Book Your Strategy Call

Optimize Practice Alliance

AI for Healthcare Administration: 5 Tasks Your Health Center Can Start This Quarter, No Patient Data Needed

by

Health centers can start using AI for healthcare administration this quarter with five tasks that need no patient data: meeting follow-ups, first drafts of internal policies, patient reminder templates, board summaries, and claim denial appeals. Each one saves staff time, keeps protected health information out of the tool, and gives your team practice reviewing AI output before anything clinical.

The National Association of Community Health Centers points the same way. Its Action Guide on artificial intelligence, published in September 2025, notes that AI can automate administrative tasks and reduce errors, and says plainly that human oversight remains essential. It also calls protecting patient information paramount. So, using AI on routine tasks that don’t compromise sensitive information allows teams to build healthy habits around AI usage.

AI for healthcare administration

Where should AI for healthcare administration start?

Much of the AI for healthcare administration conversation in health care focuses on clinical tools such as ambient documentation and risk prediction. Those tools can be valuable, but they require vendor review, privacy safeguards and clinical sign-off before they go live. Administrative drafting can start now, with tools your team may already have access to, while the larger decisions move through their normal process.

The people who benefit first are the ones carrying the most paperwork: operations managers, office managers, billing leads and executive assistants. If AI enablement is one of your strategic priorities for the Rural Health Transformation Program, these tasks are also a practical first step on that readiness checklist.

1. How can AI help with meeting notes and follow-ups?

Paste your own notes from an operations or leadership meeting and ask the tool for a short recap: decisions made, action items, owners and due dates. A recap that once took 30 minutes becomes a five-minute review. This works especially well for a recurring meeting like a weekly dental operations meeting, where the same format repeats every week.

Keep this to operational meetings. Case reviews, peer review and any discussion of individual patients stay out of the tool.

2. Can AI draft internal policies?

AI for healthcare administration can produce a solid first draft of an internal policy, such as a remote work policy, a meeting cadence standard or a new procedure, in the format your health center already uses. Give it your existing template and the key decisions, and ask for a draft with clear headings and plain language.

A draft is a starting point. Policies still go through your normal review, and anything that touches compliance or requires board approval follows the same path it always has.

3. How can AI help write patient reminder messages?

Appointment reminders, recall notices and no-show follow-ups are templates, not patient records. AI can write versions at any reading level, in a friendlier tone, or in a shorter format for text messages. That matters because unfilled no-shows and lost recall are two of the biggest drains on dental chair time.

Use placeholders such as [first name] and [appointment time], and send the final messages through your existing reminder system. If you produce translated versions, have a fluent staff member review them before use.

4. Can AI help prepare board summaries?

Board members need a clear one-page view of operations, not a stack of reports. AI can turn aggregate numbers, such as monthly encounters, staffing levels and budget variance, into a short narrative summary with the key trends up front.

Use only summary-level data, never patient-level detail, and check that your health center allows internal financial information in the tool you are using. A leader should verify every number before the summary goes in the board packet.

5. How can AI help with claim denial appeals?

Denial appeals are one of the clearest places AI saves time. The same denial reasons come back again and again, and each appeal needs a clear, well-organized argument. AI can draft that argument in minutes, so your billing team spends its time reviewing and submitting appeals instead of writing each one from scratch.

There are two ways to use AI for healthcare administration while protecting patient privacy. Without any patient data, staff ask the tool to draft the appeal using only the denial reason and the payer policy it relies on, then add names, dates, member IDs and claim numbers in the billing system. If your health center has a business associate agreement (BAA) with its AI vendor and has approved the tool for this use, staff can work with claim details directly in the account that agreement covers. Either way, your billing lead reviews each letter before it goes out.

What should a healthcare AI policy cover first?

Even low-risk tasks need a few ground rules. NACHC recommends that every adoption start by identifying and prioritizing a problem. The AI page in our RHTP guide calls for clear ownership and written policies. A first version can be one page:

  • Name an owner who approves tools and answers staff questions.
  • List the approved tools and accounts, and what may never be entered into them: patient names, dates of birth, record numbers and any other protected health information.
  • Require a human review of every AI draft before it is sent, filed or presented.
  • Track time saved on each task for one quarter, so you know which uses are worth expanding.

Set your team’s AI standards

Our free RHTP readiness guide for health center executives includes a page on building a real AI strategy: focusing on high-impact uses, setting up governance and measuring results.

If you want your team using AI for healthcare administration with clear standards, our AI Leadership Workshop is built for that. The workshop covers uses like SOP generation, scorecard analysis and board prep. Every workshop is designed around your team, your software and your workflows, starting with a free Workshop Discovery Call to map your team to the right modules.

AI is only as good as the standard you set for it. Want your team using AI fluently and with clear standards from day one? Book a free Workshop Discovery Call. It’s a design session where we map your team, your software and your workflows to the right workshop modules.

Book Your Discovery Call

Frequently asked questions

Can health center staff use AI tools without risking patient privacy?

Yes, if no protected health information goes into the tool. Administrative work such as meeting recaps, policy drafts, reminder templates and board summaries can be done with no patient data at all. Any use involving patient information needs your organization’s approval and a business associate agreement with the vendor.

What should a health center AI policy include?

A starter AI policy names an owner, lists approved tools, defines what information may never be entered, and requires human review of every AI output. It should also explain how staff request new uses. NACHC’s AI Action Guide recommends identifying and prioritizing a problem before choosing a tool.

Will AI replace administrative staff at health centers?

NACHC’s AI Action Guide describes AI as a way to automate routine tasks while creating opportunities for staff to grow their skills and focus on higher-value work. In practice, administrative AI shortens drafting time, but people still review, decide and stay accountable for the result.

What is the NACHC AI Action Guide?

It is a September 2025 guide from the National Association of Community Health Centers, part of its Value Transformation Framework. It explains common types of AI, how they can help health centers, and key considerations including data quality, privacy, human oversight and workforce impact.

How Elica Health’s Office Managers Own 4 Powerful Numbers Every Week

by

At Elica Health Centers, the dental office manager at each of eight locations updates a scorecard every week and brings it to a weekly operations meeting. Four dental KPIs anchor the scorecard: encounters, open appointment rate, no-show rate and scheduling utilization. Together they give each manager a clear view of the clinic and the standing to act on it.

That routine is new. In 2025, Elica reached record encounter volumes while absorbing 48 percent dental provider turnover and an estimated $1.9 million in revenue lost to staffing shortages. The data to manage through that pressure existed, but it wasn’t structured for weekly use, so the managers running each clinic had to work without a clear week-to-week view of their location.

Why weren’t the numbers already helping?

Most health center dental programs collect plenty of data. Encounters are counted for UDS reporting, the practice management system logs every appointment, and someone usually produces a monthly report. The gap is between the data and the person who can act on it. A number that arrives weeks later, in a format built for a board report, does little for an office manager deciding how to fill tomorrow’s openings.

Elica had already done the hard work of standardizing its scheduling template across all eight locations. The next step was tuning the slot lengths, and that takes the kind of weekly data that was not yet easy to see.

What’s on the Elica dental scorecard?

Optimize built Elica a dental-specific scorecard around four measures. Each one answers a question an office manager can act on that week:

  • Encounters: how many patients the clinic actually saw, by provider. This is the outcome everything else feeds.
  • Open appointment rate: how much of the schedule went unbooked. A rising number points to a front desk or demand problem.
  • No-show rate: how many booked patients did not arrive. It shows where confirmation and short-notice lists need attention.
  • Scheduling utilization: how much of each provider’s available time was put to use. It shows whether the template itself is working.

