Good morning. Imagine a toothbrush that not only brushes your teeth, but also flosses them at the same time, using a tiny camera and AI to identify the exact right place to spray jets of water?

No, it’s not a zany science fair project—it’s the latest product cooked up by Dyson, and while the launch video for the so-called CameraJet is admittedly pretty cool, early reviews aren’t fantastic and a $499 toothbrush seems a tad excessive anyway.

Inside this issue:

- Dental robots are past the demo stage
- The legislative fight over network leasing

⏰ Your reading time today: 6 minutes 3 seconds

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

MARKETS

📉 3D Systems ($DDD) – 3.21 | -0.16 (4.75%)
📈 Align Technology ($ALGN) – 153.00 | +0.05 (0.03%)
📈 Colgate-Palmolive ($CL) – 87.89 | +0.45 (0.51%)
📉 Dentsply Sirona ($XRAY) – 10.38 | -0.510 (4.68%)
📉 Envista Holdings ($NVST) – 25.79 | -0.91 (3.43%)
📈 Henry Schein ($HSIC) – 88.93 | +0.78 (0.88%)
📈 Park Dental Partners ($PARK) – 21.21 | +1.12 (5.57%)
📈 Straumann Holding ($STMN) – CHF 95.34 | +1.68 (1.79%)

Stock data reflects market close as of the last day of trading, showing changes over the past five trading days.

THE DRILL DOWN

🧪 PDS Health and United Concordia launch an 18-month saliva screening pilot in Southern California, another example of a broader expansion of saliva testing in dental practices to target periodontal disease management.

📋 ADA opens submissions for CDT 2028 code change requests, with a November 1 deadline, giving providers a window to propose updates before the Code Maintenance Committee convenes in March 2027.

📈 Dental hygienist employment is projected to grow 8% by 2035, with roughly 15,000 openings expected annually, according to BLS data—and while job satisfaction is trending upward, 27% of hygienists are still eyeing a job change in pursuit of better pay and working conditions.

🎟️ Registration opens for the 2027 Planet DDS Orbit summit, which will bring together dental industry leaders in Scottsdale, Arizona, from March 31 to April 2.

💳 Aetna fixes a system error that misfiled roughly 55,000 Medicare Advantage dental claims under medical benefit rules, after ADA pressure prompted a full review—dentists who believe they were impacted are encouraged to contact Aetna directly. 

⚠️ California community health centers brace for financial strain as Medi-Cal routine dental coverage is set to end for many undocumented adults next summer, with clinic leaders warning that delayed care will drive up emergency visits and shift uncompensated costs onto safety-net providers who will continue seeing patients regardless of coverage status.

TECH

Dental robots are past the demo stage

We may not have flying cars just yet, but robots that can improve the efficiency of dental practices are coming along nicely.

What happened: A clinical team recently reported using a robot to prepare teeth for crowns in a six-patient pilot of a robotics system made by Perceptive, a Boston-based dental technology company. The crowns were made before the robot shaped the teeth to match a digital plan, speeding up the overall treatment.

• Five of six crowns fit well enough to be permanently cemented at the treatment visit. The sixth was used as a temporary crown. No adverse events were recorded through one week of follow-up.

• Perceptive, which is backed by PDS Health (and Mark Zuckerberg’s dad), says that the technology could eventually be used to complete a restorative dental procedure in 15 minutes with only one visit.

Zoom out: Perceptive isn’t the only robotics company making waves in dental. A number of other players are developing hardware that promises to dramatically increase efficiency across the industry. 

• Neocis reported earlier this year that clinicians had performed more than 100,000 osteotomies using its Yomi platform, which is the only FDA-cleared robotic system for dental implant surgery.

• France’s Lupin Dental announced a €15 million funding round last month to develop its robot that prepares teeth for veneers.

• ALLSTAR, a device sold by Germany’s SCHEU-DENTAL, allows clinics to produce aligners in-house at a pace of up to 96 aligners in 24 hours.

Why it matters: As dental robotics mature, the potential payoff for DSOs is getting more care out of the people, chairs, and locations they already have. If robots can shorten appointments or take repetitive work off the clinical team’s plate, practices could treat more patients without adding the same amount of staffing or space.

• The crown example shows how that could happen. While same-day crowns are already a thing, they usually take somewhere between one and three hours. Bringing that to under an hour across a busy network of practices adds up to significantly more capacity.

• More advanced robotics also could change the relationship between practices and their suppliers. Groups with enough demand for aligners, for example, might opt to bring more production under their own roof, gaining control over turnaround times and potentially keeping more of the revenue from each case.

