, they were able to double their treatment acceptance rate and I think it’s from 35 to 70. People shouldn’t expect that.

I think they did a fabulous job here, but that is something that they’ve actually publicly stated around a tremendous increase in treatment acceptance. We’ve also had across the board different practices, I think the number you mentioned, the 20% acceptance rate. So it is varying across practices right now because I think all of us know if you’ve seen one practice, you’ve seen one practice, there is a lot to be done here and I think this will only increase over time.

And we are seeing that happen across practices. The treatment acceptance rate takes some time. It’s not just that you have to just show the image and people will understand, it’s the talk track behind it and it’s when it’s shown and if say last time the patient was not shown this and now this is new information, how do you actually convey that? So there is some change management that needs to happen across these different organizations and I think that’s where DSOs are playing a big role in trying to understand that, figure out what is the best way. We are helping them as much as we can in providing this information and sharing with them.

But I would say we’re still in early stages because on one side we’re seeing if people have implemented very seriously huge gains, then we are seeing smaller gains as well. And it’s all right now and we are learning more in how to better utilize this information as well.

Bill Neumann:

Yeah, some great points there. What I’m referring to is a study that shows an increase of 21% in case acceptance for patients who were shown their x-rays with the AI overlay. And to your point, I’m sure a lot of that has to do with the education process ahead of time. So when do you do this, how do you do it? And a lot of it is probably just practice. So with any type of treatment acceptance, it’s getting comfortable educating patients on the use of the AI and the more comfortable the docs get, the more comfortable they are and probably the better the results are with treatment acceptance.

Wardah Inam:

Yeah, absolutely.

Bill Neumann:

So Eric, back to you. This is always kind of a fascinating thing because technology is moving so quickly now and I think it can be overwhelming. So how do you really explain or maybe alleviate some of the issues that could happen if you fall behind with adopting technology? Because sometimes it’s easier to say, hey, we might want to wait, hold on or wait, there’s too much all at once, but what are some of the risks associated with that?

Eric Giesecke:

Yeah, no, I think that that’s an excellent question. So I think the risk in a competitive consolidating environment like dental from a DSO perspective is that… And I think everyone has probably thought about this, at some point people want to exit and when they exit they will have a private equity fund that has a diligence firm that comes in and wants to see a bunch of data. And when you can’t answer that question and you can’t pull reporting across multiple systems, it doesn’t look good and it definitely impacts your valuation. So just from a scalability standpoint, standardization, reporting, if you’re not thinking about ways to be able to grow quickly, to move people on a single platform, standardized training across all your locations so the experience is the same, you’re going to be left behind I think in a competitive M&A environment ultimately, which I think every DSO is thinking about or should be thinking about when they bring on financial sponsor or thinking about the ultimate exit.

So I think that’s the risk. It’s hard. We work really hard to try to make it less hard. Converting software is not easy. I think I’ve heard it referred to as a root canal or open heart surgery even, which I think might be slightly hyperbolic, but it is, everyone’s gone through a bad conversion in their lives because there’s data degradation they have to train.

So we as a company because we focus primarily on the DSO space and work with half of the top 25 DSOs have thought a lot about ways we can take some of the burden off the customer in terms of doing that, but I think it’s a necessary pain you have to take in order to scale. And I think that earlier you take it in your growth journey, the easier it is. And oftentimes we find that the right time for a lot of folks to think about that too is once they’ve made an acquisition and they’re on a couple platforms and it’s like, well what do we do with this next group of offices that are on an old kind of antiquated on-premise system? That’s a good time to then think about consolidation. But I absolutely think that you need to be in… Not just about Planet DDS, other class solutions out there, but you need to be on something that ultimately is going to allow you to present well when the private equity fund comes in and you want them to pay you a bunch of money.

Bill Neumann:

And it’s a great point and I think especially in today’s economic environment where you could create value through acquisition. Now it’s not as easy to do that ’cause it costs you more. So now it’s a little bit more focused on, all right, what is the platform actually, how well does it communicate together? What we doing in practice one and are we doing the same thing in practice 10?

And I think that also goes for the adoption of any kind of technology and whether it’s Overjet technologies. That, to me, done correctly, builds value that you can’t build just by adding additional practices. So great, great points. So back to you Wardah, little bit more clinical. So talk a little bit about, you mentioned it earlier, so how does Overjet really look at bone loss? How does it quantify bone loss? And then also how does it work? And maybe we don’t have to get super technological about this or super analytical, but how does it analyze the radiograph? So just how does that work and then how does it know about bone loss? How can it see that?

Wardah Inam:

Yeah, so I think before Overjet, two dentists will look at it, one would say there’s bone loss, the other would say there’s no bone loss. And now the question is what is bone loss? So everybody has that bone level that exists, which it might be anywhere from two to 2.5 millimeters, but if it starts to increase, that’s where you have disease emerging as well. So I think for us, technically we measure those key points, we measure the distance and that’s in pixels and then we have to get to millimeters. And we have patented technology around most accurately measuring those millimeters and it’s a challenge.