These measures map directly to the four places dental chair time leaks, and two of them, no-shows and encounters, also appear among the operational measures on NNOHA’s Dental Dashboard. Reviewing them weekly, by provider, is what turns them from a report into a tool.

What does the week look like for a dental office manager?

Optimize worked with Elica’s office managers as they took ownership of weekly data entry for their locations. Each week, every office manager joins a recurring dental operations meeting with the regional manager and clinical leadership. That meeting has three jobs: keep the new schedule template in use as designed, make sure the scorecard is acted on, and catch problems early.

For an office manager adopting this kind of routine, the week can stay simple:

  • Update the scorecard at the same time each week, before the operations meeting.
  • Compare each number to last week and to the goal, and note anything that moved.
  • Bring one issue to the meeting with a likely cause and a proposed next step.
  • Leave with a clear owner for each follow-up, and check it on next week’s scorecard.

When a number points to a team behavior, such as referrals that are not getting scheduled, the next step is usually a short coaching conversation. Our post on the DESC model walks through how to have a coaching conversation.

What changed for Elica?

The scorecard and weekly cadence supported a larger operational change. Optimize rebuilt Elica’s schedule template, recalibrating slot durations to raise available slots from 17 to 21 per provider per day without lengthening the workday. After a controlled pilot, Elica rolled the template out across all eight locations and 32 providers in under 90 days. According to the Elica Health case study:

  • Available scheduling slots rose 24 percent per provider per day.
  • A same-period A/B comparison validated a 30 percent encounter lift.
  • The pilot provider reached a 43 percent peak encounter lift against the 2025 baseline over 45 days.
  • Office managers now own weekly performance data and accountability for their locations.

In addition, the weekly cadence dealt with the staffing pressure Elica started with. It surfaced a screening step that was slowing dental assistant and RDA hiring, which was removed, and supported an organization-wide compensation increase aimed at retention. Across the organization, the case study projects 2,800 to 3,300 additional encounters per month.

Why does ownership matter more than the spreadsheet?

A scorecard someone else reads is a report. A scorecard the office manager fills in, explains and acts on is a management tool. The difference is ownership, and ownership needs two things: numbers the manager can influence, and a regular place to discuss them with people who can help remove obstacles.

Office managers in health centers already carry a great deal: staffing gaps, patient flow, and whatever went wrong before 9 a.m. A weekly scorecard should make that work easier to direct. Kept to a handful of measures, it takes minutes to update and gives the manager a clear case to bring to leadership when something needs to change.

Start with our KPI Tracker

Our free KPI Tracker gives health center leaders a structure for tracking patient access, encounters, scheduling, and no-show and cancellation rates, weekly or monthly. Start with your baseline, update it on a set day, and review it with your leadership team. If you’d like support building a scorecard and weekly cadence for your dental program, schedule a Strategy Call with our team.

Schedule Your Strategy Call

Frequently asked questions

Which dental KPIs should a health center track weekly?

Start with a small set an office manager can influence within a week: encounters by provider, open appointment rate, no-show rate and scheduling utilization. Together they show patient volume, unused capacity, lost appointments and whether the schedule template is working. Add measures only when the team is acting on these consistently.

What is open appointment rate in a dental clinic?

Open appointment rate is the share of available appointment slots that go unbooked. A rising rate can signal a front desk process gap, a recall backlog or a template mismatch. Tracking it weekly by provider helps an office manager fill openings before they become lost chair time.

What is scheduling utilization?

Scheduling utilization measures how much of a provider’s available time is filled with patient care. Low utilization with a full-looking schedule often means appointment blocks are longer than the procedures need. It is one of the clearest indicators of whether a schedule template is working as designed.

How often should a dental office manager review KPIs?

Weekly review works best for operational measures like encounters, no-shows and open appointments, because problems can still be corrected within the month. Pair the weekly update with a standing meeting that includes leadership, so issues raised from the numbers lead to decisions and follow-up.

The DESC Model: The 4-Step Coaching Conversation Health Center Managers Keep Putting Off

by

The DESC model is a four-step structure for feedback and coaching conversations: Describe the behavior, Express the impact, Specify the behavior you need, and Communicate the outcome. It gives dental office managers, clinic supervisors and team leads a short, repeatable script, so a problem can be addressed in a few minutes while it is still small.

Those few minutes are easy to postpone. Everyone puts off uncomfortable conversations. But a problem that goes unaddressed rarely stays a one-off. A missed handoff becomes a pattern, the pattern wears on the rest of the team, and eventually it turns into a crisis: a formal write-up, a resignation, or a patient who falls through the cracks. In a health center, losing a good team member is costly. NACHC’s 2025 staffing survey put vacancy rates for dental hygienists and dental assistants at around 20 to 21%, with turnover for both roles at 18%. A short conversation early is how a manager keeps good people and keeps the team working well together.

DESC Model

Why do coaching conversations keep slipping to next week?

Because something more urgent is always waiting: a short-staffed shift, a patient complaint, a schedule that fell apart before 9 a.m. In a health center, the urgent work is real, and it fills the day. A coaching conversation rarely feels urgent until the problem behind it has grown.

Preparation is the other barrier. Good coaching is a gift that takes practice and not every job description comes with training in how to give feedback. Without a structure, the conversation takes time to plan and can feel personal. With a script, it stays on a specific behavior and its effect on patients and the team, and it fits into five minutes between other demands.

What are the four steps of the DESC model?

  • D: Describe the behavior. State what you observed, specifically and without judgment or exaggeration.
  • E: Express the impact. Explain how the behavior affects the team, operations or patient access.
  • S: Specify new or continued behavior. Say exactly what you need going forward, in positive and concrete terms.
  • C: Communicate the outcome. Explain what the change will make possible, or what happens if it does not occur, and invite the team member to agree on next steps.

The order matters. Leading with facts keeps the conversation from turning defensive, and naming the impact explains why it is happening. The last two steps turn the conversation toward actionable next steps.

Is the DESC model the same as the TeamSTEPPS DESC script?

Many clinicians know DESC from TeamSTEPPS, the teamwork training program from the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ). In the TeamSTEPPS version, DESC is a conflict-resolution script between colleagues: Describe the situation, Express your concerns, Suggest alternatives, and state the Consequences. The coaching version is built for a manager giving direction: S specifies the behavior needed, and C communicates the outcome and sets the follow-up.

Example 1: How do you coach a missed handoff?

A medical assistant flags a patient for a dental referral during a primary care visit, but the referral never reaches the dental front desk. The patient leaves without an appointment. It is the second time this month. Here is how the dental office manager might handle it with the front desk team member responsible for referrals.

  • Describe: “Twice this month, referrals from medical were entered in the system but not scheduled before the patient left the building.”
  • Express: “Those patients left without a dental appointment. Some of them will not come back on their own, and the medical team is counting on us to close that loop.”
  • Specify: “When a referral comes in, I need you to check the patient’s location and schedule them before they leave. If that isn’t possible, call them the same day.”
  • Communicate: “If we get this right, every referral turns into a visit, and medical can trust that the handoff works. Let’s check the referral report together on Friday. What would make this easier for you?”

The conversation takes five minutes. It stays on the process, names a clear expectation and sets a check-in date. The same principle applies to front desk ownership of schedule gaps: a process holds when one person owns it.

Example 2: How does a new supervisor coach former peers?

Coaching someone who was a peer last month is one of the harder conversations a new supervisor faces. A dental assistant has been promoted to lead assistant. One of the assistants on that team, a colleague for three years, consistently leaves operatories unstocked at the end of the day, and the morning team starts behind.

