The Group Dentistry Now Show: The Voice of the DSO Industry – Episode 84

Dr. Eric Tobler, National Clinical Director, Regional President, Board of Directors of Mortenson Dental Partners, and Dr. Christopher Balaban, Clinical Director of Overjet, discuss dental artificial intelligence and its impact on patient care and the dental industry.

Key takeaways:
– What is AI in dentistry and why is it such a hot topic
– Main use cases for AI in dentistry
– Feedback from both dentists and staff
– ROI and measuring AI success
– Benefits of Overjet AI

To Learn More Visit https://www.overjet.ai/

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Our podcast series brings you dental support 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 everyone to The Group Dentistry Now Show. I am Bill Neumann, and as always, we thank our listeners. If you’re listening in on Apple, Google, or Spotify, thanks for listening in, you’re watching us on YouTube or you find us on and groupdentistrynow.com. Without an audience, we wouldn’t have a show. And of course, without great guests, we wouldn’t have an audience. So the topic today is leveraging artificial intelligence in group practices and DSOs. A lot of talk about AI everywhere. And in particular, I think in our industry, we hear a lot of talk about it. Not everybody may know exactly what it is. It probably covers a lot of different things. So we’re going to get into AI in the dental industry, applications now, what the future looks like. So I’ll introduce you to our next two guests, who are both dentists. We have Dr. Chris Balaban. He is the clinical director for Overjet, and he’s also a practicing dentist in Boston, Massachusetts. So Chris, welcome to The Group Dentistry Now Show.

Dr. Chris Balaban:

Yeah, Bill. Thanks so much for having me. Really appreciate it.

Bill Neumann:

This is going to be a fun conversation today. Going to maybe clear up some misconceptions about AI. And then for the second time on The Group Dentistry Now Show show, we have Dr. Eric Tobler. So I don’t know if you remember, Eric, but there’s a lot going on at this time. So in March of 2020, oh, about March 15th, 18th, somewhere around there, Dr. Tobler came on the show, talk a little bit about COVID and how Mortenson Dental was handling COVID. At the time, a lot of the practices were shut down. They were doing some emergent care in some of the locations. So it was a really interesting conversation. Can almost go back in time and listen to that podcast two years ago, how things have really changed. So you probably remember that one, Eric.

Dr. Eric Tobler:

I’m so glad we’re not talking about COVID today. I’ll say that.

Bill Neumann:

That’s all we’re going to do. That’s the only COVID we’re going to talk about. So anyway, Dr. Tobler is the national clinical director for Mortenson Dental. He’s also on their board of directors and he’s the regional president of Stonehaven Dental. So thanks and for come to the show.

Dr. Eric Tobler:

So great to be here, Bill. Thank you.

Bill Neumann:

Great. So while we’re on you, Dr. Tobler, a little bit of your background would be great, and then Chris can fill us in on background.

Dr. Eric Tobler:

Yeah. So I’ve been practicing dentistry for about 15 years in Utah, started a group practice with my father and brother, and we were able to grow it from there. And about seven years ago, we joined Mortenson Dental Partners. That was founded about 40 years ago by Dr. Wayne Mortenson. And that group has now grown to [inaudible 00:03:15], and we’re one of the largest employee owned DSOs in the country.

Bill Neumann:

What was the number of practices there? You cut out for a second.

Dr. Eric Tobler:

140.

Bill Neumann:

  1. Okay. And Stonehaven was your group that you built and then partnered with Mortenson on.

Dr. Eric Tobler:

Yep. That’s exactly right.

Bill Neumann:

Okay. And just in Utah, or any other states besides Utah and Stonehaven?

Dr. Eric Tobler:

Yeah. So Stonehaven, just 10 practices right here in the state of Utah, along the Wasatch Front, home to great skiing and great dentistry.

Bill Neumann:

Yeah, that sounds good. And I was looking at your background a little bit. It looks like you enjoy skiing, mountain biking, and mixed martial arts. So we better watch what we say here.

Dr. Eric Tobler:

That’s right.

Bill Neumann:

All right. Thanks, Eric. Chris, talk to me a little bit about you’re a practicing dentist in Boston. I’d really love to find out how you got involved in AI. What was the catalyst for getting involved in AI?

