Helping Healthcare Scale

Dr. Bryan Laskin: Innovating Dental Practices with OperaDDS and ToothApps in the Age of AI and Automation

• Austin Hair - Real Estate Developer

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Join us for a conversation with Dr. Bryan Laskin, a dentist who has boldly ventured into the realm of dental technology innovation. We explore how a surprising epiphany about his initial career choice led Dr. Laskin on a path to revolutionize data accessibility in dental practices. His journey from traditional dentistry to the creation of OperaDDS and Toothapps is a testament to his passion for enhancing patient care and streamlining practice operations through technology.

Uncover the dynamic intersection of tech and dentistry with Dr. Laskin's work on Toothapps, a platform aiming to modernize dental practices worldwide. Dive into how this technology is tackling challenges like patient data transfer and compliance with regulations such as HIPAA. With innovative tools for online scheduling, teledentistry, and seamless communication between practitioners, Toothapps is setting a new standard for efficiency and patient interaction in the dental industry.

We also explore the future of "dentistry 3.0," where automation and AI bring transformative potential to dental practices. Discover how these advancements can optimize operations, reduce mundane tasks, and enhance patient engagement, paving the way for more personalized care. Dr. Laskin shares insights into AI-driven treatment planning and the importance of integrating medical and dental records. Join us as we navigate the exciting possibilities of a technology-driven dental world and learn how to stay informed about the latest developments by visiting toothapps.com.

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Speaker 1:

basically take dentistry out of the dark ages. The only real innovations that I've seen in my 25-year career has been massive on the clinical side, but very little innovation in things as simple as how patients pay their bill or how they schedule an appointment. If you look at other industries, embarrassing how dentistry runs today.

Speaker 2:

The goal of this show is to help healthcare organizations scale by leveraging real estate strategies and interviewing high-level healthcare executives in order to pull out lessons learned along the way. If you'd like a free site selection analysis from our team, visit us at wwwhealthcareorganizationscom. The goal of this show is to help healthcare organizations scale by leveraging real estate strategies and interviewing high-level healthcare executives in order to pull out lessons learned along the way. If you'd like a pre-site selection analysis from our team, visit us at wwwreuniversityorg and drop us a line.

Speaker 4:

Hello everyone, welcome back to Helping Healthcare Scale, and I'm really excited to have a repeat guest today. It's Dr Brian Laskin and he has been in the dental industry for 25 years and he's owned his practice for 22 years. Recently, he's been focused on a platform called Tooth Apps, which we're going to get into in this show. So thanks for hopping on. Thanks for having me Appreciate it Great yeah, so we'd love for you to share with people. How did you get into the dental industry?

Speaker 1:

Dental industry, so I became a dentist. Due to flawed logic. I industry, so I became a dentist. Due to flawed logic, I thought that I basically have ADHD and I was looking at different professions. I was going to be a physician. Like some of my family members Went on rounds and decided I didn't want to go to 10 years of medical school and residency and all that to be told by medical insurance companies what to do. And so I took a year off, looked into different professions and every dentist I met was so calm that I was like, oh, this must be a calming profession.

Speaker 1:

As it turns out, people who are calm go into dentistry because it's a very stressful profession. So it's flawed logic. But probably that's why today I do mainly technology. I've been focused on dental technologies since right after I got out of dental school, did a lot of training for CAD, cam and CT imaging for over a dozen years. School did a lot of training for CAD, cam and CT imaging for over a dozen years and then scaled a patient engagement platform, opera DDS, to be in over 30,000 dental practices and now run two things where we're focused on solving what I think is the biggest problem in dentistry, which is the lack of data accessibility.

Speaker 4:

So how did you? Yeah, I always think it's fascinating to hear the story of, like how you made the pivot. So that's how you made a pivot into dentistry. How did you pivot from what you were doing earlier into ToothApps? What was the epiphany moment?

Speaker 1:

Yeah, great question. I think OperaDDS I created to solve problems within my dental practices ToothApps. I'm solving what I think is the biggest problem that nobody else was looking at, problem that I ran into running Opera DDS Because, let's say, you're a small innovative technology company in dentistry and you want to create, let's say, a paperless forms product it's going to write back into the practice management software. You have to have access to write back into the practice management software and at the time the largest vendors wouldn't actually allow people to write back into the medical history, for example. That put millions of patients at risk in the case of Opera DDS because if a patient fills out their medical history form in Opera and it didn't go back to the PMS and the caregiver was looking within the PMS the dentist, the dentist they're looking at the wrong medical history. That's one simple example of how massive this problem is and the more you think about it.

