215: Why Dentists Must Embrace the AI Revolution Now

We know the average practice roughly has 9% treatment rate of periodontal disease. And at the same time, we know that 49% of adults roughly in the US have periodontal disease. So there's a huge discrepancy.

Hi, I'm Emmett Scott, and just like you, I've had my ups and downs in the dental industry, but times are changing. The DEO has built a map of how to succeed in one of the most challenging industries to navigate. On this show, we talk to dental industry leaders, solve problems, and get you the answers you need to face these challenging times and thrive. WELCO welcome to DEO's Growth Secrets podcast for dental organizations. Now let's get started.

Hello, everyone, and welcome to another episode of DEO's Growth Secrets podcast. I'm Jake Poole, the CEO of the DEO, and today I have with me Florian. Florian is the founder and CEO of Video Health. So we have an awesome AI partner on today and we're going to go into technology. We're going to AI, we're going to, you know, what's the latest, greatest with how the largest DSOs are utilizing the latest technology. So, Florian, could you give us a little bit about yourself and a little bit about Nvidia?

Yeah. Awesome, Jake, thank you for having me. And hello everyone, who is switching on. Yeah, my name is Florian. I have a slight accent, you might hear that. So I'm originally from Germany. I actually started my career in medical school. So many years in medical school, which in the US in Germany actually is. The first two years are very close between dentists and doctors. And so I, I always felt that there's not really that divide, it's just healthcare. And then I dropped out of medical school to found my first company, which was in the gynecology space. And I overall, Jake fall, fell in love with using technology at scale to help providers to provide better care. And so that's why after, after a couple of other stints and stuff like that, I found a video health a couple of years ago out of MIT here in Boston. I'm right now in our office and we have this vision to be the first AI company in the world to diagnose a billion people globally. And our mission is to support everyone who's tuning in. So dental clinicians, the dentist, the hygienist, the front office staff to provide better care and easier care to their patients through artificial intelligence. Yeah. And so that, that is the mission and it always will be. And at this point we are doing pretty well in the sense that we have like over 40,000 dental clinicians, you know, using our platform right now we are processing tens of millions of patients per year and I think a half billion dental X rays like rough numbers. So we start to see the AI adoption curve really going there. And what makes us the most happy is and we can talk about what we actually do, right? But like we hear more and more dental clinicians reaching out also and being like, hey, this is super useful. Thank you. It makes it easier, faster, easier to communicate with patients and that, that drives what we do, Right?

Yeah. I mean, I think by now everyone's kind of sees the future, that this is the future, you know, and it's only a matter of time if people aren't using this now that they will be using. And by the way, I mean, I wouldn't worry too much about that accident. I think people, when it comes to technology and building fine things, people want to hear that German accent, right? It's associated with like building great things. So it's, I'd say it's a feature. So Florian, that's 40,000 dentists and clinicians and that's a large portion of even all of them that exist out there. So you guys have made a huge dent in just the overall population of clinicians that are out there starting to use this. So maybe Lauren, you can give me just a, you know, a two minute or if I had for dental offices or at a dental office and I call you up and I just say, let's do it. What exactly does it look like to install your technology and use your technology in my office and then what's the difference in my day to day life that I'll notice.