And there are tolerances around it, et cetera. But that’s a real challenge and that’s why people think Overjet’s technology is so much more accurate than others. And it is the work that has been done there. So once you can measure, it really changes the game. Right now you’re not talking about is there bone loss, is there no bone loss, we can say there’s four millimeters, three millimeters of bone loss and you might treat things very differently depending on how much that bone loss is, and how severe the condition is and how you want to treat that as well. So I think to your point of around standardization, this is where protocols can come and across the different DSOs on when do you treat X. Every insurance company has its own criteria around this and it varies. And how do you actually understand all the criteria and how do you keep it?

The good thing is our software abstracts that out so you don’t have to understand every insurance criteria. So that’s around bone levels and why that’s so important and why bone loss is important is for periodontal disease.

It is one of the most common conditions that exist or diseases that exist in adult population and it has connections to overall health, diabetes, heart disease, et cetera. And it is very important not only just consistency, between different practices point of view, but also making sure that DSOs are taking care of the oral health of their patients as well. And if say dentists wanted to do it themselves, now you’re talking about at least two measurements that they’re taking on two surfaces on every tooth, so if you have 32 teeth, at least you’re taking 64 measurements and going and using your measuring tools to do that.

Nobody’s going to do that manually. It’ll take a long period of time for anybody to do that. So it completely automates that process and provides this ability that can really help then just make much more accurate and better decisions because that’s been done for you. And then optical illusions sometimes play a role as well if you have a tilted tooth, et cetera, as humans, when you eyeball stuff, we don’t get it right. There’s no way you can get three millimeters or is it 3.5 millimeters, et cetera. So you actually really need a measuring tool, whether you do want to do it manually or whether you want Overjet to do it automatically, that’s the differentiator here in helping provide a much more consistent diagnosis as well.

Bill Neumann:

So Eric, we touched on this in this question prior, but yeah, maybe a little bit more along the lines of people that are using the traditional practice management software where you’re not cloud based, what are some insights people that have made the switch going from legacy to cloud-based, what they’ve noticed and maybe the ones that weren’t so sure that they wanted to make the change, made the change and some of the benefits and maybe some of the surprises that they had?

Eric Giesecke:

I think that’s a great question because it is oftentimes not fully apparent to groups until they’re on the software for a couple of months and they really realize… We go through sales process, we demo the software, we show as much as we can, but I think until you’re actually using it regularly and seeing the benefit of it, you don’t really fully appreciate the value of being on a single system. So if I had to categorize or rank it, I’d say it’s probably the first kind of most prominent thing we hear in terms of the value of being on a single cloud based system is really centralization. And I don’t have to put in a separate insurance plan and fee scheduled for every office. I can go ahead and do that across all of my different practices. The second thing is probably an example is reporting.

So right now if you’re on a bunch of different on-premise systems, you have to either connect to them somehow, pull the data, use a third party, and that third party has to deal with different types of data structure that’s not all similar and be able to figure out what adjusted net production is, and in this system versus that system, which is really complicated and changes.

With a solution like Denticon or a cloud-based system, you click a button and you can be confident that all of your reporting is available, which I think is great not only from an insights perspective, but you can make sure you pay your doctors correctly on however you pay your doctors quickly and correctly. So there’s just a lot I think benefits of being on that. And then I think it’s the insights that you can have. There’s one theme that I hear the most I think about from our customers after being on the software for a while, it’s the control that they get by being on a single system.

If you’re a C-suite executive or you’re an operations person and you want to go see what’s going on in a particular office, you just log into your browser and select the office and you can access all of the data as if you’re in the office itself. Sounds kind of elementary or not that impressive I think from a software perspective, but it really is powerful for people that aren’t used to be able to doing that, to do that because they’re just not in that office that day. It’s probably harder to explain, it’s easier to see, but once you’re on a single system, the control you get by being standardized on a cloud-based system is really quite incredible.

Bill Neumann:

So let’s switch gears to what DSOs love to hear, efficiency. So Wardah, can you talk a little bit about the efficiencies that a group practice or a DSO can expect once they start using Overjet?

Wardah Inam:

Yeah, so the experience of the dentist really matters as well. So when you’re talking about more junior dentists who are coming out of school, et cetera, even the fact that when they’re making the diagnosis on their own and they have lack of confidence sometimes around that. So that’s a big piece that we don’t talk about enough in these conversations because that is the reality where DSOs do depend a lot on young dentists coming out of school and having tools which give them just the confidence which improves efficiency as well because you are making a diagnosis with and without Overjet and that gives you ability to just be more confident in your diagnosis and better communicate with the patients so that they’re accepting the treatments as well.

There are other, I would say efficiency gains just in general as we are bringing information such as, for example, charting information, et cetera, and linking it together with the imaging information as well so that you’re not trying to understand. And that’s where, for example, periodontal disease diagnosis that comes into play where you need the two information as well.