Speaker 1:

When a new patient comes to our practices, what information do we get when they have their records transferred? It's essentially zero information, which, if a patient has an issue with their tooth, the first thing we're going to do is look back at the history. If they've been in our practice for 20 years and there's failing endo, we want to know what happened up till now so that we can have a diagnosis that isn't a misdiagnosis. However, because of the way the industry has run for the last years, until now, we act like not having access to this patient's information doesn't matter and it's vitally important. And so, after selling Opera, one of the reasons why I sold Opera was to focus on this problem because, frankly, I didn't know.

Speaker 4:

I didn't see anybody else address it. Wow, so that's interesting. So I guess you went from hands-on physical dentist to you said it's Opera or Opera, ADDS Opera. Okay, so that was more of a technology platform. So I'm just curious how involved are you on the tech side Are you? Did you have to learn any sort of like programming? Are you just outsourcing all of this? I'm really curious on what that transition was like and what's involved from your end.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, so I have coded a little bit, but I wasn't like I wasn't the primary coder and I just know enough to know what's good and what's bad, which is vitally important, frankly. But I'm look, software and dentistry overall is created by a software engineer, and if you know anything about software engineering, you shouldn't have a software engineer designing the software. You should have somebody that understands the problem you're trying to solve. And I deeply understand the operations of a dental practice, how to deliver care at a high level. So I knew what I wanted to have coded right.

Speaker 1:

The architect, typically of a house is not hanging the drywall, but they designed the house. So I'm the architect, the visionary behind how this, how the problems of how we're solving the problems, and looking at it from the perspective of in a busy dental practice, as a, from the patient's perspective, from the practice's perspective, how should this function? And, just generally speaking, in dentistry, that's woefully missed in a lot, in many cases. So I'm not doing the coding. However, I'm working with the development teams on every project I've worked on very closely so that we can make sure we're addressing the concerns from the concerns, from the perspectives of the people that are actually using the software.

Speaker 4:

And that's both Opera and ToothApps.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, yeah. Now the difference is at Opera, we had one developer and one person who was testing. At ToothApps, we have 45. And I have a co-founder who's a genius CTO, who he heads the development and shared vision on what we're building. So the scale is very different with Tooth Apps than with my prior platform, but the end result is the same. We're trying to solve problems for dental practices, for dental patients, to help basically take dentistry out of the dark ages, the way dentistry has been. From a technology perspective, the only real innovations that I've seen in my 25-year career has been massive on the clinical side. You look at intraoral scanning, ct scans, the way we place implants, massive improvements, but very little innovation in things as simple as how patients pay their bill or how they schedule an appointment, how they engaged with the team members when they're outside the dental practice. That's it's been, if you look at other industries, embarrassing how dentistry runs today. We're trying to address that.

Speaker 4:

Yeah, so one of the biggest things problems that sounds like you're solving is the transfer of patient data. Is that when they're onboarding or when you sell a practice, is that the intended use case?

Speaker 1:

Yes, but it's much more of a pervasive issue than that. It's who owns this data legally, ethically and morally. It's dental patients, and they have a federally mandated right through the 21st Century Cures Act and HIPAA to have access to their information. And they don't have access. And they don't have access because and they don't have access because dental practices don't have access.

Speaker 1:

So if you're looking at doing data analytics on behalf of your patients, so your practice, to deliver better care, it's moronically difficult today if you're running a single dental practice, let alone a group of dental practices, right? So we've written standards for the American Dental Association and Dental Standards Institute to say how is this data stored? What language do these systems speak? Because every system today speaks a different language, which is completely moronic. If you buy a dental practice and you're using EagleSoft and that uses Open Dental, these two systems can't communicate. They don't even say they don't. Even the first name isn't even stored. The same way which there's federal regulations that dictate how this information needs to be stored that the entire industry has been out of compliance.

Speaker 4:

And that's a recent regulation right.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, not even that recent. So HIPAA has been around for a long time, but there's a regulation called the 21st Century Cures Act or the Cures Act, which went into effect in 2022. So we're literally two years past this going into effect and massive fines People are getting fined and still not updating their systems.

