So today, we're going to hear how AI can seamlessly be integrated into pediatric workflows, how to explain the findings to parents in real time, build trust through visual communication, and create a smoother, more efficient experience for your whole team. And we're proud to be partnering with Pearl today for this webinar, and I'm thrilled to introduce our panelists for the webinar. So I'm gonna introduce Sheila first. Sheila is our cohost from Pearl, and she is a practice leader specializing in clinical operations, team development, and practice growth. She previously served as chief operating officer of a high performing private dental practice, leading a team of over fifty team members and supporting more than thirteen thousand active patients, and she continues to serve an advice and an as an adviser.

Sheila is the head of clinical education at Pearl and former director of clinical operations where she leads initiatives focused on practice transformation, clinical performance, and the adoption of dental AI. Known for her practical results driven approach, she helps practices improve efficiency, strengthen team alignment, and evaluate the patient experience. She is also the founder of Absolute Dental Business Solutions and a graduate of Loma Linda University and a registered dental hygienist. So thank you so much, Sheila, for joining us today, and I'll let you do the next introduction.

Thank you, Erin. It's great to be here. And same, very excited about our partnership with Patterson and Eaglesoft.

Delighted to always be able to make anything effortless in dentistry. So our integration is helpful for that, and we'll see that later today. This webinar, I'm really excited about because it's actually kind of funny when you think about effortless and pediatrics because they really don't go hand in hand.

In some sense, it's fun and great, and it's the most my most favorite patient I ever work on. But effortless is really probably the exact opposite word that that is really, in alignment with pediatrics. So I'm really excited to have doctor Solomon here today to show us how to really make it effortless, but also walking through such a high quality practice where they're serving multiple people throughout the day. And we know those little squirmy little guys aren't gonna sit around, and the parents. Right? When you tell somebody you have a cavity or something, you know, we're all in shock the first time.

So, again, just a few teasers on how doctor Solomon is going to really share with us how he's made this seamless, effortless, and really actually a fun place. So without further ado, let me introduce doctor Solomon, our speaker today.

He is a second generation pediatric dentist who has been practicing in Livermore, California for over twenty years. He has earned his bachelor's in biological sciences and went to dental school at University of Pacific and then completed his two year specialty residency and a master's, as if he needed to do more things at once, at the University of Texas, so in Houston. He is a diplomat of the American Board of Pediatric Dentistry and a fellow of the American College of Pediatric Dentistry. When he's not in practice, which I think is pretty much seven AM to seven PM, I could be wrong, he is internationally recognized speaker and a clinical instructor.

He's the owner and director of BioClear Pediatric Learning Center and the dental specialty training center. So we'd like to hear a little more about that. It's very exciting. What you're doing in your, what we call, free time.

Right, doctor Solomon?

Correct.

He also he he will be working in those centers with pediatric information for even general dentists to focus on hands on courses and such. So another wonderful gift by our wonderful prize speaker, doctor Solomon. So thank you so much for taking the time to be here. We're honored to have you, and, we'll turn it over to you.

Great. Thank you so much, Erin. Thank you so much, Sheila, for being here today. So I will hit share, and I will pop over.

So I'll get to know I'll let let you guys get to know me here in a little bit. But as far as my relationship with Patterson, I've been an Eaglesoft customer since the first day I transitioned from paper charts to electronic health records. So that was, I don't know, maybe eighteen years ago. And even before I even knew about Pearl, Pearl was in existence, I was a beta tester for Eaglesoft.

So it's been a great project for me. We were actually, I believe, the first office in the country to integrate Pearl into Eaglesoft. We help with a lot of the testing with that, And we'll talk about why it in direct integration. If you can, it's not required, but it is advantageous just for the flow of your practice.

So if people have questions today, please go ahead and and enter them in, and then you'll have all my contact information when we're done. I try to be very reachable. So if there's something we didn't cover today, if you're a general dentist, if you're a pediatric specialist, you know, if you have any questions about integrating all these things, please reach out to me. I do try to get back to everybody within twenty four hours when I can.

So thank you so much for being here. So the topic today is effortless AI in pediatric dentistry. And, you know, as a pediatric dentist, I actually think pediatric dentistry is effortless. I don't know how people treat adults all day.

I mean, I I have a lot of teens in my practice, but my hope is is that all of you that treat children or teens or young adults in your practice, I wanna make things easier for you. Dentistry has not gotten any easier, and Sheila can, I'm sure, attest to this post COVID. You know, our costs are higher. The patient demands are higher.

People look up stuff themselves online and then come to the office and say, well, what about this? And I find if I, as a clinician and an educator, if I really bring in tech that I can integrate into my practice and use it as a communication method and a diagnostic tool, things get easier. Right? I don't wanna just bring in technology to have fancy things with lights and, you know, and impress people with the stuff that I bought.

