AI And UK Dentistry with Dr Dan Shaffer [CPD Available]

UK Dentists: Collect your verifiable CPD for this episode here >>> https://courses.dentistswhoinvest.com/smart-money-members-club

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A cancelled appointment shouldn’t turn into dead time, and a tiny shadow on a radiograph shouldn’t become a missed diagnosis. That’s why we’re paying close attention to the practical side of AI in dentistry, not the hype. After walking the exhibitions and seeing what’s actually working, we break down the AI tools that can genuinely make a dental practice run smoother and safer.

We talk through AI receptionists and voice agents that integrate with practice management software via API connections, monitor your diary, and automatically call a waiting list to refill last-minute gaps, even running multiple calls at once. We also dig into the human side: why obvious AI can feel off-putting, where patients still want a real person, and why the likely future is AI that frees up your team rather than replaces them.

On the clinical front, we explore AI radiograph diagnosis and how tools such as Pearl-style systems can act as a consistent second set of eyes for caries detection, helping you move faster while staying clinically and medico-legally protected. Then we move into AI that listens to calls and provides coaching feedback, plus dental AI note-takers that draft structured records quickly, along with the non-negotiable safeguard: you must review for hallucinations, missed priorities, and audio errors before anything becomes part of the clinical notes.

If you want more of this thinking live, we also mention the Business of Dentistry event on 9 May at the Eastside Rooms in Birmingham. Subscribe for more practical dentistry, money, and time-leverage conversations, share this with a colleague, and leave us a review with the AI tool you’re most curious to try.

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Disclaimer: All content on this channel is for education purposes only and does not constitute an investment recommendation or individual financial advice. For that, you should speak to a regulated, independent professional. The value of investments and the income from them can go down as well as up, so you may get back less than you invest. The views expressed on this channel may no longer be current. The information provided is not a personal recommendation for any particular investment. Tax treatment depends on individual circumstances and all tax rules may change in the future. If you are unsure about the suitability of an investment, you should speak to a regulated, independent professional. Investment figures quoted refer to simulated past performance and that past performance is not a reliable indicator of future results/performance.

Transcript

CPD And Members Club Offer

Dr James 0:00

As ever, you can claim your CPD for this episode within the official Dentists who invest Smart Money Members Club. Smart Money Members Club also includes multiple mini courses and webinar series on finance for dentists, including how to become as tax efficient as possible, as well as understanding investing. All of this content counts as verifiable CPD, and you can download your certificates there and then upon completion of each lesson. In addition to this, we also include a whopping 10% discount on your dental indemnity and a 5% discount on lab bills for dental principals, amongst other perks and discounts for members. Please use the link in the description to claim your verifiable CPD for this episode. What's up, everybody? Welcome to another episode of Dentists Who Invest Podcast. We're here to talk about AI today and how that is impacting upon the dental field. Because every time we go to these shows, Dan, of which we go to quite frequently, of course, and I see you nodding your head, there's always a new AI company or a new novel way that people are applying AI.

Dr Dan 1:02

And for those who don't know, there's so many different ways that AI comes into healthcare and society at large. I mean, there were so many AI products and services and companies at that last exhibition, weren't there?

Dr James 1:15

We couldn't we couldn't step down one of the aisles without tripping over some more AI. There was, and you know what? Call me Mr. Cynical, and I don't know if this shows that I'm kind of getting stuck in my ways, right? But I must say that I did think the AI stuff originally was kind of gimmicky. Okay, but now I saw some of the stuff. I'm like, no, darn, this is cool. When I actually got there and saw things, that was my preconception that I thought it was gimmicky, is what I'm saying.

Dr Dan 1:39

Did you see that um robotic uh dummy head with all the valves in it and light shining? And it was connected up to an AI chatbot. And and this uh what would you call it? Not an Android, is it? It's like a robot. Uh it's not a robot, what do they call it? Because an Android Like a humanoid, a humanoid.

Dr James 1:58

Unless my sci-fi knowledge fails me, an android is one that resembles a human, right? You know, but it's synthetic on the inside. But this was just I I think it was just a humanoid head that was a robot.

