🦷 Answer the phone

CSR and your bottom line, AI is changing the call center calculus

April 28, 2026

Good morning. A company has launched a Dubai Chocolate-flavored toothpaste and mouthwash, which it promises will turn “a daily chore into an exciting treat.”

While we admittedly still aren’t quite sure what “Dubai Chocolate" is, count us skeptical of this innovation. What’s wrong with good old fashioned mint?

Inside this issue:

- Can CSR be more than a feel-good line item?
- AI is changing the call center calculus

⏰ Your reading time today: 6 minutes 32 seconds

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

MARKETS

📉 3D Systems Corp ($DDD) – 2.21 | -0.075 (3.28%)
📉 Align Technology ($ALGN) – 184.70 | -13.24 (6.69%)
📈 Colgate-Palmolive ($CL) – 84.17 | +1.08 (1.30%)
📉 Dentsply Sirona ($XRAY) – 11.96 | -0.94 (7.29%)
📉 Envista Holdings ($NVST) – 26.77 | -1.16 (4.15%)
📉 Henry Schein ($HSIC) – 77.20 | -2.49 (3.12%)
📉 Park Dental Partners ($PARK) – 18.22 | -0.44 (2.36%)
📉 Straumann Holding AG (STMN.SW) – CHF 84.00 | -6.58 (7.26%)
📉 Weave Communications ($WEAV) – 4.87 | -0.60 (10.97%)

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

THE DRILL DOWN

📊 69% of DSOs plan to ramp up acquisitions in 2026, but a low-supply market may slow them down, according to a TUSK Practice Sales report, which also found that 78% of DSOs anticipate recapitalizations within the next 12 to 36 months. Hungry buyers, shrinking menu.

💻 The global digital dentistry market is projected to nearly double to $16.7B by 2031, driven by rising adoption of CAD/CAM systems, intraoral scanners, and 3D imaging as practices shift to fully integrated digital workflows.

🚐 The mobile dentistry market is on track to more than double, hitting $849.5M by 2035, fueled by demand for preventive care in schools, workplaces, and rural communities, according to a new Allied Market Research report. The dental office is coming to you.

🤖 ChatGPT scored well on TMD knowledge in a new study, with mean response scores ranging from 4.28 to 4.48 out of 5, though researchers recommend it be used as a supplementary tool under professional supervision rather than a standalone clinical resource. Now let’s see it handle a drill.

🧾 ADA approves 67 updates to the 2027 CDT Code, including 28 new codes covering healing cap placement, orofacial pain management, and implant restoration procedures, with all changes taking effect January 1, 2027. 

📋 ADA and ADEX finalize agreement to reform dental licensure, with ADEX set to incorporate the ADA's Dental Licensure Objective Structured Clinical Examination into its exam by this summer.

🦷 Kentucky bars unlicensed individuals and reimbursement-setting entities from controlling clinical decisions, while also expanding hygienist scope of practice, including allowing radiographs and patient treatment without a dentist physically present.

South Carolina advances legislation to regulate mail-order orthodontics companies, requiring in-person evaluations following any teledentistry appointment to treat patients with orthodontic appliances.

📈 Virginia enacts two ADA-backed workforce bills to address hygienist shortages, allowing internationally trained dentists to pursue hygiene licensure and qualified assistants to perform scaling and polishing procedures, with both laws taking effect July 1.

⚖️ Connecticut dentists are among a growing wave of non-hospital clinicians suing patients over unpaid medical debt, with more than 1,000 dental-related lawsuits filed between 2019 and 2024, as non-hospital providers now account for over 80% of medical debt cases in the state.

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MARKETING

How DSOs can make CSR more than a feel-good line item

You've got a thousand problems to deal with today that will directly impact your bottom line tomorrow. Community investment might sound like a distraction from all that—but a growing group of DSOs are prioritizing corporate social responsibility (CSR) initiatives as a way to move the dial on their most important business metrics.