I need to have everything I do part of my clinical diagnosis and my ability to communicate that to patients and parents. So we really have four takeaways today that we're gonna discuss. We're gonna talk about workflow, and that I think is the most apropos as far as talking about Eaglesoft and Pearl together because in a pediatric practice, we see fairly high volume of patients, and I need everything just to mesh. I need to be able to not have technology slow me down.

If anything, I want it to speed me up. So we're gonna talk about how we integrate this technology into our workflow for every single patient, every single minute of the day without getting stressed out, having to go turn things on and open programs. We're gonna talk really about conversations with our patients and parents and how to increase our ability to communicate. Because I spent a lot of years just even on a light box showing bringing the X-ray up and showing parents on the light box and pointing out, well, do you see that thing?

And they would say, yes. They didn't see any of that. Right?

And I need to have those tools not only to help me diagnose, but to communicate and really apparent of any ability of understanding. They don't need to have a medical background or dental background to really understand. I'm not just making things up. There really is a decay process in this tooth, and I'm just trying to help your child.

But if they don't buy into that and I don't have that that communication ability with a parent, things don't work out at the end of the day. And that really gets down to trust. I find I have a very high acceptance rate of treatment in my practice, and I believe that comes down to trust. If parents and patients and grandparents, whomever brings that child in, if they trust I'm gonna do the right thing for their child, then, yes, that first conversation may be a little bit more difficult.

But then the second and third and fourth and fifth, then they know I'm not out just to have billable services. I really care about their child, and I really want the best for them. I'm I'm not trying to just pad my pocketbooks. I'm doing things in order to help their child's oral health.

And then we wanna talk about the patient experience. Right? Because of the fact it's gotten more competitive to be a dentist. Right?

Every day, office is open and, you know, large groups may come in. And at the end of the day, I am running a business. Right? Yes.

My clinical competency, my ability to treat patients, my trust with those parents, those are all important. But if I don't have a business to work in at the end of the day, none of those things are gonna be available to me. Right? So just quickly about me.

I am second generation pediatric dentist. I took over the practice for my father about twenty three years ago.

Two and a half years ago moved into a much bigger facility. So we have six thousand square feet and thirteen ops and integrated I have a teaching center there. My email address is right there, joshua at pediatric d d s dot com. If you're trying to find course information or also contact me, you can go to pediatric d d s dot com as well. And on the upper right, there's a QR code if you want it just to get all my information.

And I am on Facebook quite a bit, so I post all of my courses, you know, anything like this that I'm doing. So if you wanna friend me on Facebook, you can always have updates on anything that I I'm teaching.

So just a little view of my office. I mentioned we're in about six thousand square feet. I'm currently sitting right about here, and I wanted to have an office that was open and bright. I didn't wanna have a little kiddie theme office.

I really wanted to be available to all ages, you know, because I do have I do treat some adults once in a while. I treated an eighty year old prosthodontist friend of mine not too long ago. I mean, I don't do that very often, but I wanted to have my facility to be comfortable for everybody. And just a few pictures of my office.

Again, we try to keep everything light and bright and open.

You know, gone are the days that we, you know, we learned in COVID that you can't push everything together and have everyone sitting two feet apart. Doesn't work like that. So I needed enough space in a facility that I'm proud of and that we can bring in, you know, all of our patients and everyone's comfortable. I wanted to give one little gift to everybody that's on this webinar.

This is a QR code of all my parent and patient handouts, all my instructions. So twenty years of making handouts. I've made this available to everybody, so you have my permission to take my logo off and put your own logo on.

Over attained baby teeth, that one gets downloaded quite a bit, but we have a lot of handouts available. Actually, I should have handouts on on Pearl and some things for Patterson on here that remind me. Erin, you have to remind me to put on my custom draw types and things on here. I will do that.

But if you want handouts for your patients, this is available to you. It's free. You don't have to register. Just hop on and you can take anything you want.

So let's talk about this first key takeaway, seamless workflow.

How do I integrate not just AI, but technology into my workflow on a daily basis and improve my quality of care and make my life easier and make my team's lives easier? We all know if you've been in practice for a while, I'm sure, Sheila, you know, when you first saw first laser that came out or the first intraoral camera, you know, you needed to warm up for five minutes and you had to bring it in. And the question is, did it really speed up the process of our dental care? Because, yes, I would love to spend all day with one person.

That's not going to happen. Especially, you know, in the hygiene world, there's more and more pressure to speed up appointments and deliver quality care at the same time. And that's not always easy to do. So anything that integrate into my practice, it needs to be seamless and fast and efficient.

Right? So we're going to talk about these four s's, systems, staff, supervision, and speed. And speed really is efficiency. I don't like to use that term, but it was an s word.

I wanna be efficient when I do. I don't wanna rush. I don't wanna have a practice with my hands on the door and parents think I'm rushing, but I wanna be efficient in what I do, and it was an s, so it worked out perfectly. So this is kind of an average day in my practice.