  • Describe: “Three times in the last two weeks, operatories 2 and 4 were not restocked at close.”
  • Express: “The morning team spent the first 15 minutes restocking instead of seating patients, and the first appointments started late.”
  • Specify: “I need both operatories fully stocked before you leave, using the closing checklist.”
  • Communicate: “That gets our first patients seated on time and takes pressure off the morning team. I know this is a new dynamic for both of us. I’d rather tell you directly than let it build. Does the closing checklist work for you, or does something need to change?”

DESC keeps the focus on the behavior, not the relationship. Naming the new dynamic once, plainly, is usually enough.

What makes a DESC conversation stick?

The conversation is only the middle step. Our DESC Coaching Template breaks the work into three parts:

  • Before: fill out the worksheet for the specific situation. Get clear on the behavior, the impact and the outcome you need before you sit down.
  • During: follow the four steps in order, and leave room for the team member’s response. The template includes a space for teammate comments for that reason.
  • After: confirm the agreed next steps and schedule the follow-up. Most behavior changes hold or fail at the check-in, not in the original conversation.

Download the DESC Coaching Template

Our DESC Coaching Template is free. Keep printed copies for your office managers and team leads, and ask new supervisors to fill one out before their first difficult conversation. If you want help building coaching and accountability across your health center, our team can help.

Schedule Your Strategy Call

Frequently asked questions

What is the DESC model?

The DESC model is a four-step structure for feedback and coaching conversations. DESC stands for Describe, Express, Specify and Communicate: describe the observed behavior, express its impact, specify the behavior needed going forward, and communicate the outcome. It keeps conversations specific, objective and focused on next steps.

When should a manager use the DESC model?

Use DESC for any conversation about a specific, repeated behavior: missed handoffs, late starts, incomplete checklists or communication breakdowns. It works for corrective feedback and for reinforcing behavior you want to continue. It is less suited to performance reviews, which cover a longer period and broader goals.

How do new supervisors coach former peers?

New supervisors should keep the conversation on a specific behavior and its effect on patients and the team, not on the change in their relationship. The DESC model provides that structure. Acknowledging the new dynamic once, directly, and then moving to expectations and follow-up usually works better than waiting for the problem to resolve itself.

Why does coaching matter for health center staffing?

Health centers face high vacancy and turnover rates in many roles, including dental hygienists and dental assistants. Unaddressed problems tend to repeat until they become a crisis, and a crisis can cost a team member who is hard to replace. Regular, structured coaching addresses problems early, while they are still small.

Where Your Dental Chair Time Actually Goes: Four Concealed Scheduling Leaks in Health Center Dental Clinics

by

Most health center dental scheduling loses chair time in four places: no-shows that go unfilled, same-day openings no one books, appointment lengths that don’t match the procedure, and patients who fall out of recall. None of these require more providers to fix. They require a schedule built to catch them and a weekly look at the numbers.

The National Network for Oral Health Access (NNOHA) already treats this as a sustainability issue. Its Dental Dashboard, built for health centers to monitor dental program performance, lists no-shows, recall rates and encounters per hour among its fiscal and operational measures. If your clinic reports those numbers but can’t say where the lost hours went, the schedule is the place to look.

health center dental scheduling

What counts as a chair time leak?

A leak in health center dental scheduling is any hour a provider is staffed and ready with no patient in the chair, or a patient in the chair longer than the procedure needs. Both show up in the same measure: encounters per hour. A clinic can be fully staffed and fully booked on paper and still run low on that measure, because the hours drain away in small pieces across the day.

Hiring is slow and expensive in a tight labor market. Recovering hours your current providers already work is faster, and it is entirely within the clinic’s control.

Leak 1: Why do unfilled no-shows cost more than the missed visit?

A no-show delays one patient’s care. The larger cost is the slot that stays empty. Most clinics track their no-show rate. Far fewer track how many of those slots were refilled, and the second number is the one your front desk can move.

  • Keep a short-notice list of patients willing to come in on short notice, sorted by the procedure time they need.
  • Confirm appointments ahead of time and treat an unconfirmed patient as a likely opening, so the front desk starts calling before the slot is lost.
  • Report refill rate next to no-show rate every week. A high no-show rate with a high refill rate is a manageable problem. A high no-show rate with a low refill rate is lost access.

Leak 2: Where do same-day gaps come from?

In health center dental scheduling, same-day gaps open during the day: a late cancellation, a procedure that finishes early, a patient who arrives without what the visit requires. They differ from no-shows because there is usually still time to fill them, if someone is watching.

Gaps get filled when one person owns them. Assign a specific team member to watch the day’s schedule with the authority to call the short-notice list and move patients forward. If your clinic sees walk-in or emergency patients, route them into open gaps instead of squeezing them between booked appointments, which pushes every provider behind.

Leak 3: Do your appointment lengths match the procedure?

This leak hides best, because it looks like a full schedule. Default appointment lengths are often set once and rarely revisited. When a procedure that takes 30 minutes sits in a 60-minute block, the schedule shows a booked provider and the dashboard shows low encounters per hour.

Our Health Center Dental Scheduling Template separates the day by procedure type. Major procedures such as preps, adult extractions and quadrant restorations get 45-minute blocks. Minor procedures such as exams, pediatric extractions and single restorations get 30-minute blocks. New patients and hygiene run in their own columns, and each half-day ends with a short wrap-up slot so providers finish on time.

The effect of getting slot lengths right is measurable. When we rebuilt the schedule template at Elica Health, a health center with eight dental locations, recalibrating slot durations raised available slots from 17 to 21 per provider per day without lengthening the workday. That is a 24% increase in scheduling capacity from the same providers working the same hours.

Leak 4: How much chair time does lost recall cost?

Recall is the slowest leak. A patient who misses a periodic exam leaves no hole in today’s schedule. They leave one months from now, in the form of a patient who never returns or returns needing more involved care. Recall rate sits on the NNOHA dashboard next to no-shows for that reason.

  • Book the next recall visit before the patient leaves the chair.
  • Work an overdue recall list every week, not only when the schedule looks light.
  • Use recall patients to fill hygiene openings, which turns Leak 2 into a fix for Leak 4.

How do you find your clinic’s biggest leak?

Start with four numbers, tracked weekly and broken out by provider:

  • No-show rate, with the share of no-show slots refilled
  • Open appointment rate, or unfilled provider hours
  • Encounters per hour
  • Recall rate

Then compare them to the template. A clinic with a low no-show rate and low encounters per hour has a slot-length problem. A clinic with a good template and a high open appointment rate has a front desk ownership problem. The numbers point to the leak.

Weekly review is what makes the numbers useful. At Elica, office managers at all eight locations own a weekly scorecard covering encounters, open appointment rate, no-show rate and scheduling utilization, and review it in a recurring operations meeting with the regional manager and clinical leadership. Our free KPI Tracker gives you the same starting structure.

Get the health center dental scheduling template built by Optimize Practice Alliance

Download the Health Center Dental Scheduling Template and lay it next to your current schedule. Where your block lengths differ, ask why. If you want a second set of eyes on your template and your numbers, our team can help.

Book A Strategy Call

Frequently asked questions

What is chair time in a dental clinic?

Chair time is the time a dental provider spends with a patient in the chair. In a health center dental clinic, unused chair time is lost access to care. It comes from unfilled no-shows, same-day gaps, appointment blocks longer than the procedure needs, and patients who fall out of recall.

How can a health center reduce the impact of dental no-shows?