Yeah, after it. Yeah, no, a great question. Right, let's start with the basics. So first of all, what do we actually do? What we do is we have an, we've developed a product called Video AI which supports the dental clinician to automatically diagnose treatment plan as well as show the treatment plan and the diagnosis to the patient. Right. So imagine about us as an AI powered X ray viewer. So right now you're viewing your X rays, your bite wings and your FMX and your PAs, right? And to show them Perrier loss, or to show them. So radiographic bonus or to show them decay on your screen. And imagine instead of doing that, you would use video and it colors in the decay, it colors in the bone loss and all of that. So that, that's essentially what we do. So now how is this user experience for the dental clinician? And that's the dentist or the hygienist. When you go into an office, you know, you can go on our website, Video AI and you can reach out and you can buy the product and then we install it in your, on your computer. And it takes like less than 30 minutes to get installed and set up and everything is done. If you are actually on Dentrix, Jake, Dentrix or Ascend, we have an exclusive partnership with Henry Schein where we put Video AI directly into Dentrix, which is amazing because if any one of you here has Dentrix or Ascend, you can literally just flip a switch. You can just reach out to Andrew Shine. You flip a switch and you have OAI in it. But then, Jake, there's no change whatsoever. It literally takes less than five minutes. Okay, but what is then once it's installed and all of that, what works? It's pretty simple. When a new patient comes in, Jake, you come in into the chair and the assistant or the hygienist takes X rays. These X rays get automatically loaded to our cloud. We run our algorithms on them and then we show with a very high accuracy all the disease state this patient has. And so instead of you looking at a gray X ray with just gray blobs and all of that, instead you see our video AI product, which shows you where the decay is, how deep the decay is. It even shows you how large the decay was. The last patient visit to this patient visit, so you can actually show to the patient the progression of disease. It also shows the bone loss and it colors us in, in terms of green, yellow, red. And so that helps you now as a hygienist or a dentist, to quickly assess what is the best diagnostic and best treatment plan. Right? The decay is all the way to the pulp. So I maybe need to do something more invasive. But then secondly, and that's very important, it helps you a lot to communicate to the patient. Because now, Jake, it's not like, hey, do you see this gray blob here? Because of that, because it's already in the pulp. You know, this will cost like $2,000 plots. We need to do a root canal, a build up and a crown. And then you have an argument almost like, yeah, I don't think that that's true. I will just wait. Right? That's often what you hear. Instead you can show like, hey, look, this AI is trained on hundreds of millions of X ray images. And you can hear, you see, this is why it's in the bulb. And that's why we need to do this treatment. So it's kind of a ad hoc second opinion by FDA cleared algorithms, which just gives a greater confidence as well as a greater urgency to get the treatment done. And why does that matter, Jake? It just matters because our mission is that we improve patients health. And what's happening over and over and there just be too much is that patients don't accept the treatment at the right time, they delay treatment too often and that's, that's what we really care about.

Yeah. Something I think that that's really subtle but really transformative about this is heard a clinician kind of thought leader many years ago talk about when this does get here, it essentially changes the dentist from being the bad guy to the good guy. Right? Like the AI is the bad guy or girl that's finding all these problems in the patient's mouth and you know, and then the dentist becomes the interpreter and then is like, it's like says, hey, I think, you know, this is actually more important. You don't need to worry about this right now. But we're worried about this. And it kind of changes the relationship that the dentist has with the patient.

Right.

They're no longer this like horrible person that's just pointing out all bad things in a, in the patient. So I think that part not talked about a ton, but it's also a huge benefit.

So you know, Jake, you're touching on a great point because like, like so in my company we constantly visit, so we have actually this rule that you have to go to like an AI powered dentist. And so I'm, I'm probably radiating at this point because I'm going to a dentist all the time. We have like a Google map in our office here where you see all the dentists who use soften and when you just observe how the dentists are using it and they don't really know that this is our product. We just try to understand from a patient's perspective what the experience is. And the most useful thing is what you said is it's, it's not. The dynamic is changing. It's not like, okay, the clinician tells me that I need to do 2, 3 crowns and it's $6,000. I'm like, how I do I trust them or not? It's not like me against the clinician. Right. It is more like, okay, wait, the AI says there are three crowns and it's FDA approved algorithm, so to say. So all right, there must be something there. But now let's discuss together with the dentist. Okay, what are we doing? Like you almost become like more a team. Okay, you're on the team first, let's do this late. Exactly.

Like, hey, I'm, Hey. I don't, I don't always agree with the AI anyway. Like, you know, I mean, like, I'm on your team. Let's look at what the AI says together. Totally. So. So it's really revolutionary. And there's obviously, I think, a lot of clinical benefits here. Obviously. Right. You have data going up into a cloud. You're now starting to objectify or make objective diagnosing as much as possible. Obviously there's some nuance there. So, yeah, the three.

Three.

Go ahead.

Sorry, one more thing, because we talked about decay, but like, quite honestly, I just want to share this. The biggest kicker really is that we know the average practice roughly has 9% treatment rate of periodontal disease. And at the same time, we know that 49% of adults roughly in the US have periodontal disease. So there's a huge discrepancy. And I'm just telling you, like, we have something called video perio AI and it's just like showing the bone loss. It's just amazing that much, much more perio, every office where we install immediately, they do much more periodontal treatment. And that is good for the patient as well. Right. Because it impacts overall health. So it's a win win. Does that make sense? Like, and, and that makes carryovers just a great example.