Dr. Chris Balaban:

Yeah. So I graduated in 2016 from Boston universe and I’d been practicing in the Boston area for a couple years, and it was a Saturday that I was actually covering in my office, that young, brilliant scientist from MIT walked into my operatory. And she had been working on autonomous systems and medical imaging in the medical space with respect to MRIs and had this idea about applying basically what she had been working on and researching on the medical side to the dental field. Long story short, that ended up becoming our CEO and founder of our company, Dr. Wardah Inam. And I had been brought on early on to really try to help shape and direct some of the clinical vision of the product.

Dr. Chris Balaban:

And that was, again, back in 2018. I guess, three and a half years, or almost four years later, we’re almost 75 full-time employees strong. We’ve rallied a lot of support around the company. We’ve got a lot of hardworking individuals that have been developing this technology for the industry. I’ve been doing this full time with the company for a little while now, so it’s been an interesting journey. And again, I hope we get to dive into a little bit more of that today.

Bill Neumann:

Yeah, for sure. Why don’t we dive into it now? We do talk about it as a hot topic. You think of what’s top of mind in the dental industry and maybe overshadowing AI and technological advances might be what overshadows most industries now is recruitment and retention. But besides that, I would say technology, and in particular, AI, is one of those areas that is evolving pretty quickly. I think we see AI in a lot of our daily lives. We may not know that’s what it is, but let’s talk a little bit about AI in general, and then, why is it relevant in dentistry?

Dr. Chris Balaban:

Sure. The dental world, and Eric can speak to that because he’s got a lot of data that’s swirling around him when it comes to multi-practice or even single practice ownership, and most of this data for the history that we’ve known, it has been all over the place in a very unstructured format. And what AI on a high level is able to do, and we’ll dive a little deeper into exactly what we’re doing and how it applies, is really taking a lot of that unstructured format, processing and passing it through algorithms that have been developed to interpret it, similar to a way that a human being can interpret it, but at a much larger, faster, more effective and quantitative scale, and structure it all into whatever format we actually want it to be in, but in particular, in a format that would be clinically relevant.

Dr. Chris Balaban:

And again, that can apply to radiographs, for example, that we’re able to process tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands, millions of images in a very short period of time through algorithms that have been trained to basically extract clinical features that we as clinicians would extract on a daily basis and then quantify those, apply evidence based criteria around those findings, and present them to patients or clinicians for more standardized, improved quality of care. So I would say that’s one example, but that type of artificial intelligence that we’re currently developing can be applied to interpretation of chart notes, interpretation of photography, interpretation of different types of radiography. It’s a type of technology that can really have a broad spectrum of use across clinical practice and across the industry.

Bill Neumann:

So Dr. Tobler, as far as your role at Mortensen, why did you start to look at AI? What was the reasoning behind it? And talk to us a little bit about how you’re using it.

Dr. Eric Tobler:

Yeah. So I think the thing that really appealed most to me about diagnostic AI in dentistry specifically was the ability to give our clinicians a greater level of confidence and accuracy in their diagnosis. So for me as a dentist, I’ve been extremely fortunate. I grew up in a big practice with my dad and my brother, two of the best clinicians I’ve ever met. And now our group has grown to have even more dentists here within our group, and they’re amazing. But when we get together, let’s say a morning meeting, just the doctors get together and we go through a diagnosis, go through x-rays, even with that group that we’ve been working together for years and, like I said, some of the most respected people I know, there’s still times that we disagree on potential diagnoses.

Dr. Eric Tobler:

And so that really opened up my mind to, okay, what else can we do to give our doctors greater levels of confidence in their diagnosis? And so looking at the AI that’s out there and the ability to show our patients where the decay is with Overjet and with AI, I think that really was the initial appeal to it is both from the clinician’s perspective, having that additional confidence and accuracy. And then from the patient’s perspective, if we could pass that confidence onto them, there’s a huge opportunity for us there.

Bill Neumann:

So, Dr. Balaban, I’d like to build on that a little bit. So you touched on it a little bit earlier, some of the use cases for the platform, but can we get a little bit deeper into that?