Track how many no-show slots get refilled, not only the no-show rate. Keep a short-notice list sorted by procedure length, confirm appointments ahead of time, and give one front desk team member ownership of filling openings. Review both numbers weekly by provider.

How long should dental appointments be in a health center?

Appointment length should match the procedure, not a default block. The Optimize Health Center Dental Scheduling Template uses 45-minute blocks for major procedures such as preps and adult extractions, and 30-minute blocks for exams and single restorations. Review your block lengths against how long procedures actually take.

Which operational dental measures does NNOHA track?

The NNOHA Dental Dashboard groups five measures under fiscal and operational sustainability: recall rates, no-shows, charges (production) per encounter, encounters per hour, and direct cost per visit. Health centers use the dashboard to monitor dental program performance as part of quality improvement.

Rural Health Transformation Program Readiness Checklist: 9 Areas That Make the RHTP Achievable

by

Here is your Rural Health Transformation Program readiness checklist. The Rural Health Transformation Program is a once-in-a-generation opportunity to reshape rural care. But the money alone won’t create impact, your readiness will. 

Have you asked yourself, “How prepared are we to transform our health center when the funds arrive?” 

The RHTP is a five-year, $50 billion federal investment designed to help states transform rural health care delivery, improving access, quality, and outcomes through innovation, workforce, and technology. All 50 states received RHTP awards from CMS in December 2025, with funding running from 2026 to 2030.

That means your state is issuing RHTP-funded RFPs and subawards now.

This post is not a breakdown of every line in the statute. It’s a Rural Health Transformation Program readiness checklist for CEOs, CMOs, CDOs, and operational leaders who don’t just want to “chase a pot of money,” but actually use those dollars to transform care. 

Use these questions with your leadership team. If too many answers are “I’m not sure” or “we haven’t really talked about that,” you’re not ready yet and that’s exactly where the work needs to start. 

Rural Health Transformation Program readiness
Rural health center priorities for RHTP funding, from a California HCAI poll of rural health centers.

Here is your Rural Health Transformation Program Readiness Checklist.

Let’s get ready together.

1. Have we defined our vision across the five RHTP strategic goals? 

CMS frames the RHTP around five strategic goals:

  • Make Rural America Healthy Again (prevention and chronic disease)
  • Sustainable access 
  • Workforce development 
  • Innovative care 
  • Tech innovation 

Before you draft a single paragraph of a proposal, ask: 

  • What would prevention and chronic disease management look like across our medical, dental, and behavioral health teams? Using integrated products like OroMed could enhance prevention without adding burden
  • If we had meaningful new funding, what would “sustainable access” actually look like in our service area? More appointments per day? A stronger dental program? Fewer no-shows? Extended hours? 
  • What’s our long-term vision for workforce development? Do we want defined career ladders, better onboarding, opportunities for growth, or all of the above? 
  • What innovative care models do we want to build or scale? School-based care, mobile clinics, embedded dental in medical, integrated behavioral health, a telehealth program? 
  • How do we want technology to change daily life for our clinicians and patients, not just our IT budget? Think: easier documentation, better decision support, tighter medical-dental integration, more proactive outreach, second-opinion tools. 

If you can’t articulate even a rough vision in each of these areas, your rural health transformation program readiness plan will end up being a string of buzzwords instead of a transformation roadmap. 

2. Do we have a clear strategy for each of the three “on-the-ground” pillars? 

Underneath those four federal goals, health centers will actually execute in three practical pillars: 

  1. Transformative care models 
  2. Technology and tools 
  3. Workforce development and change management 

      Ask yourself the following: 

      • Transformative care models: 
        • Where are the biggest gaps today between what our community needs and what our current model can deliver? 
        • How will we break down silos between medical and dental health? 
        • If we want to expand dental access, what does true medical–dental integration look like in our clinics? 
      • Technology and tools: 
        • Which tools actually improve access, quality, and provider experience, and which are shiny objects?
        • Are we prioritizing clinical second-opinion tools, ambient note-taking, telehealth, and data infrastructure that support real care redesign? 
      • Workforce and change management: 
        • Who will champion these changes internally? 
        • How will we support staff through workflow changes, new tech, and new care models, instead of just “dumping another project” on them?

      If your answers are vague, that’s a sign you haven’t made the decisions yet.

      3. Do we understand what our state is actually prioritizing? 

      RHTP is federal, but applications and implementation are state-driven. States submit a Rural Health Transformation Plan to CMS, then design their own program priorities and processes.

      Key questions: 

      • Do we know our state’s approved RHTP plan, its initiatives, and its RFP calendar?
        • Which populations, service lines, and geographies is your state emphasizing? 
        • Are there specific expectations around behavioral health, maternal health, telehealth, or integration? 
      • Do we know how funds will flow in our state? 
        • Is our state funding health centers directly, through regional partners, or through contractors?
        • Are there regional hub-and-spoke models or consortia being encouraged? 
      • Are we on our state RHTP office’s update list?
        • Have we talked with the state team about where we fit in its initiatives?
        • Have we clarified how oral health and dental integration fit into the state’s larger strategy? 

      If your team is still saying, “We’ll see what the state rolls out and then react,” you’re already behind. Many states are issuing RFPs now, and response windows can be short.

      4. Are we fixing access with strategy, not just square footage? 

      One of RHTP’s core aims is to improve access to care in rural communities, not just keep buildings open.

      Before you ask for new space, new chairs, or a new site, ask: 

      • Have we maxed out access with the space we already have? 
      • Are scheduling templates optimized? At Optimize Practice Alliance, we’ve used scheduling template redesign to help health centers move from an average 8–13 encounters per provider per day to 50%+ more patient encounters. At Centro Medico, those changes translated into dramatically expanded access with the same number of operatories and staff. 
      • Are hygiene, restorative, and medical schedules aligned to minimize bottlenecks? 
      • Do we consistently run on time, or do we lose capacity? 
      • Do we have a plan to expand access through better systems, not only more bricks and mortar? 
        • Standardized workflows 
        • Smarter recall and re-care systems 
        • Flexible team-based care models 
      • Can we quantify the access lift of our proposed changes? e.g., “With these changes, we can safely increase dental encounters by X% using existing operatories and staff.” 

      RHTP reviewers will be looking for transformational leverage, not “more of the same, but more expensive.” 

      5. What is our recruitment and retention strategy, beyond “we hope people stay?”  

      RHTP explicitly calls out workforce development and retention as a priority.  

      So: 

      • Do we have clearly defined career pathways and levels for clinical and operational roles? 
      • Can an entry-level team member see a path to becoming a lead, manager, or advanced clinical role? 
      • How strong is our onboarding and training? 
      • Can we reliably take a new grad provider from “brand new” to “highly productive and confident” within a defined timeframe?*
      • Do we understand why people leave us? 
      • Are we tracking turnover data and reasons systematically? 
      • Do we know where burnout is highest and why? 
      • If we used RHTP dollars for workforce, would it be one-time bonuses, or structural change?**

      *Optimize helps health centers build structured clinical development pathways so new-grad providers don’t stay “new” for long. Using a combination of simulation-based training, case review, and progressive skill-building, we’ve supported clinicians in going from fresh graduates to confident, efficient providers who can handle advanced procedures with consistency. This kind of structured development doesn’t just improve clinical performance, it strengthens retention and builds long-term workforce stability. 

      **If you use RHTP dollars for recruitment or retention incentives, plan for the federal service requirement: anyone in a clinical role who receives an RHTP-funded incentive must work full time in a rural location for five years. CMS can recover funds if the commitment isn’t met. Training pipelines, professional development, career ladders, and leadership development are far more sustainable uses of funds than short-term pay bumps. 