Speaker 4:

So people are getting fined and nobody's still updating their systems.

Speaker 1:

It's, the systems aren't updating. So if you think about it, if you're a dentist and a dental patient says I'd like my entire comprehensive dental record in an electronic form, you're required within 30 days to give it to them. If they say through a secure mobile application, through a secure mobile application and that's completely missing today so if that patient reports you that you could pay up to a million dollar, fine, now dental practices are paying something around $50,000 on average, but software vendors pay much bigger fines, even more than the fines and the regulatory issue. But this is an issue that is choking innovation. It's degrading patient care every day in every dental practice around the country.

Speaker 1:

So the lack of having the patient's medical history, dental history, radiographs, chart, notes when you refer a patient from your office to an endodontist across the hall, even if you use the same software, that endodontist typically doesn't get anything except for maybe a radiograph Whole history is important and so being able to partition that for that specialist is very important and also, if you want to increase your case acceptance, having the patients have the ability to review the information when they're at home with their spouse so they can securely message your office if they want to through a mobile application. Do a teledentistry consult. Get third-party financing, pay their bill. Do online scheduling. Do the same application where they can review their treatment plan. It only makes sense, and so that's what we're enabling.

Speaker 4:

And when you say app, I guess you also mean software, right? Because if a GP is referring a patient to an endodontist, they're going to be doing all that. They're not going to be getting out their iPhone and sending it over. So it's compatible both ways.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, it's compatible both ways. So we have Tooth Apps has three different platforms. There's Tooth Apps, which is for dental professionals. Dental practices can just log into any web browser. There is also a mobile application, so if you want to do the referral from your iPhone, you can. There's ToothApps Connect, which is where software vendors plug in, because we're looking to solve this problem for everybody. We're an open platform, so anybody, any system, can plug into ToothApps and we normalize that data to industry standards and then redistribute it securely to those that basically have the rights for it and that's got to be on the back end right, like your programmers have to set up.

Speaker 4:

I don't know if it's an API or something that's going to talk with. Whatever software it is that they want to integrate.

Speaker 1:

Exactly. Yeah, we've opened APIs so that if you're here at a federal like HIPAA and you have the medical necessity, you can plug into ToothApps and that's called ToothApps Connect. And then our third platform is ToothApps Patient and that's for patients to get access to their data, and that's where that's what we've recently launched it and I'm really excited about it because I think it's going to be the biggest increase in case acceptance since the intro camp. Oh wow, patients are in our practices and we're talking about their treatment. Right, it's like they're by the campfire and they're all cozy and everybody's.

Speaker 1:

Oh yeah, I should have this crown done. But then every step they take outside of your practice, they get cooler and cooler. But having that information on their phone so they can look at it and review it at home, it's like keeping them a little bit more cozy than a campfire. Then we're going to be more likely to remember what you said reach out to ask that simple question, or maybe the person at the front desk was too busy to go over financing, but it's available in the application so the patient can quickly or they were embarrassed to ask questions or embarrassed to ask about third-party financing All that's available through a mobile application Is that like a chat feature?

Speaker 4:

Yeah, there's a secure chat functionality.

Speaker 1:

You can use SMS, email or secure chat, which obviously, if you're sharing personal health information, you should do securely through that functionality. Yeah, people can confirm their appointments. They can basically do all the functionality that anybody on planet Earth in 2024 would expect from a business that they interact with right.

Speaker 4:

Yeah, it's fascinating and I'm really curious too, like as an entrepreneur, what was the journey like from when you decided to do it until now. It's been shocking to be honest, so I.

Speaker 1:

this happened during the pandemic.

Speaker 4:

I mean, it wasn't as easy as you thought.

Speaker 1:

In some ways it's been harder. In some ways it's been shockingly easy. What I would say is the big stuff has been easy because it's such a massive problem that getting standards written like everybody understands that this is a necessity. Next week I'm flying out. I'm going to be on a government birds of the feather panel moderated by the chief dental officer of the United States of America. This is a massive issue for the federal government or the DOD, for people that actually run the industry. They recognize this.

Speaker 1:

However, when I talk to dental practice about it, sometimes they say things like why would I share a treatment plan with a patient? Then they can go shop it around? Now that's been a little disappointing, frankly, because why would you not want to give patients their treatment plans when they're at home to review them Because you think you're so bad at your job or your team members are so poor at like? The experience is so bad that they might go somewhere else? That just doesn't happen.