Dr. Chris Balaban:

Yeah, absolutely. I’ll piggyback off of what Dr. Tobler just alluded to there is, we know that there is an inherent standardization issue. And again, it may not be an issue, it’s just reality, where if multiple individuals, clinically trained individuals are looking at the same situation, that we can arrive at different conclusions. Even we as individual clinicians, if we look at the same situation days, weeks, months apart, under different lighting, under different stresses, under different circumstances, we may arrive at slightly different conclusions than we did the time before. So with respect to standardization, some of the use cases that we’ve been able to develop at Overjet, I’ll highlight maybe two or three of them, is Dr. Tobler mentioned decay. And so our ability to actually identify carries radiographically, and we’ll keep it to the radiographic realm right now, is extremely impressive because of how these actual algorithms are trained and how they learn and how they develop.

Dr. Chris Balaban:

One clinician sees a finite amount of radiographic examples in their career. I’m at the beginning of my career, six years out. Dr. Tobler has been doing this for a little bit longer than I have, and his father’s been doing it for a lot longer than both of US. But we are only able to see so a certain amount of clinical situations in our lifetime. And how these algorithms and technology are built out is that they learn from hundreds, thousands, millions of different examples. And those examples are fed into the systems by various clinicians. We have to label a lot of data in order to train these algorithms to detect decay, for example. So when an algorithm possibly says that there’s a decay on the distal of tooth number 29 that’s into the dentin versus incipient in the enamel, the prediction that it’s making, at least at this point and moving forward in the future, is based on more data than tens or hundreds of dentists have seen in their lifetimes.

Dr. Chris Balaban:

And so it’s a remarkable concept to think about how many examples of a specific scenario these algorithm have been trained on before they actually make their interpretation or prediction on that image. The great thing about this technology is that it doesn’t forget. It only continues to learn and get better, so long as you continue to feed it positive information versus negative information. So the ability to identify decay on an image is as good, if not better, than an average group of clinicians at the moment. And we know that from studies that we’ve run with other groups internally through our regulatory pathways. At the current moment, a lot of the algorithms that we’ve developed are at that level. And so you can speak to bone levels, for example, where we have to actually plot between two anatomical landmarks on a radiograph to say, “How much distance exists between those two points?”

Dr. Chris Balaban:

We know that at the moment, that’s an extremely important quantitative feature of an x-ray, because we’ve never been able to really measure bone levels. And yes, you can do it with certain tools. For example, if you’re using your radiographic software, you can plot different points, and we use that for endodontic determinations, but it’s a very manual process and it’s also a very subjective process. So we’re able to, again, in near real time, auto-populate radiographs with findings that a clinician would use walking into an operatory, that a hygienist would use to communicate to a patient, and that a patient could actually use to understand what we’re talking to them about. Patients don’t understand very well black, white, and gray shadows that we point to. But when we’re able to actually colorize those and quantify them and say, “You have a large lesion here that’s outlined in red, that’s approaching the nerve,” and we can actually begin to highlight all those features, it empowers both the clinician and the patient to make better decisions about the treatment that they’re going to potentially undergo.

Dr. Chris Balaban:

So again, carries detection, bone levels, calculus detection, [inaudible 00:14:36], impacted wisdom teeth. Those are some of, I would say, the features that we’ve come to near clinical confidence on where we’re able to actually leverage those in the workflow. As we continue to knock some of those off, we’ll get into more abstract concepts with respect to other pathologies that are not as common. And the reason that those are harder to work on is because not that much data exists around that specific pathology, if you will. Yeah, that’s what we’ve been working on from an actual use case standpoint.

Bill Neumann:

Dr. Tobler, I’d love to hear from you a little bit about Mortensen. Of these use cases, what are you finding that you’re comfortable with right now? What seems to be what you focused on?

Dr. Eric Tobler:

Yeah. I couldn’t agree with… What Chris said is exactly right. Evidence based dentistry is the golden standard. It’s what we’re all seeking for. And so as a clinician, that’s why we go to CE. That’s why we collaborate together is to try to just do everything we can to improve our own individual ability to diagnose, and with these millions of data points that we’re able to bring in. I feel like for us, the primary reason we are looking at it is for diagnosis of decay and periodontal disease. That’s definitely, I think, where Overjet shines. And so, as we look at that, if we consider just the opportunity that we have to provide better care for our patient, to be able to detect carries earlier, that is so much better for the clinician and tremendously just holds such an opportunity for the patient as well. I think for us, that’s really where we saw the number one opportunity, just in improving our level of care through more accurate and early diagnosis.