You know, it makes tons of sense. So, so three or four years ago when, when this kind of was becoming more popular, there was a lot of resistance from, from doctors, from especially kind of like associate doctors or providers. How is that now? And do you think it's changing and you know, what kind of resistance do you think somebody's going to come across when they, when they implement this inside their group?

Well, it is a great question and quite honestly, you can even look at healthcare. So before I started the company, I was working a lot in AI and other healthcare fields, like so in breast cancer detection, for instance, and radiology. And Jake, I bet you and everyone in the audience has heard about AI radiology for breast cancer detection and many other fields. And there, the adoption took a very, very long time, unfortunately, like it, it should be the standard of care at this point. And one of the reasons was because the radiologist felt that it's, it's a competitive product, if that makes sense. And, and I think that's the same that happened in dentistry two, three years ago. To your point. I think what has happened now though is that people Realize that it's really, it's not the dentist versus the AI at all. Even FDA studies are not like that set up. It is the expert. The dentist together with the AI is having an easier time to identify, more, easier, quicker than a dentist without the AI. So it's a collaborative effort and not a one with us. You. It's really. The dentist keeps all the autonomy and it's just a supportive tool to help you communicate easier. That's all it does. And I think that that is more and more understood by dentists who are using the technology, actually. So two, three years ago, we just didn't had so many dental clinicians who've used the technology. Now I think you're hearing more and more people who are using it, and I think they're realizing, wait, I still keep all my autonomy. I can do the treatment plan I believe is right for the patient, which should be the case, by the way. We shouldn't. The technology should never dictate what the patient care should be, but it does help me to do my job faster, easier, communicate easier, and those kinds of things. I think that's what we are standing. And so what's happening, Jake, is the resistance is turning towards demand. So we're actually having this with, with a DSO where like more and more dentists and also hygienists in particular, are raising their hands and say, hey, I would love to have this technology. So that's. That's changing that sense.

That's. And that's a. That when you hit that tipping point, that's when it really starts to take off. And, you know, I think what you're saying is, I mean, it's inevitable. It was inevitable. It's. This is a. This is better for the patient, it's better for the company. It's actually better for the doctor, even if they don't always see that right away. And so it's inevitable. I think that with a lot of this kind of AI technology, it's. It's inevitable. And so it's just a matter of being patient and letting people come around to it, because change can be scary sometimes. And we're way. We're well into this change management and the dental job isn't going anywhere. You know, in fact, it's more needed than ever. In fact, you know, we're having trouble, people having trouble even recruiting. So. So that's a good thing. That's a good thing. So let's talk about, you know, you guys are working with a lot of larger DSOs, and oftentimes the larger DSOs, they have a little more resources, so they're able to invest in this and they're able to, you know, actually prove it out. And you guys work out the kinks together. And then once the kinks are worked out, you're able to bring them to bring the same technology to maybe some of the, the smaller groups, you know, two locations, four locations. So you've, you're working out with a lot of larger DSOs. Give us an idea how that's going, what you're, you know, what you guys are doing with the larger DSOs.

Yeah, you're absolutely right. So, so we have 2024 was a, was an amazing year and we're excited for 2025. We, this year we have rolled out Heartland Dental, one of the largest DSOs, to all their offices. We are right now rolling out Dental Corp. Which is the largest DSO in Canada, for instance. So we have, we have like over 50 DSOs of, of many of the large ones, so to say, using our technology. And to be quite honest with you, we had to work through a lot of challenges. How do you integrate this into the technical aspects, the workflow? How do you onboard your staff on it? And not just the dentist, but also the hygienist, the front office staff. How do you deal with changing team members? Right, like they use the technology, but then actually the hygienist leaves. You have a new hygienist. How do you retrain all of those things? Because what's really important, Jake, is that you don't buy it and don't use it. The adoption really, really matters because the I comes, it's easy. Like it's all about actually using it. And so we learned a lot and how to do it and how we onboard things. We have a learning center which is phenomenal. It's used like all the time. Right. We, we streamlined the product that it integrates into any PMS system. Again, Dentrix is very easy. And so we had all these learnings and built these processes and we actually came towards Jake that we consider as much as a vendor, but as a partner. So no matter at this point how large the organization, you were right in the beginning we did the big ones. But right now we are really focusing on the DO locations. Like we really focus on 2, 3, 4, 5, 10, 20, 50 locations. That's kind of where you're focusing on and we are partners. So it's not like you buy it and we give you the install package and you do it and. But we have like an entire Implementation team and onboarding team and then the customer success and support team. And so I think it's our responsibility as a partner to not just provide the technology, but also ensure that it's used, if that makes sense.

