🦷 AI state of play

Your AI cheat sheet, Leveraging your patient data for growth

March 31, 2026

Good morning. After last week’s Danish elections left no party with a majority, the colorful leader of the Moderate Party, Lars Løkke Rasmussen, has been vaulted into a kingmaker role with the power to decide who becomes the country’s next prime minister. 

Of course, we have no view on Rasmussen or his politics, but we do find his reported habit of brushing his teeth with hand soap a bit peculiar (and certainly not something we’d want to try ourselves).

Inside this issue:

- The state of play in AI
- Could patient data be your next growth channel?

⏰ Your reading time today: 6 minutes 27 seconds

🏆 Enjoy your coffee break with Word of Mouth, a dental-themed word game inspired by Wordle.

MARKETS

📉 3D Systems Corp ($DDD) – 1.90 | -0.13 (6.40%)
📉 Align Technology ($ALGN) – 166.26 | -11.66 (6.55%)
📈 Colgate-Palmolive ($CL) – 85.73 | +0.98 (1.16%)
📉 Dentsply Sirona ($XRAY) – 11.20 | -0.15 (1.32%)
📉 Envista Holdings ($NVST) – 24.26 | -1.17 (4.60%)
📉 Henry Schein ($HSIC) – 72.70 | -0.84 (1.14%)
📉 Park Dental Partners ($PARK) – 15.65 | -1.11 (6.62%)
📈 Straumann Holding AG (STMN.SW) – CHF 81.28 | +1.14 (1.42%)
📉 Weave Communications ($WEAV) – 4.41 | -0.28 (5.97%)

Stock data reflects market close yesterday, showing changes over the past five days.

THE DRILL DOWN

📈 The global digital dentistry market is projected to nearly double from $7.2 billion in 2026 to $13.7 billion by 2033, fueled by AI adoption, IoT-enabled systems, and surging demand for implants, aligners, and cosmetic procedures.

🦷 ADA-led coalition urges CMS not to roll back adult dental coverage expansion, pushing the agency to finalize a rule allowing states to include routine dental services as an essential health benefit starting in 2027, warning that delay until 2029 would fragment coverage for millions.

🏥 Rural Medicaid gaps are driving preventable ER dental visits, according to a new study, finding that adults in states without adult Medicaid dental benefits have the highest rates of emergency department visits for conditions that could have been treated in a dental office. From the operatory to the ER.

🏆 Dentalcorp is launching a $100K dental tech competition at its inaugural Demo Day, set for June 24 in Orlando, where up to ten finalists will pitch live in front of industry executives for a SAFE investment and a pilot opportunity across its 600-plus practice network. Shark Tank, but make it dental.

💸 Dental care is the most frequently deferred service among adults carrying medical debt, with researchers finding that medical financial hardship was strongly tied to patients delaying or forgoing needed oral health treatment.

🏛️ Utah governor signs bill expanding hygienist autonomy into hospitals, adding hospitals to the list of public health settings where hygienists can practice without dentist supervision, effective May 6.

🤝 Mississippi joins the Dentist & Dental Hygienist Compact, making it the second state to do so after Louisiana, and opening a streamlined pathway for dentists to practice across the states with minimal red tape.

🌵 Arizona Senate passes bill to study comprehensive adult Medicaid dental benefits, creating a committee of legislators, dental professionals, and an economist to examine feasibility and cost, with findings due by April 30, 2027. 

💧 Louisiana's statewide fluoride ban bill has been scaled back to a local-vote measure, where local communities with fluoridated water will be allowed to petition to remove it via a 15% resident signature threshold. The fluoride fight goes hyperlocal.

📋 Idaho bill proposes eliminating the independent Board of Denturitry and folding oversight into the State Board of Dentistry, expanding the board from eight to nine members while requiring one licensed denturist seat to ensure representation. One board to rule them all.

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M&A

Your AI cheat sheet: What DSO leaders actually need to know right now

Everyone’s selling AI now, but you need more than a sales pitch to separate hype from the true capabilities of the technology. Here's your no-fluff field guide to what AI can actually do, where it still falls flat, and where it’s headed. 

What's happening: AI has graduated from "cool demo" to "line item on the P&L" faster than most business leaders (at least outside top AI labs) expected. Seventy-eight percent of organizations reported using AI in some capacity in 2024, according to Stanford's AI Index. 

  • In dentistry specifically, the technology has moved well past the chatbot phase. FDA-cleared imaging tools, voice-enabled perio charting, automated insurance verification, and ambient clinical documentation are all live and productized today.

Yes, but: Just because companies are spending money on AI doesn’t necessarily mean they understand it. The terminology is moving just as fast as the tech, and that's creating a knowledge gap. When a vendor drops "agentic AI” or “RAG” into a pitch, you need to know what's real and what's resume padding. So here's a quick decoder ring:

  • Foundation models / LLMs: The engines behind tools like ChatGPT and Claude. They're very good at drafting, summarizing, classifying, and coding. They are not good at being right 100% of the time, a feature the industry politely calls "hallucination" and that you might call “BSing.”

  • Reasoning models: Newer systems that spend more compute time "thinking" before answering. Better for complex analysis, worse for speed and cost. Great for hard clinical questions, overkill for appointment reminders.

  • RAG (retrieval-augmented generation): Instead of generating a prediction as to what the answer will be, the model pulls from a curated set of trusted documents first, then generates a response. This is how the best knowledge assistants and patient communication tools stay on-script. If your vendor isn't using this pattern, ask why.

  • Agentic AI: Models that don't just answer questions but take actions, like booking appointments, pulling eligibility, and drafting claims. The promise is huge, but independent testing finds that even the best systems still succeed at real-world computer tasks less often than humans. Agents are improving, but proceed with guardrails for now.