Bill Neumann:

Both of you talked a lot about accuracy, really assisting the clinician. I’m curious, I’d love to hear perspective from both of you, as far as any type of possible pushback from clinicians initially, whether it’s the fear of the technology or the fear that AI’s going to take over, that this is the thought, that it may take somebody’s job away from them, versus that’s here to help make you a better clinician, almost mentor you in some way or give you that clinical confidence. I’d love to hear, Dr. Tobler, if you can touch on that.

Dr. Eric Tobler:

Yeah. Yeah. I’ll talk about a few things on that. So as a company, we’ve really tried to focus on being on the cutting edge of technology. And implementation with that is key. So over the past year, we were able to implement prime scan scanners across all of our practices, and the implementation there has been really good. We’ve had huge success in clinical improvements. We’ve measured that through remake rates with crown and bridge. But it took us a long time to get those. So in 2018, as a company, we did an evaluation of scanners. We sent them across to each of our regions, had some of our top clinicians try out close to 10 scanners. And the data that came back was no, none of the above. We didn’t even ask that question. It wasn’t one of the options.

Dr. Eric Tobler:

We said, “Which one do you enjoy most? What do you want to go to next?” And the answer was none of the above resoundingly from them. We pushed pause on that and let the technology catch up. Because technology’s great, but only when it’s used to support great clinical dentistry. It can’t get in the way of it. And so with Overjet, it’s kind of the same thing. I think that this tool, as we’re implementing it now, as we get the feedback from our clinicians, they are loving it. And the reason they love it is because it fits in their workflow well, and they just view it as one more tool. Overjet isn’t diagnosing the patient. It’s not telling you what the treatment is. It’s just one more tool in addition to probing oral examination, radiographs, intraoral photo, CBCT. It’s just one more piece of the puzzle that brings in information for the clinician to process, work through with the patient, and give a best possible solution for that outcome that we’re all looking for.

Bill Neumann:

Chris, I don’t know if you have any more feedback on that.

Dr. Chris Balaban:

He took all the words out of my mouth. I’m going to say that, putting it as simplistically as I can, is the best chess players in the world, they play chess against AI, and it’s to make them better. It’s to augment what they already are masters at doing. And we, as clinicians, we do what we do very well. And this is a tool that helps a clinician see better, explain better, miss less potential findings that they may not have seen. It’s like loops. If you want to see better, you can work under magnification. And a technology like this helps the clinicians, no question, identify potential areas of concern that they can pass along that information to their patient in a far more accurate, confident, and quantified manner. So I would just say it’s a tool here to augment what we already do well.

Bill Neumann:

So Dr. Balaban, I’d love to ask you this question a little bit about DSOs, could be smaller groups. But at the practice level, how do you see it impacting the practice, the clinicians at the practice level? And then I’d also love to hear maybe more from an analytical standpoint, is there a way that you can take this data and really benchmark, so figure out how AI is being used at practice A, B, F and look at things and hopefully be able to educate the clinicians at each location based on some of that data?

Dr. Chris Balaban:

Yeah. On a workflow level, if we could just speak to that a little bit, the idea is that this optimizes and makes the entire diagnostic, treatment planning, and communication process more efficient and more effective. And I think we’ve touched on a lot of the pieces that contribute to that. But the ability, again, to annotate radiographs with highly accurate clinical findings in near real time allows basically a clinician who’s working under magnification and prepping a crown and has three or four hygiene operatories that they have to visit during that appointment and meet a patient, establish trust, maybe it’s a first time patient that you’re meeting, interpret these radiographs under different scenarios, and then communicate those findings and hope that the patient comes away with enough information to make an educated decision about their oral health. Where this is definitely improving the workflow is that the hygienist is still…

Dr. Chris Balaban:

For example, let’s take this to a recall visit. They’re taking their radiographs. Those radiographs are automatically being interpreted by our artificially intelligent algorithms. All of those findings are displayed in a very simplistic and quantitative format in our portal. And the doctor walks in, and what used to be a black, white, and gray world is now colorized in some sense. Restorations can be highlighted and quantified. We’re able to track the progression of whether it’s incipient or non incipient. And we can look back historically and now use some evidence based on those artificial intelligent algorithms to say, “The decay that you had on tooth number four and tooth number six, it hasn’t changed significantly. It’s actually gotten better by X percent. So it’s something we’ll wait and watch.” And the doctor can, again, come in and have that communication with a patient where they’re actually understanding what we’re pointing to and speaking to. And it can, again, just impact and drive better treatment planning decisions.