And then being able to just make sure that what their diagnosis’ and what we are uncovering as insights in this case of things that they might have missed, et cetera, that helps them do that better. In the future we’re going to see more in terms of auto charting and I think that would be a game changer in efficiency. Right now it is not the technology, it’s on the AI side, it’s more on the practice management systems and how you integrate with them and how do you push this data and that’s going to change very quickly as well. But I think that’s something that we are very looking forward to and I think a lot of DSOs are very looking forward to as well, especially when you talk about a new patient, new patient comes in, all that information needs to be charted and doing that more effectively is something that can improve efficiencies significantly.

Bill Neumann:

So let’s expand on that a little bit Eric, as far as another thing that’s important to DSO is ROI, so how can the leaders at these groups measure ROI and then also what are the metrics that they should be tracking?

Eric Giesecke:

Yeah, I think I hit on it a little bit, I think it’s treatment plan acceptance. So if you’ve got AI imaging that’s tied specifically to something like Denticon or the PMS, you can see before and after treatment plan acceptance and you can see just increases in production associated with that acceptance. We’ve started running a couple of case studies with a couple of customers. Been a lot of interest and a lot of adoption with AI.

We’ve been doing this for a couple months now with Overjet. Now people are starting to ask, okay, how do I figure out whether it’s really kind of driving the key metrics in the ROI, as you say Bill, that justified the increased cost? So I think a lot of it is just running those reports and if you’re using Denticon and Apteryx and Overjet, then you can run a before and after treatment plan acceptance report by provider and you can also run production by provider. You can even break that down by treatment code. So there’s a lot. I think that’s the fundamental ROI that you want to look at is how many people are accepting treatment that are using the AI technology to drive that, and then how many people are actually doing that treatment associated with some of the diagnosis?

Bill Neumann:

So it looks like as we start to wrap things up here, I want to make sure we didn’t miss anything. So Wardah, do you have any final thoughts?

Wardah Inam:

I would just say it’s still early stages and this is when people think about, oh should they be early adopters or should they wait for the technology to mature further, et cetera. I would say if it’s a group, it’s probably the best time to get involved because they can help influence what the future looks like here because it isn’t that this has been done somewhere else and there’s a playbook here. This is us working with our customers to define how we want this to happen. And being able to be in that position where especially the DSOs here can start to define how they would want care to happen, how they would want the protocols to be followed?

And the earlier you are in the pace, the more you are impacting the roadmap as well. So it’s one of the things where the pros and cons are there. That’s the clearance criteria. So it’s definitely crossed that threshold, but now it is, what’s the experience that DSOs want for themselves, for their patients, and being able to start to define those as well and working together collaboratively as an industry to say what do we want the future of the industry to be?

Bill Neumann:

Eric, how about you? Final thoughts?

Eric Giesecke:

Yeah, I’ll just echo that. I think we’re just scratching the surface from an AI perspective. Imaging is done a ton on the payer side and I think is really innovative on that side. But from practice management, integrated imaging, AI perspective, there’s so much stuff to be done and I think we’re really kind of trying to figure out what that is and where to focus.

Wardah mentioned auto charting, that’s an area we’re thinking about, real-time claim adjudication, advancing against claims based on the way the AI engine determines whether that claim will be paid. There’s a lot of things about trying to figure out within a data set what treatment is available and how we communicate with patients to bring them in the office as opposed to just chairside diagnosis. So there’s so much stuff to do and a lot of work, wood to chop, and we’re fortunate to have a lot of DSO customers that talk to us and we’re fortunate to have a partnership with Overjet. So we’re really excited about the future.

Bill Neumann:

Great. So let me ask you this Eric, and then I’ll ask Wardah, if people want to find out more about Planet DDS, Denticon, Apteryx, how can they do that?

Eric Giesecke:

Best way to do is visit the website. Just request more information there. It’s probably the fastest way to do it. If you’ve got a contact or if you want to email sales@planetdds or info@planetdds, you can do that if you prefer to do email. I won’t give out my cell phone number, but it’s actually on the internet somewhere. I think.

Bill Neumann:

We won’t give that out ’cause you probably won’t want to come back on the show for a third time, for sure.

Eric Giesecke:

That’s right.

Bill Neumann:

What we will do is we’ll drop the URL for the websites and those email addresses. Wardah, how can they find out more about Overjet?

Wardah Inam:

So similarly, overjet.com, and go going there, I think there should be a get demo link and they can get a demo and understand more effectively as well. Planet DDS is a customer and they’re using XVWeb, they can reach out to their rep as well.

Bill Neumann:

That’s great. And we’ll drop those URLs and then the demo link in the show notes as well. Well, thank you Eric Giesecke, thanks for being on the show. Wardah Inam, thanks again, and this second time in now, so hopefully you’ll come back for a third time. We really appreciate it. It’s amazing how far both of you have come your organizations in a short period of time and the next time you’re on, who knows where you’ll be, right?

Thanks everybody for listening in today. Like I said, we’ll drop all those links in the show notes so you can reach out to Eric and Wardah and find out more, and you’ll probably see them in some of the many upcoming DSO meetings. I see Eric and Wardah at just about every single one of them and there are a lot of them that are out there. Again, thanks for listening and watching. I’m Bill Neumann and this is the Group Dentistry Now Show.

Wardah Inam:

Thank you, Bill.

Eric Giesecke:

Thanks, Bill.