Dr Dan 2:08

It was a a humanoid dummy head, if you like. But it had facial muscles that twitched and and facial expressions that you know went with the words it was saying, and it was connected up to something like some kind of AI large language model or LLM as they call them. And so you could ask it any question, and it would draw from this massive database of seeing the entire internet in one go, and you'd say, Well, okay, so uh tell me, yeah, you know, what files should I use? An an H Flex file or a K-Flex file to do a root canal, and it would say, Well, HFlex files are really good for this, and headstrom files and K-Flex files for this, and you know, it had a great dental knowledge, but also it was there for patients, so you'd say, Well, I've got a toothache, you know, what shall I do? And it would say, Well, a hot compress can be really good for a toothache, and then phone your dentist for an emergency appointment because you might have a hole in the tooth. And you know, so it was coming up with really large database kind of answers that were quite useful. And I didn't hear it hallucinate once, apart from when I asked it, have you heard of Dr. Dan Shaffer, dentist in the UK? And you know what it said? It said, No, I haven't heard of Dr. Dan Shaffer. I did I didn't ask it about James Martin though.

AI Receptionists That Fill Cancellations

Dr James 3:15

Well, there you go. I mean, um uh you need to up you need to up your uh Google SEO presence by the sounds a bit, Dan, because that was that was the the limiting factor there. What the bottleneck, I guess, really, on the humanoid being able to give you that sort of information. But yeah, anyway, no, it's it's interesting. By the way, for the benefit of the audience, for those who don't know, Dan is my collaborator, or we collaborate together on the Business of Dentistry event. Shout out to the Business of Dentistry Event. That next event is coming up on the 9th of May in the Eastside Rooms in Birmingham. So obviously, we go to lots of these shows because we want to stay abreast of what's going on in the industry. And you know what? On that note, let's do exactly that. What cool applications does AI have that people may not expect that Dan that you come across at a show or otherwise in the dental industry? I've got a ton, but I want to hear yours first.

Dr Dan 4:04

Okay, so coming out of the humanoid and Android kind of sphere, because I only saw one at the show, and and it's interesting what you said that the model was perhaps limited a little bit by the information that it drew upon, so it knew loads about dentistry, but it might not have heard about a particular dentist. Um now moving on to uh another factor, I think we saw three or four different examples of this, which was Roboreception, or you know, which which I'm using as a generic term.

Dr James 4:31

Um and what it means just to caveat that, roboreception is actually one of the brand names for those companies. Oh, oh, it is.

Dr Dan 4:37

Yeah, no, you're absolutely right. Sorry. Yeah, yeah.

Dr James 4:40

So what we should say is robot receptionists or AI receptionists, right?

Dr Dan 4:45

Yeah, I I'm not sure if the generic term is uh robotic receptionists or AI reception or whatever it is, or remote reception. Um, it used to be that you'd have your receptionists in a faraway country where labor was cheaper, and then you know, they'd answer the phone for you, and that was you know, a virtual assistant or virtual receptionist. Now it's gone a stage further when it's taken the chat box off your website and it's put a person with a voice behind it, but it does a lot more than that. It can, you know, you can program it in with the services that you offer in your practice, and then it can phone out and make marketing phone calls for you to your patients and sound like an AI. And I don't know if you've been phoned by AIs. I'm still a little bit resistant to an AI, even though you don't always recognize it. Um, I I've had a few phone calls lately from an AI and I don't I can't remember what they're selling, but double glazing or timeshare or something. And um the uh the the voice, the first thing it says is can you hear me? And and in a very human voice, so it's very authentic, but I know from that initial response that it's just trying to check that it's got someone on the end of the phone that the AI can interact with. So I always then put the phone down because I know it's a sales call. And I'm not sure if the rest of the population has that kind of resistance to talking to AIs or even seeing AIs in videos still, you know. You always watch and you think, oh, is that an AI or is it a person? And and it's kind of like a game in your own head to try and weed out what's AI or not. Uh James, are you resistant to watching AI videos or being advertised to by AIs or phone calls from AIs?