Dr. Chris Balaban:

We know that when we cut into a tooth, we commit it to a lifetime of treatment. And so if we can identify decay, for example, in an earlier state and treat it more proactively or less invasively, we can have a big impact on that patient’s overall oral health for the rest of their life. And that can apply to identifying potential periodontal concerns earlier on and allowing for less invasive therapies to prevent the progression and [inaudible 00:23:25] that we know that follows with that. So I think that it’s something we’re seeing immediate impact with respect to efficiency and workflow and standardization.

Dr. Chris Balaban:

But I think long term, when we have enough data to that, we will, based on our data that we have, hopefully see an overall improvement in oral health and a lack of degeneration in many situations, because we were able to pick up certain very minute findings, which are difficult to quantify as humans. But when we can measure to the 10th of a millimeter or bone level, for example, or we can identify root calculus on a far greater and more detailed level and intervene there prior to having significant attachment loss, that’s a huge impact to the patient.

Bill Neumann:

Love to get feedback from both of you on this. In daily practice, how often, Dr. Tobler, are you using AI? Talk about it like just a a regular day. When would you feel that this would be used? Are we using it on every patient? Is it just with certain clinicians? Is it just for certain things? I know Dr. Balaban touched on that. And then also, and this is probably more for Dr. Balaban, the morning huddle page. So I’d like to talk a little bit about that and how that helps the DSO practices.

Dr. Chris Balaban:

I hope Dr. Tobler says with every patient. Otherwise…

Bill Neumann:

Go ahead. We’re going to let him go.

Dr. Eric Tobler:

Yeah. So right now, within Mortenson Dental Partners, we’re in the process of implementing this in a pilot group. Within that pilot group, really, we’re looking at every patient who’s there running, through our hygiene program for their regular examination. So, yeah, it’s part of the exam process. The x-rays are taken at the practice using our existing software. That’s then uploaded to the cloud and through Overjet. As the clinician comes in, the AI has already worked through that and has an image marked with where the decay is, where the bone loss is. That’s all ready to go. So then, as the clinician sits side by side with the patient, they can look together at the image. And that’s one of the things that for me, there’s a lot of really, really impressive innovations happening in diagnostic AI and dentistry right now.

Dr. Eric Tobler:

There’s some great companies out there. The thing that, for me, made Overjet stand apart was the visualization. The way that it highlights the decay is a much more intuitive, understandable for really, truly the clinician and especially for the patient, versus boxing it out that we see in some of the other programs. I really, really liked the intuitive visualization that Overjet provides. And so as the doctor and the patient sits side by side, we look through the x-rays together. It’s pretty much business as usual at that point then. We talked through the potential treatment options. But I do believe that with that added tool, it’s a built in second opinion for the patient. They understand that this is my opinion, this is an independent analysis of your x-rays as well.

Dr. Eric Tobler:

And so it’s just one more way that our patients can have confidence in the accuracy and the treatment plan we’re providing for that. That’s a challenge for us. I think it’s a challenge that we all share in dentistry is case acceptance. Patients, they trust us enough to come in. But despite that, there’s millions of dollars on every single dental practice across the country, sitting on books of untreated, diagnosed but untreated dental problems that are getting worse, every day, that those problems are in the patient’s mouth, they’re getting worse and becoming much more difficult and expensive to treat. And so if we can help our patients make good decisions about their dental care through making the diagnosis more clear, I think that’s really the advantage that I see, and that’s the process that we’re working through right now.

Bill Neumann:

So yes, using it on every patient. And the other thing, the other takeaway there is it’s a treatment acceptance tool as well.

Dr. Eric Tobler:

Yeah, absolutely.

Bill Neumann:

Yeah. Dr. Balaban, talk a little bit about the morning huddle page.

Dr. Chris Balaban:

Yeah, sure. A lot of the findings that these technologies and our technology in particular are able to highlight are very attractive and exciting for clinicians when they’re looking at them. I think a lot of it has to do with, can we make that data actionable? And what can we do with once we actually have all of this data, how do we present that to the patient, to the provider, to the manager in a way that they can make the most of that, especially in their daily operations? On a high level, basically in our morning huddle, we’re really able to identify both for the office manager as well as for all of the practitioners in the practice all of the opportunities that are potentially coming in today, as well as areas of concern that may not have been identified previously.