Yeah.

The nice thing is once you use it, after 60, 90 days, it becomes habitual and it just becomes second nature.

Yeah, yeah. You know, I mean, on one hand things move slow and you have time if you're out there and you're not doing this. On the other hand, you know, imagine a patient, I mean you have that map of AI powered dentists, right. Imagine a patient gets a cleaning or goes and gets a checkup at one dentist who has this technology, right. And they, they wheel it in, they can show everyone, they show the patient. And then imagine that patient going to a doctor who doesn't have this technology. It's gonna be pr. It's gonna be pretty clear that pa. I mean patients are eventually going to really want this and expect this at their dentist. You know, like it's not going to be too long before it's, people are going to be just like, you were like, hey, I need to go to an AI power dentist as a patient. I'm like, why? Why would I ever not go to somebody? That technology, you know, So I think, you know, that now is the time to start thinking about this. Any kind of final words for those folks, you know, who might not be the very large DSOs either. A single location. They're, they have a lot of things going on. They're trying to figure out a lot of things to, you know, five locations. What are your, what are your thoughts, what are your final thoughts on to somebody in that situation? What would you say to them as they're kind of evaluating this?

Well, I mean, I would say to them like to, to, to get clarity of like what's most important for their organization for 2025. Right. I bet staffing and team will be part of it. And then probably also like, how can I grow in a way that I don't need to do too much of an investment? Because like, I think, you know, buying your practices and so on is pretty expensive here. And, and I think for instance, video AI would be a great solution for that, but maybe it's not a priority. But one of the things we see the greatest success is that almost every dental office we've met so far could do more periodontal disease. Quite honestly, like it just, we are under diagnosing perio and we always have like you put video in and the next Month, you have like, much better perio results. And what I love about it, it's, it's really good for the organization, but it's also really good for the patient. Right. I don't want to walk around with untreated perio. And so I would just think through the priorities, so to say. And I think what's helpful, if what we call organic growth is one of your priorities, meaning like increasing your revenue within your offices, I think then vidai would be a great solution or other platforms. But obviously we believe that we are the best in terms of the big guys have chosen us and stuff. But. And the second, the second piece really is that it helps a lot with management. So we have an overview of all your offices. You have five locations and we can show you across all your five offices how well everything is working and you can remote in, into all of them. And I think that's the other aspect, if you think about training and staffing and retention. I think one of the pain points we've been seeing as you hire a new dentist, but you just came out of school, but you cannot be everywhere at the same time. So AI helps a lot to have a standard of care across your practices. Does that make sense? Because like, you have always, you always have the same consistency of diagnostic quality across number one location, but also across 5, 6, 7. But that's, that's really useful too.

Yeah, well, I mean, one of the kind of prioritization frameworks we like to use is that the closer it is to the patient experience, the closer it is to that. You know that the, the kind of place where everything happens in dentistry is the dentist and the patient meeting in that room. Right. And so you start there, you have to make that amazing and then work your way out. So, you know, anything that, that makes a significant difference with that is, is probably a high priority. So anyway, this type of thing is, is, is a big deal. I think so. Florian, thank you so much. Reach out to Florian Video Health. I think this is one of those things where, you know, I, I have a lot of empathy for dentists who are running these businesses because you got to know a lot of, right, you got to kind of be out there and see what the latest tech is. This is one of those, you kind of got to know what's going on. You kind of got to get a feel for it. Even if you're not signing up, you got to know what's out there and how people are using this. So sign up and kind of get a demo just to get yourself involved. And if you're interested, Florian, I know you guys are going to be a lot of places next year. 2025. It's a big growth year for you guys, so we expect AI in a lot of dental offices.

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