The dental care industry is growing, and technology continues to advance and with innovative software and tools. Several expected trends in technology include a focus on overall wellness, enhancing the patient experience, AI in the dental industry, etc.
Artificial intelligence for dentistry is making an impact across the dental care industry, and its effect is getting noticed by many dental practices. It is being used to boost revenue opportunities, and when coupled with the right technology, it can have an impact on the ROI for the practice.
The practice can evaluate potential revenue that can be derived from an investment in AI in the dental industry by estimating a breakeven point. This investment can add value to the practice over a period of time. The practice can also gauge how productivity can be enhanced per patient before making such investments.
The primary objective of every dental practice is to offer superior dental care to patients. The dental team must focus on every patient who enters the practice. This helps to generate trust and confidence. Patient interaction extends from the staff, hygienists, nurses, and dental practitioners.
Investing in dental practice automation can take away a large burden of work from the dental team. This can create more time for the entire team to focus on patients. More time spent on patients leads to more productivity and a boost to overall revenues.
Artificial intelligence for dentistry can help a dental practice in diagnostics. It can detect and address typical dental anomalies. It helps to lower the time taken to understand and analyze reports. This helps the dental practitioner to spend more time on the chair and focus on the patient rather than analyzing data and reports. AI in the dental industry can also help to decrease the chances of human error in a few dental services.
More than half of the revenue accrued to a typical dental practice comes from reimbursements by insurance companies. The remaining substantial volume of payments comes from direct patient contributions. The dental practice can harness the power of AI in the dental industry to drive profitability by rationalizing the critical dental billing process.
AI-based insurance verification tools are gaining popularity, and real-time insurance eligibility checks are reducing claim denials. AI-based tools help to create estimates instantly, and this can accelerate the payment process. Such automated solutions are ideal for repetitive tasks while helping create more time for the dental team to focus on patient care. More importantly, it also results in higher dental revenue optimization.
AI in the dental industry can be used across multiple operational areas of a dental practice. Besides billing-related tasks, AI solutions can help the dental practice to remain connected with patients, which can have an impact on the revenue.
While AI may not be a human interface for the practice with patients, it lightens the burden on the dental team by connecting with patients as follows:
A practice can stay profitable and sustainable when the calendar of appointments is full. A packed schedule leads to a productive day when the business operations are running smoothly. But this cannot happen if appointment-making and processes are disorganized. In such scenarios, more patients might lead to more confusion and a negative patient experience.
The dental team can use AI-based solutions to assist with the operational processes, appointment scheduling, etc. This can help the team to judge the volume of patients for the day and align the staff requirements accordingly. This will then result in rationalizing the daily schedule to curtail gaps and prevent overbooking. AI-based solutions can be used for better decision-making through smart diagnostics and imaging.
Pearl offers tools like Practice Intelligence, which is a computer vision system that precisely reads radiographs accurately and fast. Pearl Protect is a program that protects the practice and patients against radiograph-related insurance fraud.
Overjet uses dental research, data science, and computer vision to help insurance companies and dental practices through an insurance claim intelligence platform. This platform can automatically assess a claim to lower turnaround time. This leads to faster payments. The company also has a clinical intelligence platform to automate routine administrative activities. Zentist is a platform that automates dental insurance billing. This helps to streamline the revenue cycle.
Dental practices will be able to use AI in dental industry tools and solutions to predict workloads effectively, avoid potential bottlenecks, and improve the energy levels of the dental team. Dental practice automation and artificial intelligence for dentistry will contribute to dental revenue optimization by enabling faster and more efficient billing, insurance verification solutions, etc. AI-based tools are just tools, however, and they cannot replace the human touch.