What's happening: Public disclosures from the largest DSOs show CSR programs moving well past one-off check writing into structured, multiyear programs with real scale.

  • Heartland Dental says its 2025 Companywide Free Dentistry Day delivered $2.6 million in free care to 6,364 patients across 349 supported offices, and has produced more than $16 million in donated care to 45,000-plus patients since 2010.

  • PDS Health's Smile Generation Serve Day has logged 27,000 patients served, 400,000 volunteer hours, and $57 million in donated dentistry over 13 years, according to the company. Its foundation also raised a record $800,000 for special-needs access in 2024 and awarded $269,000 in dental assistant scholarships in 2025.

  • Smile Brands' Smiles for Everyone Foundation reports $120 million in donated dentistry with 180,000 people treated across at least 8 countries.

  • Aspen Dental says its Healthy Mouth Movement has served more than 30,000 underserved patients and veterans since 2014.

The pattern: The strongest CSR programs are distinguished by their structure, with DSOs typically focusing their investments around three pillars:

  • A flagship access program: A named platform—free-care day, veterans initiative, mobile clinic, or special-needs program—gives the work internal pride and external recognition.

  • A workforce or pipeline program: Think scholarships, well-being resources, DEI initiatives, clinician development, and organized volunteer days.

  • An operating-efficiency program: Teledentistry, sustainability, or waste and energy reduction can lower costs while addressing a social goal, helping CSR programs clear the CFO's internal hurdle.

Why it matters: Well-executed CSR programs can be an effective way to address some of the pressures DSO operators are already losing sleep over:

  • Workforce retention and satisfaction: Academic research on perceived CSR has linked it to higher engagement, stronger employer attractiveness, and lower turnover intent—not a small thing when a recent industry survey found that 63 percent of dental professionals reported frequent burnout.

  • Patient trust and loyalty: Healthcare CSR research has linked visible community investment to patient satisfaction and revisit intention.

  • Recruiting pipeline into hard-to-fill roles: Dental assistant scholarships and university partnerships can feed directly into the roles DSOs are struggling hardest to staff. PDS Health's six-figure annual scholarship spend is a recruiting investment as much as a philanthropic one.

  • Local brand and community trust: In markets where DSOs are sometimes viewed skeptically compared with independent practices, visible, sustained community investment is one of the few levers that directly addresses the "corporate dentistry" perception. It's a differentiation story competitors without scale can't easily copy.

Questions to ask now: Thinking about launching a CSR program or want to pressure-test one you're already operating? Consider asking some basic questions, like:

  • Do you know what you're trying to measure? Be clear about what metrics you care about before you start spending time and money. Is it new patients? Local press coverage? Employee retention?

  • Do you have a baseline set? If you're claiming CSR drives retention, you need to know what your turnover looked like before the program. Perfect causation may be out of reach, but without a starting line, you can't make a credible case for impact.

  • Is your budget proportional to your ambition? Undershoot and you won't see results; overshoot before you have proof and you invite backlash. The right number depends on your scale and the scope of the portfolio you're building.

Bottom line: Done right, CSR investments can help DSOs move the dial on the biggest business challenges they are facing, from recruiting to retention to differentiation in a crowded marketplace.

BUSINESS BITES

👔 Notable leadership changes: The National Association of Dental Plans (NADP) appoints its first-ever dentist to a permanent staff role, making Lauren Gritzer its director of dental informatics and plan operations.

📈 Deals and de novos: Ideal Dental enters Oklahoma and expands in Washington and North Carolina, and Heartland expands through a partnership in Michigan.

💰 Dental Care Alliance announces a new financing agreement to reduce debt by more than $1.1 billion, saying the deal with its existing lender group—which also includes $95 million of fresh capital—strengthens the company’s financial foundation.

💸 MINISH Technology secures $22M investment at $110M valuation, with PE firm VIG Partners acquiring a 20% minority stake in the biomimetic dental materials company—tripling its valuation since 2023.