Dr. Chris Balaban:

And we definitely really want to have a clinical set of eyes on that ahead of time. There are many times, even with myself in private practice, where on a really busy day and everyone’s behind, that you may not end up going to see a specific patient for an exam because you didn’t have time or they had to leave early. And you see them six months later or 12 later, or maybe, I know we weren’t going to talk about COVID, but 18 months or two years later, and something that could have been identified there that just hadn’t been because your clinical eyes didn’t see it, is now in a situation of disrepair in some sense. Basically, it’s a really targeted action page to really highlight all areas with each respective patient who’s coming in that day and which specific concerns or lack of concerns we have for them. And again, without going into too much detail, I would say it’s the most actionable page and feature that our platform allows for the users, and it builds on all of the stuff we were just discussing.

Bill Neumann:

So Dr. Tobler, and Chris, you can certainly talk to of this as well, but I’d love to hear about onboarding. You decide that you’re going to work with Overjet. How do you implement this? You talked about a lot of different stakeholders. It’s not just the clinician. So can you talk a little bit about that, since it’s relatively recent for Mortenson?

Dr. Eric Tobler:

Yeah. So I mentioned the intuitive visualization is one of the reasons that we decided to go partner with Overjet. The other reason is really on the support side. I think that technology is only as good as implementation of that technology, and that’s a big challenge for us, for any dental prep, I think. As the organizations gets bigger and bigger, implementation can get a little bit messy. And so that’s one thing that I think I really have appreciated about Overjet is the attention to detail on the front end on the education and the support. That’s been really, really huge. Early on, as I heard about this technology, my first thought was new clinicians. How great is this going to be to get somebody right out of dental school up to speed and help them have a greater level of confidence in their diagnosis?

Dr. Eric Tobler:

So initially, as we thought about which practices to do, I went right to some of our new practices that may have some younger doctors in there, but that quickly shifted as I talked to, really, across the organization. My dad, who’s on the edge of retirement, I mentioned him earlier, when I told him about this technology, he immediately said, “Oh, that would be so nice. I would love to have this.” And I just thought, “Boy, if he’s about it, who’s not going to be?” I really do think that from an implementation standpoint, there’s just benefits across the board, but you have to make sure that it fits the workflow.

Dr. Eric Tobler:

And I think that Overjet’s done a good job supporting us and implemented in the practices, giving us both virtual learning, which we’re all embracing now, out of necessity, but also some one-on-one personal touches. And then we’ve done some group meetings as well to get all of our practices that are on this technology together to share best practices and talk about how it’s going. It’s really been a combination approach, I think, to get it implemented well. That part’s gone really, really well up to this point.

Bill Neumann:

Dr. Balaban, do you have anything add to that as far as the onboarding process?

Dr. Chris Balaban:

I think Eric’s actually had a lot to the success of this as well. They are very organized and efficient group to work with. We’re striving as much as we can. Now, it’s all about early adoption, of course, and a lot about knowledge transfer of what this technology is. The last thing we want, especially post COVID, is to introduce something into a practice that ends up making your appointment less convenient or take a little bit longer. So I would say that the team has been working very closely, especially our customer success and sales team, to make sure that onboarding is as smooth as can be given the state of where these technologies are, and that we can do everything we can on a daily basis to continuously improve. And I think a lot of it is about transparency, effective communication, and having great partners to work with, and Mortenson has been incredible in that front.

Bill Neumann:

So Dr. Balaban, Overjet’s been rolled out to a lot of the groups in the dental industry recently. Talk to me about what that experience has been like for them, from the clinician perspective and then also the staff perspective. I’d love to hear that.

Dr. Chris Balaban:

Yeah, sure. From the clinician’s perspective, I think a lot of it, first off, is having the clinicians understand what this technology is and can do, both the benefits as well as some of the limitations. And I think there’s sometimes a preconceived notion that AI can do everything and anything, even if a human couldn’t do it on a radiograph. And to some extent, yes, it can. It can look at a pixel level or it can measure a 10th of a millimeter, but there are limitations to 2D radiography that as we move into the 3D world and other dimensions in the company, we’ll be able to sort of tackle some of those questions. But I would say once clinicians have been brought up to speed and educated on how the tech is developed and most are very interested in knowing a little bit about what’s happening under the hood, and I work hard with our team to provide that when they’re interested in that. Then they can become these AI champions within their practice and with their patients.