What’s next: Watch for larger veneer and crown trials, simpler implant workflows, and microrobots that could target bacteria in hard-to-reach root canals—an innovation that’s admittedly much further away but potentially even more revolutionary. One date to keep an eye on is October 13, when this year’s China Dental Show, which is expected to feature advances in robotics front and center, gets under way.

Share this article: https://www.themorninggrind.com/p/dental-robots-are-past-the-demo-stage

BUSINESS BITES

👔 Notable leadership changes: The American Academy of Cosmetic Dentistry names Krista Paternostro Bower as its executive director, David Fusco is the new CEO of 42 North Dental, Rodeo Dental & Orthodontics names Lorri Detrick CEO and Andrew Napolitano CFO, and Curve Dental appoints Luke Anderson as chief product officer.

📈 Deals and de novos: Lone Peak Dental group buys four Vital Smiles pediatric dental and orthodontic practices in Alabama, Imagen Dental Partners adds a practice in Illinois, Sage Dental opens a new practice in Florida, and 11 new practices join the Corus Orthodontists network.

🚗 Aria Care Partners, an onsite senior care provider, acquires Precision Mobile Care, a Utah-based provider of mobile onsite preventive and restorative dental care.

CONSUMER

Network leasing is now a legislative battleground

If you’ve ever had a claim paid by a carrier you've never contracted with at a rate you never negotiated, you’re already familiar with the practice of network leasing. A new law in Colorado is taking direct aim at it.

What happened: Colorado just became one of the first states to ban dental network leasing without the provider’s affirmative consent. The new law, which took effect last month, also requires insurers to send regular updates on which third parties are accessing the network and mandates that third parties accessing a leased network honor the original contract's terms.

• According to the ADA, six states in addition to Colorado have introduced leasing bills in 2026. Wisconsin passed a narrower fix that lets dentists exit a leased network without terminating the underlying contract, while the rest of the proposed laws have yet to pass.

How it works: A provider joins an insurer’s network and agrees to its payment rates, but a clause in its contract lets that insurer share access to its network, including those rates, with other insurance companies. Patients covered by those other insurers can then receive care at the provider’s negotiated rates, even though it never signed a contract with the third-party payer.

• Sometimes insurers make these arrangements directly. Other times, a middleman connects the network to dozens of payers, an arrangement sometimes referred to as “umbrella plans” or “passive PPOs.”

• Insurers say that leasing helps them offer patients a wider choice of dentists and allows employers to cover workers who live in states outside of their insurance company’s network.

Yes, but: Dental providers object that the arrangements often involve applying discounts offered to one insurer (typically offered in exchange for patient flow commitments) to payers that send few if any patients. The outcome is reduced reimbursement with no volume guarantee.

• The practice also creates other headaches for providers, like plans failing to notify dentists they've become participating providers with a new plan, patient confusion over whether they’re in-network, and carriers making it difficult or impossible to opt out of plans they don’t want to participate in.

Why it matters: For dental practices, these rules affect who can use their negotiated rates and how much control they have over those arrangements. For multi-state DSOs, the patchwork of regulations adds significant operational complexity, with several leasing regimes now in play: opt-in (like Colorado now requires), opt-out in many more states (where dentists must explicitly opt-out of leasing arrangements), and notice-only or nothing at all elsewhere.

Bottom line: Colorado flipped the default from "you're leased unless you say no" to "you're leased only if you say yes." It’s one of the most provider-friendly laws on the books in the country, but how far that model spreads remains to be seen.

Share this article: https://www.themorninggrind.com/p/​​network-leasing-is-now-a-legislative-battleground

CLINICAL NOTES

🧠 Severe gum disease may increase the risk of ischemic stroke, with the risk appearing to rise as gum disease gets worse, according to a review in the Journal of Periodontology which found that regular dental care may help lower that risk by reducing plaque and inflammation.

🦷 A special chewing gum made from lablab beans may help fight HPV and bacteria linked to oral cancer, with researchers finding that the gum, which also contains an antimicrobial ingredient, targeted HPV and two types of bacteria associated with head and neck cancer.

💰 A national cohort study in the Journal of Dentistry compared the long-term survival rates and costs of root canal treatment versus implants, concluding that the survival time for implants replacing endodontically diseased teeth was greater than that of teeth following root canal treatment but was also more expensive.

BEYOND THE CUSP

• Billionaire venture capitalist Doug Leone says he had a root canal without Novocaine “to see if [he] was a badass or not.”

• 10 viral TikTok trends damaging people’s teeth.

• Stress over football may contribute to teeth grinding at night.

• Researchers explore delivering vaccines with dental floss.

• Just for fun: The wildest sport you’ve never heard of has some unlikely stars: American cowboys.