Smart Money Members Club Breakdown

Dr James 6:25

Um I mean, the thing is if I can tell it's AI and it's very obvious, then I'm a bit repelled by it. But the I'm I bet there's been times before where I've watched a video and not been able to tell, and I probably thought that was a cool video. So uh that is your answer. Uh if I if I if I'm if I'm aware it is, yeah, then it just looks a bit like lame, and I just think, oh, this is fake. Uh but if I if I'm not, which is I'm sure it gets better and better, that won't be an issue. You know, I had an interesting one the other day, right? Because I got a spam call, and this is nothing to do with dentistry, by the way, but I'm gonna pull this back to dentistry in a second. And the very first thing that the person on the other end, or the inverted comments person, said to me was it said, Hey, would you would it put you off if you thought that I was a robot? And it was in this very robotic voice, and I'm like, what is what is their angle? Would you not just like start talking? Like, it just seemed a weird way to do it, but anyway, um, talking about those robotic receptions that we talked about just a second ago, we referred to just a second ago. Um, they're not like that, they're actually really convincing, and you can't tell. Yeah, they are. I I saw one and this was friggin' cool, right? And uh it's just a great podcast to have because we can talk about all these applications that people might necessarily know about. Because I don't think people are aware of what these things can do on all these applications of AI that we talked about just a second ago. Uh so this particular uh software it plugs into dentally via an API, okay? It monitors your diary, you set up all the automations and prerequisites, and you're like, okay, cool. If a person cancels within 24 hours, call my waiting list that I will populate of patients, call all of them and try to fit them in on this slot, right? Now, obviously, if a receptionist has to do that, he or she has a hundred million other things they have to do in the day, like talking to people and everything along those lines. So they'll do it when they have time, but they don't always have time, right? Whereas this thing in the background, it'll call like the a patient, then it'll call the next patient, then it'll call the next patient. It'll even call five patients at once, okay, if you want it to. Yeah. And if it gets through to one off, then it'll book it'll book the slot, basically. Um, whereas to do that, the amount of if you're doing it five simultaneously, because you can have as many calls as you want through these pieces pieces of software, yeah, uh, versus one person doing it, then you remove the bottleneck, don't you? And you're way more likely to not have that white space in your diary. And even if you have like two or three appointments every single month that are gained where they would have been lost before, that's worth a lot to the clinic. That is worth an absolute ton. And the fact that it's all automated as well. UK dentists, Dentists Who Invests now has an official platform where you can learn about finance and obtain UK compliant, verifiable CPD at the same time. The only platform that exists on which you can do both. The Smart Money Members Club has hundreds of hours of mini courses, webinar series, and live day recordings on all things finance slash tax efficiency for UK dentists. This includes complete courses on how tax works for UK dentists, finance so that you can invest and grow your own money, business so you can improve your profitability as an associate or principal. And for those out there that want it, there's also a mini course on how you can responsibly enter the crypto space using measured amounts of capital. I've gathered this content from the best to the best I could find in each respective area so that you know that this is how people at the forefront of each field advise their clients. The Smart Money Members Club also contains discounts on common things that UK dentists need to pay for on a regular basis. This includes a whopping 10% discount on dental indemnity, the offer to beat your income protection deal no matter what you're paying, and for the principals out there, 5% discount on lab bills and 10% discount on practice insurance. These are designed to offer hundreds, if not thousands, in annual savings. The purpose of this members club is to not only boost your monthly income but also manage your outgoings as much as possible and therefore create more profit. To celebrate the launch of the Smart Money Members Club, and given that the CPD deadline is coming up soon, I've decided to offer the first month for this platform entirely for free. This offer will end in the coming weeks as soon as the current CPD cycle is up. To collect your CPD for this podcast episode using the Smart Money Members Club, feel free to use the link in the description of this podcast.