Dr. Chris Balaban:

So I think it’s a very important part of the knowledge transfer process that I’ve been working hard on, as well as everyone on the team. From a staffing perspective, I think it’s a very exciting time for them. They get to interact with a technology that is a first of its kind in its industry. So what I’ve seen from all the non-clinical staff is a big excitement on, “This is going to help me improve my claims process. This is decreasing the number of appeals that we’re actually receiving based on our submissions, because we’re actually submitting them based on evidence based thresholds.” And so I think there’s excitement on that side. And I would say it’s still early to tell the entire breadth of that, but I would say that’s a consistent message that we’re hearing across multiple groups. And again, the longer that we’re participating with each of those organizations, the more feedback we’re getting. Positive feedback is coming in. And anything that requires attention, we’re working very hard to obviously improve upon that.

Bill Neumann:

So as we start to close up this podcast here, some great conversation, by the way, really, first, educational for me, for the audience. I know they’re going to get a lot out of this. Talk to me a little bit about what you see as some of the really interesting things that are happening in AI now, stuff that gets you really excited, maybe what the future holds a little bit, maybe a peek into the near future. I’d love to get Dr. Tobler, if you want to start, and then Dr. Balaban, you can finish up.

Dr. Chris Balaban:

Sure.

Dr. Eric Tobler:

Well, I’m sure Chris has a lot to say about the future. Just being part of this, I feel like we are actually in the future of dentistry. I think just getting greater implementation and adoption of this technology is a huge step in the right direction. Getting dentists, patients, and payers all on the same page, I think there’s just a tremendous benefit there. And AI is a technology that can do that. It can jump from each of those, both to help us do that. I think just moving into the digital world to dentistry, it has a great number opportunities for us as well. Machine learning and data analytics really allow our clinicians to focus on clinical care in the right ways. And so I think all of this is just, as you mentioned earlier, it’s not just in dentistry, it’s really in every aspect of our lives. I think we see these improvements and innovations coming in a big way, but I’m really just excited to be a part of it.

Bill Neumann:

Dr. Balaban?

Dr. Chris Balaban:

Yeah. I would say in the near term future, some very interesting things that we are working on internally and that obviously our customers and partners are going to be able to tap into. From a patient perspective, the ability to really track and quantify progression of specific findings on radiographs, periodontal concerns, carries, and really map that prospectively over time. Right now, again, where the technology is, we are doing a lot of retrospective analysis. But as more data flows in from the respective organizations, we’ll be able to really build out patient reports and health reports in some sense that are far more quantified and evidence based. We’re working on some research at Harvard right now. And hopefully, there’ll be some publication of that in 2022, but also tying in overall health. And I think that that’s one component in dentistry that many have been talking for a long time.

Dr. Chris Balaban:

I believe a technology like this, because of its way to actually analyze vast amounts of data in near real time and couple that with the medical component that each of our patients has, is a huge potential benefit, and really, that overall health component to it. I think you’ll see, at least from Overjet coming out over 2022, moving beyond 2D radiography and tapping into some more 3D radiography, different workflows, and that will be pretty exciting. And you’ll definitely begin to hear, lastly, more about the payer provider connection here, where the payer community will be leveraging this same technology, and it’ll be an equivalent standard, an evidence based standard by which claims are actually processed and adjudicated for necessity, but in a far more transparent, efficient, and effective manner. I think we will see, maybe in 2022 or in 2023, your point of care type of adjudication, which is something that is extremely exciting for us.

Bill Neumann:

Yeah. That certainly is exciting. Well, thank you both today. We appreciate you both being on, Dr. Eric Tobler and Dr. Chris Bablaban. We’re going to leave information if you want to reach out to Chris or anybody at Overjet in the show notes, but the website’s pretty simple. It’s overjet.ai. So pretty easy. And Dr. Tobler, thank you very much. We’re going to also put in the show notes the link to the original podcast you did with us two years ago, because it’s a flashback that you should definitely check out. You did a lot for the industry, Mortensen did, way back when, when COVID hit. So we really appreciate you contributing. I mentioned it again. Sorry. I told you I wouldn’t, but Chris said it once, so I figured it was okay to mention COVID again. Thank you both, Dr. Tobler, Dr. Balaban. Thank you to Overjet and Mortenson for being a part of The Group Dentistry Now Show. And until next time, I’m Bill Neumann.

 

 

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