      If your only workforce lever is bonuses or more money you’re leaving a lot of transformation and long-term stability on the table. 

      6. Do we actually have an AI strategy, or a list of tools we’re familar with? 

      RHTP strongly encourages technology-driven, data-driven solutions that support prevention, chronic disease management, and better outcomes.

      For most health centers, that should include an intentional approach to AI. Ask: 

      • Who owns AI strategy in our organization? 
      • Do we have an AI governance group or at least a designated champion? 
      • Do we know what we’re comfortable with and what we’re not? 
      • Are we piloting tools that actually free up clinical time and improve quality? 
      • Ambient note-taking to give clinicians time back 
      • Clinical second-opinion tools (e.g., radiograph analysis, risk scoring, lab decision support) 
      • Predictive outreach to identify high-risk patients earlier 
      • How will we evaluate AI tools? 
      • Impact on access, quality, provider experience, and equity 
      • Data privacy and security 
      • Alignment with our state’s RHTP priorities 

      RHTP is a rare chance to build a responsible AI foundation instead of reacting piecemeal to vendor pitches. Optimize Practice Alliance is leading the charge when it comes to AI in dental care. Our AI rollouts routinely give dentists back 26 minutes a day by wiping out the bulk of their documentation burden. And because our CEO, Josh Gwinn, is the founding president of the Denver chapter of AAIA Global, we’re not guessing at where AI is going, we’re helping shape the standards for safe, effective clinical use. 

      7. How ready are we for change management, not just project management? 

      Most failed organization transformations don’t die because the idea was bad. They die because nobody planned for the human side. 

      Ask: 

      • Who is our internal change leader for RHTP? 
      • Is there a cross-functional group (medical, dental, behavioral health, operations, finance, IT) that meets regularly? 
      • How will we communicate changes to staff and patients? 
      • Do we have a plan for training, feedback loops, and iterating without burning people out? 
      • What will success look like in year 1, year 3, and year 5? 
      • Are we setting realistic milestones, or just “Everything will be transformed by 2030”? 

      If your RHTP plan doesn’t have a change-management backbone, the best strategy in the world will stall in the day-to-day. 

      8. Can we show sustainability once the grant dollars sunset? 

      States and CMS will be looking hard at whether proposed projects will survive beyond the funding window.

      Your team should be able to answer: 

      • What happens when RHTP funding ends? Does the project collapse, or does it become self-sustaining through improved revenue, cost savings, or other funding streams? 
      • Do we have a financial model that ties clinical transformation to financial stability? For example: more completed treatment plans, higher kept-appointment rates, improved coding and documentation, reduced avoidable ED visits. 
      • Are we avoiding uses of funds that can’t be maintained? e.g., staffing models that only work if grant dollars are permanent. 

      If you can’t show a credible path to sustainability, you’re not fully prepared, no matter how strong your narrative is. 

      9. Where are we already strong and who are the right partners for the rest? 

      Finally, a simple but important set of questions: 

      • What do we already do well that RHTP can help us scale? Maybe it’s a small but successful mobile-based dental program, or an integrated medical-dental workflow in one clinic. 
      • Where do we openly need outside expertise, practice operations and scheduling redesign? Our Practice Optimization Process™ is a strategic, proven framework with a track record of transforming underperforming clinics into high-efficiency, high-access care teams. It’s the same system we’ve used to redesign workflows, tighten scheduling templates, and unlock dramatic gains in patient encounters, without adding staff or operatories. 
      • Do we have a plan for dental and medical-dental integration? Optimize helps health centers stand up fully integrated medical–dental care models that bring preventive dental evaluations directly into primary care: no extra chairs, no added complexity. This integrated approach consistently uncovers hidden oral-health needs, drives earlier intervention, and opens entirely new access points inside the existing footprint. It’s one of the fastest, most sustainable ways to expand care without expanding your building. 
      • What are our AI governance and clinical second-opinion tools? 
      • What workforce pathways and training can we offer? 
      • Who are we going to call in before we write the proposal? Implementation partners should be at the design table, not just in the budget appendix. 

      Optimize Practice Alliance works with community health centers across the country on exactly these questions, from building sustainable dental programs and integrated care models to designing AI-enabled, clinician-friendly workflows. RHTP is new, but the fundamentals of transformation are not.  

      If reading this raised more questions than answers, that’s a good sign. It means you’re thinking at the right level. Here’s a simple next step: 

      Pull this list of questions into your next leadership meeting.  Have your team rate each area (Sustainable Access, Workforce, Innovative Care, Tech & AI, Change Management, Sustainability) as: 

      • We’re clear and ready 
      • We’ve started, but it’s shaky 
      • We haven’t really tackled this yet 

      Rural Health Transformation Program Readiness

      Ready to move from awareness to readiness?
      Our Rural Health Transformation Program Readiness Guide was created to help leaders translate RHTP expectations into operational clarity, so your organization is positioned not just to access funding, but to execute meaningful, sustainable transformation.

      The question to ask: “Are our systems, operations, and leadership aligned to deliver on what the RHTP requires?”

      Download the RHTP Guide for Health Center Executives to pressure-test your readiness, identify where optimization will matter most, and ensure your health center is prepared for what’s ahead, before the next bend in the road.

      Download Your RHTP Readiness Guide

      The Future of AI in Dentistry: How to Seize the Power of ChatGPT-5 to Scale Smarter, a Conversation with Joshua Gwinn

      by

      [This conversation was recorded on August 11, 2025] With the release of ChatGPT-5, the conversation around AI in dentistry has moved beyond curiosity into strategy. For dental leaders, the question is no longer if AI will shape the future of their practices, it’s how to navigate this vast, largely untapped landscape with purpose and foresight.

      To explore these opportunities, Jessica Dean, Director of Digital Content and Engagement at Optimize Practice Alliance, sat down with Joshua Gwinn, CEO of Optimize Practice Alliance. From his unique vantage point as both a seasoned practice operator and a forward-looking industry leader, Josh offers an emerging expert’s perspective on maneuvering through the complexities of adopting AI in dentistry and highlights how dental entrepreneurs can begin unlocking its transformative potential today.

      Moore’s Law, Exponential Growth, and AI in Dentistry

      Jessica Dean: So thank you so much, Josh Gwinn, for hopping on a call with me today, because I am very excited to talk about the special delivery this weekend. ChatGPT-5 just rolled out. And I just want to ask you some questions to sort of get the big picture and what this means for our clients and our partners specifically. 

      So let’s start with the first question. As someone deeply rooted in dental entrepreneurship, of course, what do you see as the single most transformative way that ChatGPT-5 will change how dental practices operate over the next three years.  

      Joshua Gwinn: Yeah, I think there’s a couple of things. And it’s interesting you said three years. So, to give you a grasp of how fast AI and model development is pacing, let’s start with a reference that most of us understand. 

      So there was Moore’s Law in computing starting in the late 60s or so. And if you remember, you know, we’ve all heard these stories about how computers took up whole rooms inside the CIA or whatever, right? 

      Pick your alphabet soup, but they all had these massive computers. And what they were really talking about in Moore’s Law, it was that computing power doubled every 18 to 24 months. And the basic standard is, say, 24 months, every two years. And what they’re saying is that the transistors, the number of transistors on the chip itself, doubled physically. 

      So, you had twice as much power every two years. And there’s another concept called the other side of the chessboard, which is this idea of exponential growth. And what it is, is this: It’s a story from, you know, way back, way back in the day. And, you the king goes to the inventor of chess and he says, “Wow, you’re such a genius. As a reward for inventing chess, I want to give you, you know, your choice of any riches from my kingdom.”