  • Human-in-the-loop (HITL): A system-design principle, meaning a human must verify AI output. This matters because it's becoming the regulatory and clinical expectation for every AI tool that touches patient care, from imaging overlays to auto-generated chart notes. Being able to enforce clinician review of sensitive work is an important thing to look for in AI tools deployed into any healthcare setting.

What it means for you: When it comes to dental, AI capabilities can be grouped into roughly two baskets:

  • Clinical imaging AI: There are now dozens of FDA-cleared products for caries detection, bone loss measurement, periapical findings, CBCT segmentation, and orthodontic remote monitoring. The ADA has also published its first ANSI-approved standard on validation datasets for dental imaging AI, which gives you a credible lens for evaluating vendors.

  • Operational and RCM automation: Insurance verification, claims attachment generation, patient FAQ bots, and voice perio charting are all scaling quickly. They don't make clinical claims, which means lower regulatory risk and faster deployment.

Why it matters: The gap is widening between DSOs that are piloting AI and learning what works, what doesn’t, and what guardrails they need to use the technology safely, and those still debating whether to "wait and see." AI is no longer something that’s coming on the horizon. It’s here, and one more thing (as if you needed another) that you’ll have to stay on top of to keep up with the competition.

BUSINESS BITES

👔 Notable leadership changes: National Dentex Labs appointed Paul Kahn as its interim CEO, George Fox is the new SVP of M&A at Imagen Dental Partners, and Smile Partners named Patrick Perodin as its new COO.

📈 Deals and de novos: Vitana Pediatric and Orthodontic Partners expanded added a practice in Florida, Aspen Dental opened offices in Georgia, New Jersey, and Texas, SALT Dental Partners added a Washington practice, Imagen Dental Partners expanded in Washington, Heartland added a new Texas practice, and Epic4 Specialty Partners expanded in Illinois.

LAST ISSUE’S POLL RESULTS

MARKETING

Clean patient data could be your next growth engine

Good news: There’s hidden treasure buried in all of your practices right now. Don’t reach for your shovels, though—we’re talking about something admittedly less glamorous than gold doubloons: patient data.

What’s happening: Dental practices already capture troves of patient data—demographics, treatment histories, imaging, appointment outcomes, billing records, and communication logs—but turning all that information into something valuable is a whole other ballgame. 

  • Data often lives in separate practice management systems, imaging platforms, billing tools, and patient engagement software with limited interoperability.

  • For DSOs that have grown through acquisition, the problem compounds. Each new location can bring a different PMS, different schemas, and different definitions for something as basic as what counts as an "active patient."

Why it matters: Better use of patient data can drive the metrics that practices care about most and lead directly to a stronger bottom line. 

  • Recall and recare recapture. Industry benchmarks suggest the average practice converts only about 60 to 70% of patients due for hygiene into completed visits. Closing even part of that gap adds up fast. Clean patient data allows operators to do segmented outreach based on due status, contactability, and channel preference.

  • Unscheduled treatment conversion. Many practices present treatment plans worth hundreds of thousands of dollars each month, but only a fraction gets scheduled within 30 days. Tailored chairside presentations, patient financing workflows, and structured follow-up for patients can drive this rate up.

  • No-show reduction. Predictive risk scoring—flagging patients most likely to no-show based on history, lead time, and contact patterns—lets you target higher-touch outreach where it matters. Even being able to contact people on the channel they prefer can cut down on no-shows.

Yes, but: None of this works without clean and consistent data. A cross-site master patient index with a single, deduplicated record for each patient is the unglamorous foundation of data-driven growth opportunities, but achieving that is easier said than done. 

  • Particularly for DSOs that have acquired practices on different platforms, the same patient can easily exist under multiple IDs without anyone noticing.

  • A Pew Charitable Trusts report found that patient matching within a single healthcare facility can fail for as many as 1 in 5 patients. Cross-organization rates can drop as low as 50%, according to another study.

What you can do: Start by understanding where your patient data comes from today. Map every source system, and document what lives where and how current it is. Then focus on getting a clean, deduplicated record for each individual patient (many software options can help with this). Then the fun part starts: coming up with ways to use that data to drive business results. Here are a few ideas to get started: 

  • Score no-show risk nightly. Flag next week’s high-risk appointments based on lead time, past behavior, and contact history. Route those to a human call, and automate confirmations for everyone else.

  • Build a recall engine that actually segments. Instead of blasting the same reminder to every overdue patient, stratify by how long they've been overdue, their no-show history, preferred contact channel, and whether they have an unscheduled treatment.

  • Run channel A/B tests on outreach. Once you have clean contact data and channel preferences, test SMS vs. voice vs. email for specific patient segments.

Bottom line: Patient data is a growth lever just as much as a new technology or acquisition. Cleaning and organizing that data is the hard part, but if you can nail that, it can become a powerful tool in your kit.

🗳️ The Check-up:

⬆ VOTE: How much of an impact do you think AI will have on the dental sector?

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CLINICAL NOTES

🫁 GERD and peptic ulcers are linked to higher rates of gum disease and tooth decay, with a new meta-analysis finding that lower oral pH and weakened saliva buffering ability may drive enamel demineralization and create an oral environment favorable to caries. What's eating you may also be eating your enamel.

🦠 Researchers discovered a “genetic brake” in the bacteria that causes periodontitis, paving the way for targeted therapies that could lock the brake in place and suppress only bacteria that cause gum disease while maintaining the mouth’s healthy microbial balance.

👨‍👩‍👧 Children with closer, lower-conflict parental relationships show better compliance with clear aligner treatment, with a study suggesting that assessing the parent-child relationship before treatment could offer valuable prognostic insights for orthodontic planning. Healthy family, healthy teeth.

FUN AND GAMES

BEYOND THE CUSP