Speaker 1:

We've been giving patients their treatment plans on a piece of paper for years and years, and it's no different having it on a mobile application.

Speaker 1:

So, from the perspective of look, change is hard and change comes with fear, and there's a lot of fear right now when people are looking at opening up our dental industry to be more patient friendly and I understand it, but I'm also that cake is baked. It's the right thing to do. Everybody can recognize. It's the right thing to do, understand what can happen and how to elevate your practice. When we're doing this in a way, for example, that dental practices can customize what they share with the patients initially, but we still need to give I mean, this is the patient's data, it's their information, so when they request it, we it's the right thing to do and, by the way, we need to have access to this information to give the best quality of care. So, yeah, I think it's been. As an entrepreneur, it's been interesting to see that how much industry as a whole understands the problem, but how much fear there is on an individual basis sometimes.

Speaker 4:

Yeah, last time we talked, you mentioned building a story brand by Donald Miller as one of your favorite books. How has that integrated into what you're doing with Tooth Apps? Is that something you think about a lot?

Speaker 1:

Yeah, I do. I think storytelling. In fact, right now I'm reading a great book called Save the Cat, which is also about storytelling. Yeah, because I, as you can probably tell, I'm a change agent. I like making change and I lean into sometimes getting too far ahead, like we're talking about right now.

Speaker 1:

So, in Donald Miller terms, the hero here is dental practices right, who can provide the best quality of care. What we're trying to do at Tooth Apps is enable that. In Don Miller's terms, the guide, we're trying to give them the ability to provide the highest quality of care, the best patient experience, a more seamless experience, not just for dental patients but for team members, who are overwhelmed right now. Dental there's no lack of demand in dentistry. There's lack of people to meet that demand and automating these tools, which is what we enable to have the sort of heroes who are doing the great work in dentistry, which is, the people who take care of patients. That's what we're trying to do. So, in Donald Miller terms, we're the enablers, or the guides, to let the heroes do their job yeah, that's cool, yeah, it's so important.

Speaker 4:

It's like a lot of times we just get into the weeds so much we forget that we communicate with humans. We've been communicating via storytelling for a long time and that can be so powerful when you're trying to explain something or convince them or something or whatever. So so what do you think is the potential to the bottom line revenue to pivot? Opposite of storytelling, it goes straight into the numbers. Do you think? Like how much do you think this is costing a practice or even a DSO by not having this information or not being able to organize it from an efficient way?

Speaker 1:

Yeah, it's much, much bigger than what people realize. One study that was done by 3Disc, which is an inter-oral scanning company that shares those scans with patients. So they do 3D scans and then you can, patients can, see their scans and the study shows that practices that share those 3D scans with patients get a 40% increase in case exceptions. Wow, 4-0, right, and that's just an intraoral scan. That's not radiographs or treatment plans or charting or third-party financing. We're capturing the data on that now because our patient application just recently reached out.

Speaker 1:

But then if you look at the amount of just wasted time in a dental practice with things like everything from paper forms to calling phones, calling the laboratory, calling the specialist, versus sending a secure message back and forth, I think that automation would minimally augment the operations of a dental practice, where they would get more done with one less person at the front desk. I'm not saying that you need to replace people. I'm saying that you can free up your people to do what people do best, which is connect with other human beings, right? So when people come into your practice they can actually have the time and energy to look people in the eye, greet them, versus being they're no stuck in the computer.

Speaker 4:

So I think, it's.

Speaker 1:

I think it's a. I think it's the biggest opportunity in dentistry and I want to highlight, too, what I think is going on in the industry. We're entering a phase of dentistry that I call dentistry 3.0. If you think of dentistry 1.0 as analog dentistry, the conversion to white fillings, four-handed dentistry, and then when I got out of dental school, right before the turn of the century, we were entering digital dentistry 2.0. I saw this pong game called CERAC that I thought was fascinating and PMSs were just coming out. You could take a paper chart and put it on the computer. It was amazing. I my first calendar was schedule, was a paper calendar and we converted to a digital calendar and that was like scary as hell. That was the most difficult technology transformation we had in my practice because it was the first one, this transition from analog to digital, which many of us have done in dentistry and that's been going on for 25 years.