      And the inventor of chess, he thinks about it for a second. He says, “Okay, I want one grain of rice on the first square of the board, that doubles every subsequent square. That’s what I want as my reward.” And the king laughs. He’s like, “Well, that’s hilarious. Sure, you can totally have that instead of gold or whatever.” And he’s like, “No, that’s what I want.”

      What the king didn’t realize is by the time with that exponential doubling, by the time he got to the other side of the chessboard, so to speak, they were talking billions of grains of rice, more rice than existed in the entire kingdom. 

      So basically, he took all the riches of the kingdom by understanding this idea of exponential growth. AI is an exponential growth opportunity in our world. In a way that we have never seen. The only thing we can tie it to is this idea of Moore’s Law. 

      Moore’s Law meant that computing power doubled every two years. Right now, the Moore’s Law of AI says that model development in power is doubling every 60 to 90 days. So, every two to three months, we’re doubling in power. And this is what we saw when GROK-4 hit. We’re now seeing it again in GPT-5. We’re waiting for the next anthropic cloud model and then LAMA and on and on. This is going to continue to grow and develop. So we’re here to talk about ChatGPT-5, but I wanted to just establish this idea of exponential growth and exponential thought. 

      Practical AI Applications for AI in Dentistry

      Now, there will come a time where the current architecture of models, which is a transformer-based architecture, can no longer really hit that 60 to 90 day exponential growth. There will be some slowdown. But what we expect is that model development will be so high by then that human scientists and engineers coupled with AI will come up with a new AI infrastructure that can take the models to that next phase, whatever that becomes, if it’s AGI or ASI, whatever it becomes in the future. 

      So with GPT-5, though, the next three years, that long-winded story, we’re to say, man, I have no idea in three years. That’s the thing. I’ll tell you this. As a dentist or an entrepreneur, if you’re not using this in three years, you will be so far behind. You won’t catch up. So the things that I want people to focus on are today,

      “What do I need to do today to get started?” 

      Well, the first thing, you may already be using ChatGPT for basic things. You know, how do I make X recipe? You know, looking at, like you do Google, literally, like you’re Googling things. In my mind, that’s lazy prompting. And I really want folks to think about this, because if you’re doing deep-level prompting, you’re establishing the mindset of the machine. 

      And I’ll give you a for instance. I’m taking my family to London and to Dublin this fall. So over the weekend with the new release, I brought up agent mode in which ChatGPT acts as an agent that has its own desktop computer and can run task programs, very complex tasking for you. 

      So, what I said to it, this is my example of a not quite so lazy prompt. I said, “You are a European travel specialist, one of the best in the world, with a specific knowledge of the United Kingdom. I plan to take a family of five over the following dates to the following places. I want you to focus on flights with these specific companies, then focus on price, then focus on hotels with a specific brand, then a secondary brand near the following tourist sites. And in the end, I want you to build me out a 10-day itinerary that includes restaurants, that includes tourist attractions, and stops, mostly walkable with limited use of cabs, buses, public transit, or Uber.”

      And then I let it run. And it asked me a series of questions: What kind of food do we like? How old are the kids? What are we trying to develop?

      And then I hit submit and I walked away. About two hours later, ChatGPT-5 came back to me with a full itinerary as if it had been developed by a European travel specialist. 

      So, I say all that to just say the possibilities of how entrepreneurs can use this, as long as they’re thoughtful about what it can do, what are its capabilities, they really are endless. 

      Having said that, the next three years, how are they going to use this?

      • Number one, agents are going to revolutionize your scheduling workflow. 
      • Agents are going to revolutionize your RCM workflow.
      • AI agents are going to revolutionize the way you communicate with insurances. 
      • They’re going to continue to read radiographs and give you second opinion analysis on what you’re trying to complete for the patient. 

      If you’re not using this already, it is deeply embedded in the dental world and is creating great, great achievements and growth. 35% more treatment planning effectiveness. Agents are also going to listen to clinical notes, and they’re going to input those notes directly into your system. 

      They’re also going to be there for hygiene, for when your hygienist is doing things like perioprobing. They’ll just speak those probing numbers out loud. The agent will capture that and deliver it directly into the chart. Now there’s no need for that second assistant to be in there with the hygienist, etc. So, on a base level, that’s how AI in dentistry and agents are going to affect dental practices.

      For ChatGPT specifically, you can take the agent mode and with the correct prompt, you can have it run a full site-by-site, competitor-by-competitor marketing analysis for your entire city. You can find out what specials every single practice around you are running. You can find out what the most competitive positioning you can have in the marketplace, and you can do all that within about an hour, as long as you understand the modes of ChatGPT and the specific prompts that you need to use to get there. 

      The other big updates that I think are going to really push people forward, ChatGPT-5 now auto-selects the model that it’s going to use based on your prompts. So, if you’re lazy prompting, it’s going to give you the cheapest model that does the least, full stop. If you say, “Google restaurants near me,” that’s what you would put on Google, right? If you ‘ChatGPT restaurants near me,’ you’re going to get ChatGPT 3.5, and it’s going to give you a list that it pulled from Yelp or Google. 

      You could have done it on any of those sites. If you say, you know, “ChatGPT, you’re a, you know, a huge restaurant advocate who likes to try all the newest and trendiest spots with a particular taste for Indian food, Mexican food, and Japanese cuisine. Find me the top five restaurants and rank them in order of newest, trendiest, and highest ranked.”

      You’re going to get a much different model. ChadGPT is going to go to a tighter model, 4.0, 4.5, potentially deep research, depending on how deep it needs to go. And then it’s going to give you a very nuanced answer that’s going to directly hit to your taste, Indian, Mexican, Japanese. 

      So that’s a huge development overall. And then another big stat that kind of popped is 80% fewer hallucinations from the 5.0 model versus the 4.5 model, which was already a pretty large jump in an overall kind of trust and truth, if you will. 

      Enhancing AI in Dentistry, Not Replacing the Human Touch

      Jessica Dean: Oh, that’s phenomenal. Speaking of dental practices specifically, there’s often a fear that AI will replace human touch in healthcare. I think we’ve heard those over and over again. How do you see ChatGPT 5 enhancing that as opposed to replacing the human touch in patient care? 

      Joshua Gwinn: If it’s really well-used and really thoughtfully deployed, there are opportunities for the memory function to be able to give you a depth of knowledge about your patient. 

      What’s interesting is the new token window. So token, think of it as your prompt window. The new token window and prompt window inside ChatGPT-5 in some cases can take up to 400,000 tokens. 

      That would be your entire patient record for all your patients, let alone for one patient. You could input all of your patient records and have it create a very customized patient communication plan to where because you’ve gathered little bits of data, it can give you a communication plan to where you could literally, when they walk in, say things like, “Hey, it’s so good to see you. How’s John and Tina? How’s your wife? Janet? How was that vacation you guys took? Did you really enjoy that?” 

      And you can show a depth of care and personalization for each patient that only the best practices do today. Now, it happens, but it is so rare. And the absolute best relational customer service patients or customer service practices are already doing this. ChatGPT can just put it all together for you for every single patient, give you scripting for your receptionist, and you’re off to the races. 

      The other thing that happens when you do it and you’re that thoughtful is that you start creating ‘yesses’ for each patient. The other thing you could do, which could be interesting, is create little interviews for your new patients when they come in so that you gather tons of data and knowledge about them that ChatGPT can then review each time they come in. 