AI Diagnosis From Dental Radiographs

Dr Dan 10:46

Yeah, I was just whilst you were saying that, I was just feeling really sorry for my lovely receptionist because she's going to be really nervous about losing her job. And uh I know it's not a real worry because it will free up her time to do the tasks that are more human interaction. So she unless we get an Android receptionist, of course, where you know, but I think we're quite far away from that at the moment. Or a holographic one. I've seen a couple of those as well. Um, but I think there's still a place for uh receptionists in you know normal um corporate environments and clinical environments because people want that human interaction still. They really want it, they are a bit resistant to AI person to person, they wouldn't be that happy with a hologram. Um, whereas in a phone call, probably we can get away with it. I think that resistance has broken down. So I think it's a a continued kind of um evolution of society and societal norms that we need to continue evolving. And I think year on year we'll see more and more barriers breaking down to AIs and holograms and robots and androids and all the rest of it. Because at the moment, you can go into a bar in London, you can get your drink served by a robot robotic waiter. You know, uh you'll soon have a cleaner coming in to uh, you know, tidy up your socks and pants off the floor and fold towels and do the laundry that will be AI powered and robotic, you know, within a few years. Um, there's no there is a robotic dentist, and I didn't see it at the exhibition. It's in China at the moment, and it came out last year, and I don't think it's in clinical service just yet. And I think that's a long way off for dentists and dental nurses and hygienists, because I think that resistance is going to take a lot of time to break down. I don't think that we're quite there yet. And I think if you look at the kind of jobs that, you know, everyone's worried about jobs eroding, um, you know, so anyone that uses spreadsheets or graphic designers or, you know, lots and lots of different areas, you know, we're we're gonna start losing jobs because things are gonna become more efficient by using AI. I think dentistry, we're gonna get more efficient, but we're not gonna lose the workforce. I think we're quite protected for now. So anyone that's nervous about that, just to reassure you, that the um, you know, the uh the outlook is is good for humans in the workforce in dentistry and healthcare still. Uh let's move on to another um AI kind of uh application. So thinking about the other AIs we saw at the exhibition, um maybe it's your go, James. Was there anything else that you saw that uh you know to do with AI that you thought was pretty cool?

Dr James 13:17

I've got a whole list of things, but I'm actually interested to hear what you're gonna say because you might have seen some things that I didn't see.

Dr Dan 13:23

I saw the most incredible uh thing that I've seen before, but I want to mention it again because I think I'm just still blown away by it. And that is the way that AI can diagnose from radiographs. And I know we've talked about Pearl Dental before, and you know, Pearl is one of the examples, and perhaps a leading example that I've come across in X-ray diagnosis. Now, there's a lot of studies done with doctors trying to look at CT scans, and they find that AIs are just far more efficient, more accurate, quicker, like by 10 times as much at diagnosing cancers from CT scans and you know, caries from radiographs and all the rest of it. So we know AI has a place in doing it. We're worried about false positives, even false negatives. We're worried about accuracy. However, it seems that the accuracy is there. And uh I I'm just amazed because I started using um an AI uh Pearl Dental in my own practice to give it a go. And it saved so much time and it diagnosed caries where I didn't know there was caries on my radiographs, uh, and I would have just missed it and I would have let the patient go, and that would have had a clinical um uh what's the word, like uh a negative impact on the patient's oral health. And also medico-legal issues, you know, you've got to think medico-legally, protective. I don't practice, you know, scarily protectively, but you need to practice protectively nowadays. And having something backing you up with an image, a picture paints a thousand words, well, you know, something like pearl dental AI looking at your radiographs is a fantastic addition to your practice. I don't work for them, by the way. I've got no association with them. I'm not an advert for them, but I am an advocate for using this kind of AI to our advantage in not only an efficiency way, but also a protective way. So that for me is probably a really good one.

Dr James 15:14

That was snappy, you know. I don't know if you meant to do that. I'm not an advert, I'm an advocate. I like that. I like that. That was uh that was good, wasn't it? Is that fresh off the top of your head or is that a saying that I might not?

Dr Dan 15:24

Well, I didn't I didn't realise I said it, but it is, you're right, an alliteration that you know always sounds good when you alliterate, doesn't it?

AI Coaching For Patient Calls

Dr James 15:29

Yeah, it was punchy, man. That was quite cool. I like that. I like that. You know, I'm really conscious of time here because you said this is going to be a short, snappy podcast. One other application that I saw that I thought was really, really, really cool, and it's kind of on the receptionist side of things, but it's kind of unrelated to what I was saying before. Um, and that is that it you can actually get AI if you if you make your calls, and this is as a dentist, right? Not just as the reception team or the support staff, a dentist as well. If you make your calls through some of the new AI CRM softwares that are coming out, the AI will listen in on your call and it will give you feedback on things that you should have done better, right? So, for example, um I remember I went to this show a little while ago and someone uh they made a call, they were acting that they were the dentists, and they made a call to the patient, and they basically they were acting a little bit like how can I say this over the top just to see what the AI would say. And they basically made this joke about the patient's last name that was kind of like inappropriate or like a bit crossed the line a little bit, you know. Yeah, just just like it was funny, right? But in the context of the situation, it was funny, but it wouldn't have been something that you would have normally said. And the AI, it was amazing, right? The AI actually picked up on it, okay. And the AI, it was it was ever so polite about it, right? And it was like things that you did well, you know, it actually gave him feedback at the end on the call so that he could get better. And it was said something along the lines of um, you greeted the patient politely, you were efficient in your communication in that you booked the patient in at a desirable time, which suited their agenda, uh, and you did this in a very concise manner. And then it was like things you could have done better, perhaps consider not pointing out the patient's amusing last name. Some people make some people may have taken offense to this, right? And it was just the way that it said it, it was like ever so polite. It was like, you know, it was such an obvious thing not to do, but I really like that demo because it shows what level the AI is on, and it it was a little bit like I can't remember the he the person just basically had an unusual last name. His last name was McGrish. All right, are you with me? And then the guy or Mrs.