🦷 Apollo announces an investment in vVARDIS, the Swiss dental medtech company behind Curodont, on undisclosed financial terms.

🎨 VideaHealth rebrands to Videa and opens platform to private practices, expanding beyond its DSO base to independent owners. New name, bigger game.

LAST ISSUE’S POLL RESULTS

TECH

AI is rewriting the call center calculus for DSOs

A simple thing like always picking up the phone can make a big difference to a dental practice’s bottom line. Now with more advanced AI, it’s achievable for even smaller multi-practice operators.

What's happening: For years, the centralized call center was a luxury reserved for scaled-up multi-practice operators. AI is rewriting that script. A new generation of dental-specific voice agents and intelligent routing tools has gotten good enough—and cheap enough—to change when and how multi-practice operators can offer their customers call center-style support.

  • Dental-specific voice agents can now handle after-hours calls, appointment booking, FAQs, and insurance questions for a few thousand dollars per location per year—a fraction of what hiring a dedicated central team would cost.

Why it matters: Every unanswered call is a patient you risk losing to a competitor that does take their call. Scale that leak across a dozen locations and the number gets uncomfortable fast. “Call conversion is the most measurable revenue lever DSOs are targeting,” one dental consultant reported in Planet DDS’s 2026 Dental Industry Outlook.

  • Unfilled follow-ups on accepted treatment plans can make revenue leakage even worse. Last year, 58% of treatment plans were accepted but only 47% were completed, an 11-point gap that shows up directly in production.

Yes, but: AI isn't a shortcut around operational discipline. Deloitte contact center research found that while AI raises the return on a well-run contact center, it can hurt customer satisfaction when implemented poorly. Clean scheduling rules, clear workflows, and strong escalation paths are prerequisites. Without that, automation just creates faster mistakes.

How to start: Once you have reached an inflection point in your business where your traditional front desk model is starting to crack—missed calls are piling up, staff are burnt out and turning over—it’s worth thinking about layering in an AI voice agent.

  • Standardize the workflows AI will amplify. Scheduling templates, call scripts, recall cadences, and treatment plan follow-up processes. If these are inconsistent across your offices, centralizing or automating will lock in the inconsistency.

  • Pilot AI on narrow, high-volume intents first, like after-hours calls, appointment confirmations, and common FAQs. Save the complex patient conversations for humans until your data, scripts, and oversight processes are mature.

  • Have a way to track what happens after the call. It’s great that someone’s phone call was answered, but what you really need to know is what happened after. Did an appointment get scheduled, completed, and collected on?

  • Don’t lose the human touch. Calls that still require a human touch can be passed along to a centralized team of people who manage overflow and complex situations, while staff in the office can focus on in-person experience and high-value interactions.

Bottom line: With sophisticated AI tools on the market, DSOs don’t need to make a binary decision between using a traditional call center or not. A hybrid approach, with technology reducing the burden of high call volumes on staff, can now realistically plug leakage and scale up your patient support without adding significantly to headcount.

🗳️ The Check-up:

⬆ VOTE: Are you using AI to take inbound phone calls?

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CLINICAL NOTES

🦷 Early removal of mesiodens around ages 6 to 7 may reduce complications in children, according to a new study, which found that timely extraction of the extra front tooth helps protect normal dental development and prevents crowding or displacement of permanent teeth.

💊 A single IV dose of dexamethasone during wisdom tooth surgery was linked to lower pain in the first 24 hours post-op, with patients who then used non-opioid pain relievers reporting the lowest pain scores overall—adding to the case for non-opioid post-surgical pain management.

❤️ Older adults who skip dental care due to cost significantly raise their risk of heart attack, stroke, or dementia, according to the first large-scale study to link financial barriers to dental care with cardiovascular disease and dementia incidence among adults 55 and older.

FUN AND GAMES

BEYOND THE CUSP