      You’ll have this ability to review some of that data. each day and it can continue to build that relational communication plan as you go each time. I think that could be absolutely crucial if you really, really were thoughtful and wanted to build some really neat, tight relational pieces with it. 

      Getting Started: First Steps with ChatGPT for Dental Practices

      Jessica Dean: Well, then kind of getting down to the nitty-gritty then and specifically speaking to dental entrepreneurs, what would you say could be their very first, most simplest, maybe most practical first step that they can take to start integrating ChatGPT-5 into their business? 

      So we’re not talking like, you know, big AI-driven software. We’re talking about really using ChatGPT-5 as a sort of getting your feet wet. 

      Joshua Gwinn: Yeah, I’ll throw a couple of things out there. And the first is the most obvious to me, but it may not be for others. Sign up for the pro plan, pay the $20 so that you have access to the best models all the time. 

      You can run on the free plan, totally fine. If your practice isn’t generating an extra $20, though, we should talk about many other things Optimize can help with. 

      • But pay for that pro plan so that you have access to it. That’s number one.
      • Number two, schedule time every single day, 30 minutes, 15 if that’s all you got, to sit down and use the tool. 
      • Number three, get some training, even if it’s just YouTube videos. Get some training on what the model’s capable of, what the whole LLM, as it were, the whole ecosystem that goes around ChatGPT, what is it capable of? 

      Get that training and use that 15 to 30 minutes a day just to practice and work through things. And then I’ll give you two easy things for your business just to try. 

      • Number one, run the marketing analysis that I just spoke of. Give your zip code, do a great prompt, prompt out a marketing analysis and see what the practices around you are offering to new patients. It’s very interesting to find out.
      • And number two, upload a 12-month financial and have ChatGPT act as a financial analyst and review your financials for trends and areas that you could be more efficient to bring more profit to your bottom line. 

      Start there. If you get through those two things, you will see so much value. One, just the financial review is worth way more than the $20 you paid. And then secondly, once you see those things, if you just implement a couple things off of that, you’re going to see some movement in your practice regardless, and it’ll start to change things. 

      Hidden Game-Changers in ChatGPT-5 for Dentists

      Jessica Dean: Okay. So you’ve been at the intersection of AI in dentistry for a couple of years now, pretty solidly. What is one sort of behind the scenes ChatGPT-5-capability that you think most people don’t know about or something that could be a game changer for their practice? 

      Joshua Gwinn: Yeah, there’s, man, there’s, I think there’s quite a few. I’ll say this. How about automated patient recall campaigns? You can upload all of your patient data into ChatGPT and it can build out a full recall campaign. 

      • You can build an agent that will then auto-text all those patients on your behalf.
      • Another thing it could do, it can produce multilingual education materials. If you need your patients to be able to read or write any language, it can flip it into different languages at any moment. You can use that.
      • You could use it to draft insurance prior authorization requests. It’ll pre-autopopulate using your patient’s data and your treatment plan and just upload those. And it’ll build your pre-offs.
      • It could audit your compliance documentation, upload your whole client’s plan and let ChatGPT have a swing at whether or not you’ve got compliance up to snuff for HIPAA, for OSHA, etc. 

      Those are four that I guess pop to the front of it, but there are really so many more. The way we like to think about it is this mentality of AI first. And what I mean by that is, specifically, “if we’re paying a human to do it, could AI do it today?”And could it be more efficient if it did? And then trying it out.

      And it’s not to replace people. We keep saying this. It’s not about AI in dentistry taking humans’ jobs. It’s about AI enhancing what humans do so that we can give the type of service that we all want anytime we go anywhere. 

      There is a golden age of service coming our way where we’re going to have somewhat flawless execution on the data and numbers side. And the humans in the loop who are watching the data and have to be paying attention to that can spend 95% of their time being good people. 

      Guiding Sherpas through the process. You know, we know a lot of folks come in and they have dental anxiety. What a great way to get rid of that by having your own personal concierge walk you through that’s not also thinking about scheduling, automated recall, RCM, answering the phone, all the million things that we don’t want to be thinking about. That’s going to be a big part of it over time, I think. 

      The Competitive Edge: AI vs. Non-AI Practices

      Jessica Dean: I am going to throw a question at you now that was generated by ChatGPT. So I’m going to get you to take on this because it’s a little bit interesting question. 

      If two dental practices are identical in every way, except one uses ChatGPT and the other one doesn’t, and this is in their operations, their marketing, you know, front to back, everything, how would that AI-enabled practice look different after one year of using ChatGPT?  

      Joshua Gwinn: Oh, 10% to 15% profit margin, without a doubt. And again, when you say ChatGPT, ChatGPT, I’m taking that as enhanced AI, right? ChatGPT in this sense is just the tool we’re talking about, but any of these tools are all working off of large language models, be they ChatGPT, be they Claude, be they Llama, you name it, either way. The point being, if you take the enhancements that are available, I believe there’s 10% to 15% margin and a much faster cash cycle. 

      So speeding up that cash so that there’s more cash available for you to do anything from distributions to more investment in growth, development. And the way we like to think about it is, depending on your goals, you can use AI to develop your own virtuous cycle of, you know, of growth and development inside your practice. 

      Use these tools to enhance. And if you were running a 15% margin, that’s a good business today and paying yourself a fair wage. But if that were 25% in a year and that 10% becomes your investment. The game changes pretty rapidly on that course. 

      So, that’s really how I would think about it is the opportunity, and it’s not necessarily in losing people. There may be some inefficiencies in your system. I can’t speak to that. I’ve seen practices that are highly overstaffed. But most practices are normally staffed and have pressure because it’s hard to find good people. 

      This can buttress and enhance what those great people can do. And if you’re down a person, maybe it doesn’t hurt so bad because you’re able to really still push the support necessary and hit the functions as need be. 

      The practice without it, it’s going to look the same, Jessica. It’s going to be the same as it always was. And in three years, that practice is going to be obsolete. One thing that we are seeing, 65% of patients are now hyper-aware of AI radiography. So, they’re asking, “Are you using AI to check these, these x-rays?” And if you’re not, they are going to start finding practices that are, that’s going to happen. 

      Jessica Dean: Wow. 

      Joshua Gwinn: That will change, absolutely change. The patient loyalty factor, especially with the younger generation, is going to be loyal to the practices that are using the most enhanced tools to make sure they get the best care, straight up. 

      Lightning Round: AI in Dentistry Insights

      Jessica Dean: Yeah. Yeah. That makes sense. Okay. We’re going to do a lightning round of questions. Okay. Let’s do it. Ready? 

      What is one word that describes ChatGPT for dentistry?  

      Joshua Gwinn: Revolutionary. I mean, it’s going to change everything. It already is. For those who aren’t using it, it’s already changing everything. One more thing I want to say, Jessica, like, load your denials from insurance into ChatGPT. Let it tell you what the problem is, and it’ll fix your denials. Then resubmit. Boom, you’re done. 

      Jessica Dean: What? 

      Joshua Gwinn: Like, people spend hours and days on that. No one wants to read that crap, load it up, have it, fix it, and then move on. 

      Jessica Dean: That’s brilliant. 

      Joshua Gwinn: So anyway, that’s a must-do.  

      Jessica Dean: It’s must-do. Yeah, absolutely. What’s the biggest myth about AI in dental practices? 

      Joshua Gwinn: I think the biggest myth is that it’s going to, and this is not just dental practices. It’s everywhere. It’s so scary that it’s going to either destroy everything, we’re going to hit this dystopian landscape where only the haves are going to survive, et cetera. 