Dr Dan 17:47

Banana Head or something. Yeah, okay, I get it, I get it.

Dr James 17:50

The guy on the other end of the phone was like, no, but what's your real last name who was acting as the dentist? Okay, and the the the AI picked up on this and was like, dude, you can't do this. What are you doing? Yeah, I thought I thought it was cool. I thought it was cool.

AI Note Takers With Real Risks

Dr Dan 18:03

It leads me on to another point, which my last one, perhaps, if I can fit one more in that I was really impressed by. It's a connected one, which is AI note-takers. So we you know, we we've used them, James, haven't we, in Zoom and Teams and you know, for meetings, and we get a nice summary at the end of it. Um, but the dental tailored note-takers like uh that listen in in the background, they might have a few issues, which we'll discuss in just a moment. Um, but I I tried one called Heidi, and absolutely brilliant, and I know there are lots out there. Um it listens to what you say, and then it has a programming that says, right, well, here are the dental terminology to watch out for. This is how we like the dental notes to be organized. You you can then instruct it yourself, of course. And it was so brilliant. It set things out as I wrote my notes, and it saved me a load of time. Now, what are the weaknesses? Now, you need to check over it afterwards because you get this thing called AI hallucination occasionally, where you know it just says something really, really wacky and weird. And if you don't pick it up, then that goes into your clinical records. And of course, we think about these clinical records being read out in a court or in front of the GDC. How's it going to look when you're you know you've got something really wacky and wonderful that an AI's come up with? You really want to go over it and check everything before you put it through and press that okay button. The second thing is that it might not capture exactly the things that you want to give priority to. So it might be that with this patient, you might uh want to give priority to an eating disorder, but the AI won't have picked up the psychological impact of that eating disorder on the patient's oral health necessarily. So you might want to go over there and just re-prioritize things a little bit in the records, um, you know, in your own style and what you're write. So there are a couple of weaknesses there. Uh your microphone might not be the best quality, so you might get a crackle when the AI might not pick up anything. Um, you know, uh that it might concentrate on the nurse, it might not uh understand uh if you've got an accent or two, it might not understand your accent, which is particularly salient for you, James. It might, you know, pick up a word that you say slightly differently to me. Um exactly, exactly. Um, but uh but yeah, really, really cool note takers, and there's quite a few of them out there. I can't recommend one over the other because they're all developing at different rates, and uh, I think those are the future of what's going to be happening, certainly in healthcare. We can see it outside of healthcare in Zoom and Teams as well. So that for me is really uh, you know, the AI roundup, if you like.

Event Plug And Closing Thoughts

Dr James 20:36

Hell yeah, thank you so much for that uh summary, I guess, uh to yourself, Dan. And you know, we share this stuff for the benefit of the audience as two people who go to a lot of these shows and want people to know about the cool stuff that's out there to make their lives easier, because that is the point of Dentistry Invest. Anything that we can use to leverage and get back our time is the aim of the game. And on that note, that's why Dan and I are hosting the Business of Dentistry event on the 9th of May in Birmingham in the East Side Rooms. 500 dentists are gonna be in attendance there. We're gonna be talking about AI, we're gonna be talking about income, we're gonna be talking about all the juicy s stuff whenever it comes to the commerciality of dentistry, how to be better dentists, and of course how to get back our life and time as well. Keep an eye out on the dentistry invest mailing list for details on that very soon. In the meantime, peace out, hope everybody has a smashing day, and we'll see each other soon.