What aspects of the convergence of AI and dentistry most excite you?
“AI as a potential general-purpose technology has significant implications across the dental industry. In the near to medium term, I see AI becoming a key enabler to lowering the cost of care, while improving the quality of treatment outcomes. We are already seeing some good proof points from the use of AI in broader healthcare that are now entering dental – in administrative tasks, operational optimization, accuracy and efficiency improvements, as well as on the clinical side with applications in radiology that are being deployed for diagnostics and clinical decision support. AI offers a variety of possibilities across clinical and non-clinical applications, and in the longer run I believe its greatest potential is taking dental beyond oral health. Ultimately, we can leverage AI to improve our understanding of how oral health impacts overall health –– and use that understanding to drive even better outcomes.”
“Dentistry is a vast field, and AI has a vast potential to bring new efficiencies, to expand access to care by lowering costs, and to increase patients' confidence that they are getting the care they need. We see incredible opportunities to increase patients' health and confidence and therefore financial and social mobility. In fact, over time, the oral-systemic links and health correlations that AI will uncover can demonstrate causations that will save innumerable lives.”
“From a clinical perspective, artificial intelligence offers tremendous promise to improve patient diagnoses and treatment outcomes and do so with speed and reliability. AI tools can recognize caries and periodontal disease on images that even the most experienced dentist may miss (remember: dentists are not radiologists). Oral Surgeons are utilizing robotic surgery, CAD/CAMs are enhancing prosthodontic services and intraoral scanners and cameras are eliminating the need for traditional impressions. The introduction of all of these AI-backed enhancements can only improve the quality of dental care. AI also has significant potential for third-party carriers. The tools can improve standardization within the dental carrier's utilization management department, making claim reviews more accurate and consistent. Even with non-reviewable claims, which otherwise would get overlooked, AI can detect and flag any that appear unusual before they are adjudicated. Dental insurance fraud can be identified early and, in many cases, prevented. Operating costs and claim spending will go down, and a data-driven risk-based modeling for underwriting will enable more competitive pricing. Ultimately, all these areas of impact will translate to healthier patients, a decrease in unnecessary procedures and reduced costs. In that way, AI can deliver the ultimate trifecta in healthcare: More affordable care, increased quality and improvement of patient satisfaction.”
“AI presents opportunities for improvement in patient care that only a few decades ago we never could have imagined. In the frame of restorative and cosmetic dentistry, it has the potential to allow doctors to bring the whole breadth of historical oral health information to bear on patient evaluation, augment treatment planning using those holistic insights, then, with augmented reality interfaces, offer patients a virtual picture of what the results of a proposed treatment might look like. When it comes to performing treatment, less invasive AI-backed digital impression technologies and virtual chair-side solutions can provide for a more comfortable patient experience. For example, with something like full-contour prep analysis, AI could provide real-time feedback that shortens and improves the restorative process. Also, state of the art CAD/CAM and computer mediated communication (CMC) solutions are less invasive, can shorten seat times, and facilitate great practitioner precision––all adding to that enhanced patient experience. Finally and most important to where I sit in the industry, there’s excitement around instantaneous integration between the dental practice and the dental laboratory, where AI can take human error out of processes, accelerating and improving the quality of outcomes.”
