Artificial intelligence is becoming more common throughout the healthcare industry, and the dental sector is no different.
Effingham, Ill.-based Heartland Dental and Cincinnati-based Cordental Group are two DSOs that have partnered with dental AI companies this year.
Heartland is the largest DSO in the U.S., with a network of more than 1,700 practices. Cordental, on the other hand, supports a little more than 40 locations.
Both companies implemented AI at their practices in April; Heartland Dental partnered with VideaHealth and Cordental teamed up with Overjet. Since the integrations, both DSOs have seen a rise in their patient acceptance rates.
Neither company rushed into adding AI, opting to gather opinions from providers and employees and employees before pulling the trigger.
"From our perspective, we did a lot of diligence up front, first and foremost," Stephen Jones, co-founder and chief growth officer of Cordental, told Becker's. "We started really looking at this late last year, we rolled it out to our doctors at the doctor's meeting to get them hyped up about it and excited about it."
"Sometimes you look at it and it feels like an overnight success, but we've been working with VideaHealth for five years now," said Tim Quirt, DDS, senior vice president of clinical operations for Heartland Dental. "We wanted supported doctors and the teams to have a starring role in what we were doing."
Even with the difference in network size and using a different AI provider, both DSOs have felt a similar positive impact since rolling out artificial intelligence to their dentists.
"That's one of the greatest things AI has enabled our supported doctors to do — reinforce their diagnostic philosophy and accuracy while enhancing patient case acceptance," Dr. Quirt said. "This is just light years ahead of anything we've had in the past."
"We're already seeing that our case acceptance has gone up," Mr. Jones said. "That's where this really gets exciting for us is that we're not changing how we're diagnosing, we're just changing how we're treating and producing and presenting it to the patients."