// Practice areas · Dental practices
AI for dental practices
A practice is two businesses in one building: the clinical side, which regulation rightly guards, and the front office (communications, content, imaging prep, paperwork) where AI can start working today. I begin on the front-office side, and anything that touches patient records waits for the right agreements and stays on machines inside your practice.
Taking first engagements: nothing is for sale until it has shipped for real users.
// The screen
Every idea runs four tests, in order
In a healthcare business the first test does the most work: privacy rules decide what an outside tool may even touch. Ideas that fail are listed below with the test that killed them.
1 · Allowed?
HIPAA, business-associate agreements, marketing authorizations.
2 · Possible?
Can today's tools really do it, on your real workflows?
3 · Worth it?
Staff hours back, against what it costs to build.
4 · Best use?
Of the survivors, one gets built first.
// The opportunity menu
Where I'd look first in a practice
Time figures are industry estimates, not measurements of your practice; a working session replaces them with yours. Badge key: Build first = start here · Analyzed = screened, viable · Deferred = viable, waiting on a prerequisite · Cut = failed a test, with the reason.
01
Front-office content engine
Recall and reactivation campaigns, patient-communication drafts, and social posts from practice highlights: the marketing that never gets done because chairs come first. Uses only content you already have the right to publish.
02
Clinical-photo workflow
Sorting, orienting, and assembling standard photo series into chart-ready composites is minutes of hand work per patient, every patient (industry estimate). A tool on a machine in your office can do the assembly pass; photos never leave the building.
03
Insurance narrative drafting
Claim narratives assembled from structured notes for staff review: the writing bottleneck between treatment and reimbursement.
04
Practice knowledge base
SOPs, protocols, and training answers on demand for staff: a "how do we do X here" assistant that carries zero patient data by construction.
05
Records-integrated automation
Filing outputs straight into your practice-management system is the endgame, and it waits until a business-associate agreement is signed and the architecture is verified local. In that order.
06
Cloud AI on patient data
Uploading patient photos or records to a general-purpose cloud AI tool is the most common pitch in this space, and it's a compliance incident waiting to happen. No agreement, no data. Full stop.
// What I'd leave alone
- Diagnosis and treatment planning. Clinical judgment is the doctor's; no tool of mine drafts it, scores it, or second-guesses it.
- Patient records before a signed BAA. No arrangement exempts anyone from HIPAA: the agreement comes first, then the data.
- Patient images in marketing without signed authorization. Consent to treat is not consent to post.
- Marketing imagery you don't hold the rights to. Patient-facing content stays original or properly licensed; image rights are cheap to respect and expensive to litigate.
A tool that knows its limits is the only kind worth installing.
Accepting clients. A working session is how we find out what your version of this list looks like: your workflows, your volumes, your priority order. Early engagements are how a service earns its place on this menu, so if the fit is right, let's talk.
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