Speaker 1:

I think we're now entering a new phase of dentistry and there's still going to be you know, there's still dentistry 1.0, dentistry 2.0, advancements or entering dentistry 3.0 that I call connected dentistry Consolidation of dental practices, connecting directly with our patients, more consumerism, medical dental connections, which is something we're actually showcasing connecting a dental record to Epic and other medical records this weekend. So medical dental connections, but then also connecting our systems through data interoperability, which is our main focus, and remote care. That's another theme. If, when you look at this sort of from your to your point, what's the ROI on using CAD, CAM or a PMS? Yes, there's a direct ROI.

Speaker 1:

However, it's a better way to deliver care. It's so much so that it was a new phase of dentistry and that's what's going on right now. There's a new phase of dentistry and we're on the very beginning of this. I don't know what the last another 25 years with the end technologies will be in connected dentistry, but hopefully we'll still be leading the way. But this is all. This is not a new technology. It's a new phase we're entering and I think that if you recognize that, you can adjust the sales of your practice to the winds of change to be able to take off like crazy.

Speaker 4:

What about, yeah, ai? Are you guys incorporating that in any form, like maybe using that to develop on the back end, or integrating with it so that practices can use it? What's your thoughts on that?

Speaker 1:

color eyes. Great technology, it's used, massive benefit, but it's a 2.0 application of dentistry. So what we're doing is we're trying to leverage AI to do something that a human can't. Our first version of this is actually coming out next month, so I'm glad you asked the question. What we're doing next month. We're showcasing at the SmileCon, which might be after you listen to this podcast. Obviously, when you look at your calendar in tooth apps, we're going to show you the probability that that patient is going to show up for their appointment and then we're using AI to increase the probability that patient will show up. So, using analytics and AI to change the content, the cadence and the mode of delivery for how we reach out to those patients to get them to show up for their appointment. Also, we're going to be leveraging AI for doing things like treatment planning and increasing case acceptance scheduling what is the best for that patient, what?

Speaker 4:

about follow-up phone calls, like using AI agents to do that? Yeah, I don't know. I just listened to the All In podcast and they had their summit this week, last week, and yeah, the CEO of Salesforce was just talking about we're getting close to where you'll have an agent like an AI. That's like me as a consumer, and then these companies will have their agents too and it's where you might have agents AI agents negotiating, talking like having complete conversations on their own, talking back and forth. But I think from your perspective, yeah, so valuable. Now you don't have to pay so many hourly to go and make phone calls and do all these follow up and then, like, when they do call and leave a voicemail, you wouldn't know that it's an ai or a person. It's going to be saying their name, but it's going to be personalized and if they get them on the phone, great like it just has huge potential to cut down on all these costs yeah, I.

Speaker 1:

We're evaluating that now. I think we're right at the precipice of where that technology is almost there. I don't know if it's exactly there yet, not yet.

Speaker 1:

And I don't think that dental practices will. That's not going to be. The first thing they want to sign up for is for an AI agent. They're going to have anxiety about that that patient as needing to be having a human call them versus sending a text message, versus an email, versus what to say to the patient to get that specific patient to come in right. Those things are. That's what we're going to be doing. We're going to be empowering the people in the dental practice to do things that other people can't do. Also, things like, like I mentioned this weekend, we're going to be showcasing integrating Epic and dental records. A lot of people talk about the correlation between periodontal disease and heart disease, for example, but we don't know the causation, because who can look at millions and millions of patients' data and make those connections? That's very difficult for a human to do. However, when we connect Epic to the dental systems, we can turn on AI to find the causation between these, and so we're enabling research that hasn't been able to, because these information sources are siloed.

Speaker 4:

We can't connect them and make those conclusions, so we're doing that too. This has been awesome. Anybody who wants to learn more what's a good resource for that About what you guys are doing?

Speaker 1:

Go to our website ToothApps T-O-O-T-H-A-P-Scom. It's the best way to get information.

Speaker 4:

Sweet. Hey, thanks very much for your time and looking forward to seeing this progress as you get more and more into the weeds on it. Thanks a lot, take care.

Speaker 3:

If you need help finding the perfect location for your practice or you're ready to invest in commercial real estate, email us podcast at leadersreecom R-E, as in realestatecom, or go to leadersreecom and fill out our form. See you next time.