      And I don’t believe that to be true. I believe we have the potential to hit a golden age of society and a golden age of dentistry and, you know, have a clinical tool next to you that is enhancing your knowledge base. 

      Right now, and this is across healthcare, it’s really across almost everything. But in healthcare specifically, if I go to a general practitioner doctor who’s never heard of a specific thing and I have that specific thing, I might die because they have no idea.  Now, this tool has heard of all the things. And so it’s going to aggregate data and tell my general practitioner, hey, check out this thing you haven’t heard of. 

      Or send this guy to see someone who has so I can get that specialty care I need. In dentistry, it’s going to be the same thing. It’s going to be this idea of you have a multitude of ways to treatment plan and sequence care, that is the most efficient based on your inputs. 

      Do you want to be most efficient by time, by visits, by income? How do you want it? And then ChatGPT will tune it up, or any model will tune it up and give you the feedback as to how to make this patient experience the best it possibly can be for this treatment plan. And if you’re really communicating and engaging with your patients, this is a conversation you’re having together, and you’re tuning the model to their preferences and yours. So that you have this experience that you both really enjoy and it’s super interactive. So I think that can be absolutely critical. 

      Jessica Dean: One task that ChatGPT can do today that still blows your mind. 

      Joshua Gwinn: Oh, loading up insurance denials and getting me paid, so I don’t have to deal with it. That part is so critical and it’s so frustrating, especially for those of us who hate to do double work. “I did that. I submitted it. It got kicked back. I don’t want to do it again.”  

      And I see practices, because of that one little mental tick that they have, certainly do. I’ll do an amazing first job. At least, I think it’s amazing. And when it doesn’t work, I’m done, right? You need to bring in, bring in, call on the cavalry. Somebody else has got to support.  

      And in insurance, I’ve gone into, I mean, tens of practices that have stacks and stacks of denials. And they just go away through untimely filing and they lose all that money because they don’t want to go back and redo what they already did. They’re like, “I’m working on today’s stuff. I don’t have time for that.” The idea that you can load all that up and get answers quick and reprocess claims.  

      You need to think HIPAA. You need to disidentify data. Make sure you’re not putting HIPAA data in, but that’s a big part of it. And for me, I mean, it does a little bit blow my mind.  

      The second, and this isn’t ChatGPT related, it’s AI related, is that it reads radiographs and color codes the types of material in the teeth. So, you can see the layers of the tooth very, very clearly. So, when someone says, “This is a cavity that’s just barely into the enamel,” well, I can see the enamel. And then when it says, “but now it’s into the dentin,” well, now I can see it in there. Or if it’s into the root, I know whether I need a root canal or not. “You can’t fade me. Yeah, like I see it. It’s in the root. Give me a root canal or don’t give me one because I can see it’s just in the enamel.” 

       And the idea of trust, in my opinion, actually goes up dramatically as a clinician when you’re showing them the proof. Yeah. You know. The doubt goes away. So, you know, training plan, acceptance goes up. It’s been proven. We’re seeing it across the board right now. 

      Jessica Dean: And similar to what you were saying about the rare disease example, it’s sort of a democratization of information, right? We’ve been in this information age for a couple of decades now, but it has become more and more tiered. And this is truly a democratization of all information, which is… 

      Joshua Gwinn: I will tell you, and again, this, I hope, gives some sense for how important I believe this to be. China started training all their children on AI starting at the age of six. That started this year, this school year, all of their children. America’s not doing that currently. In the new AI action plan that came out from the administration a few weeks ago, there is some of that baked in. 

      However, having said that, I have reached out and found programs through… through some of the leading AI labs for my own children, and I am prioritizing my six-year-old and my 13-year-old getting trained up as fast as humanly possible, because I fear that AI ability to use it, understanding of, development and being able to conceptualize what’s possible is going to be the most important future skill. 

      Because to your point, the data is going to be available for all of us. The democratization of data will be complete at some level. When that happens, the real skills you’re going to need are prompt generation. Can you prompt effectively to get out the output that you want? 

      • So are you giving it the input it needs to give you the appropriate output for your solution, whatever you’re trying to complete? 
      • And then number two, do you have a true understanding of how to layer tools together to develop the capabilities to get done the things that you’re trying?  

      If you have that understanding, once people have that understanding, the game changes. Those who never get it or see this as a fad or a bubble or all the other things I’ve heard, they’re really going to struggle. 

      It’ll just happen to them. A lot of times, I think in terms of dividing the world into those who make things happen and those who have things happen to them, we’re about to see a whole lot of people have things happen to them in ways that they cannot comprehend. 

      And only those of us who decide to go and learn now and figure out the process and what’s coming are going to be able to make things happen in this new world. It’s going to really compress that ability. 

      Jessica Dean: The more things change, the more they say the same, right?  

      Joshua Gwinn: 100%. It’s always the way you respond to the adaptation that makes or break your mindset. Charles Swindoll, right? Life is 90%, you know, 90% how you respond to the 10% of things that happen to you. 

      Jessica Dean: So, absolutely. Absolutely. Absolutely. One last question. What is one mistake, or maybe there’s more than one, but one mistake to avoid when starting to use AI in dentistry? 

      Joshua Gwinn: Specifically, in dental practices, be hyperconscious of the following:

      • You need to disidentify data so that you’re not breaking any HIPAA or any compliance, and understand that what you tell ChatGPT is not protected information. Let me be crystal clear about that. There are no legal protections. For instance, some people use ChatGPT as a therapist. If that information gets subpoenaed in a lawsuit, they can have it. There’s no legal protection. There’s no therapy protection. There’s none of the things that we enjoy today with our professionals. When we feed them into ChatGPT, they [our right to privacy] go away. So be very conscious of what you’re saying. And I was listening to one of the AI Lab CEOs, and he said specifically, say things like, “my friend, blah, blah, blah,” like you would talk to, you know, someone back in the day, and they’d be like, “Oh, your friend.” Speak like that, because that keeps you legally compliant [protected]. You’re not admitting anything. You’re not doing anything. So that’s really what I would start with is, hey, there are no legal protections here. That’s a big piece.
      • And then secondarily, if this is a clinical decision you’re making, double-check your work. Double-check your work. Make sure that this is rooted in sensibility. If it’s something you’ve never heard of before, I probably wouldn’t recommend you trying it for the first time on a live patient. I would make sure that you’re doing all the work to double-check. I mean, there’s some great, great, great clinical research out there. And perplexity, actually, you can tune that model to just go search PubMed and give you answers directly from only clinical text inside. 

      So there are ways that you can still use the models to double-check for accuracy and make sure that you’re really getting to a place where you’re getting the best data possible. 

      Jessica Dean: Wow. That’s good advice. Well, thank you so much, Josh Gwinn. I really appreciate your time today talking about this.  

      Joshua Gwinn: Yeah, my pleasure. Let me know. I’m always here for this. It’s good stuff. Awesome. Thank you.  

      Conclusion: The Future of AI in Dentistry

      ChatGPT-5 isn’t just another tech tool, it’s the beginning of a new standard in how dental entrepreneurs operate, grow, and care for patients. From boosting efficiency in scheduling and billing to enhancing patient trust with personalized communication, the opportunities are endless.

      The key is simple: start now, learn daily, and think AI-first.

      Ready to See How AI Can Transform Your Practice?

      At Optimize Practice Alliance, we help dentists navigate the future of technology with confidence. Book a free 30-minute consulting call today, and let’s analyze your dental practice’s AI usage and uncover how you can leverage tools like ChatGPT-5 to grow faster, operate smarter, and deliver unforgettable patient care.

      Schedule a Call