Right? So I'm not a large group where we have seventeen providers. You know, this is just two pediatric dentists that are working, and we have one assistant per column and typically one or two floater assistants and then a treatment coordinator is helping to run that day. And I spend we spend a lot of time with parents.

I do not feel like I rush. We run on time, but we have things buffers and things built into our schedule so we can work efficiently and proficiently throughout the day. So I'm gonna give you just some pearls here, no pun intended, I guess a little pun intended, on just some things not having to do with AI or treatment planning, but just some of the things that I've learned to do over the last twenty years to increase that efficiency in your schedule. Actually, one of my team members came up with this is because I was always wondering, you know, do parents wanna come back?

Do they not? Well, it turns out there's a lot of parents that would love just to have fifteen minutes on Facebook or on their phone and check their email without hearing mommy, mommy, daddy, daddy every fifteen minutes. So, actually, there's a fair amount of parents that wanna, you know, stay in the reception area. So we ask every single parent or caregiver or dads or moms, whoever comes to the appointment, you know, at the fair, do you wanna come back with your child right away?

Do you want to come back during the exam, or would you just like an update at the end? And what I found is that parents feel like they're listened to.

We're not separating them from their child. Gone are the days, like, when my dad was working where the patient just came back by themselves and the parents wait in the waiting room. It's completely up to them. We do mark our charts to know when a parent came back, if a doctor spoke to that parent, because at least every other visit, I want one of our docs speaking to that parent. And but unless the doctor specifically wants and in the team huddle, there may be parents that I wanna talk to.

So unless the doctor specifically wants that parent back, the team member will have that parent back if they notice a concern. So if mom or dad or grandma's in the waiting room, my team automatically knows that if they see something, one of the key metrics, you know, that we followed when we want a parent back, they will go ahead and get that parent. So I'm not waiting. I want the associate doctors is not waiting.

So what have we done to help increase our staff and our systems of supervision or speed? Number one, I think most people now have paperless medical history updates, So we require those before that parent or patient comes into the office. So we're not waiting like the old days for people to handwrite things. Happens once in a while.

But also within Eaglesoft, it's pretty slick. There's a lot of there's a lot of customization you can do in your chart, and so we have little alerts that pop up. So the second my front desk sees that schedule for the day, they automatically know who sent in their medical history and who did not. So they're not having to look through every single chart.

That's a feature built into Eaglesoft. Works very, very well. At the before that appointment day, one or two days beforehand, either my office manager, my clinical lead goes through all the charts. They see who needs X rays.

We assign what patients are in what chairs, and then we discuss in the morning that huddle. Okay. We have this patient coming in. They're kind of loud, so we maybe should put them over here.

Or this parent wants a little bit more privacy. Let's put them in x y z room. I find this helps tremendously as far as our flow. Because if you're not organized, a schedule like this will eat you alive.

Right? And I want every parent, every child to have that experience that I'd want for my own kids, and you can only do that through having these systems in place. And then having I know it's the CPA sometimes don't like it with the amount of staff that I have, but I have one assistant per column. That assistant is assigned.

Those are their patients. They know if they call in sick that day, someone else has taken their patients. They have to take responsibility for those patients. They're gonna, along with the doctors, of course, look at the medical history, be prepared for that column, but then we also have a floater in a treatment coordinator.

And then this is another big one. My team knows if they see something significant, decay, you know, pathology, they're automatically hopping in, taking intraoral photos, and getting that parent back. Little things like that can slow you down by five, six minutes, and you do that enough times during the day. It can really slow down the the process of, you know, your exams.

And then we call them one of my assistants came up with the holers. That's a large hole in a molar. So if there is a hole or if they see just all of a sudden a a tooth that really needs they think something going on, they're gonna grab the camera out. They're gonna bring the parent back.

They're gonna start that. Now they're not diagnosing anything, but they're just starting that documentation.

And they may buzz me or in the radio say, hey, doctor Josh, do you want me to take a PA of this of this tooth? And I'm gonna say, Absolutely. Please do.

And then specifically, as I mentioned, parents are brought back if in the reception area for certain things. And that ties us into our Pearl second opinion. So if they see things like this, they automatically know what to do. Now they're not diagnosing, but they are now my team has the ability of just seeing color.

If they see a lot of pink and they see a lot of yellow, they automatically know what are the next things that I need to do, and we're gonna talk about that today. And as important as the software that you use for your terrorist detection is integration when possible. Pearl has really can live in two worlds. It can live online, and, Sheila, you'll correct me if I'm not describing this correctly.

It can be a web based portal, which works very quickly. You just open it. You see all your patients that day. It's I don't even know how they get it that fast updated, you know, uploaded online and the AI run, but it's almost seamless.

And then my suggestion is for any of you that are gonna bring in AI caries detection, if you can have it run within your software, it's always the most efficient. Now online, there's more features. Right? But the for the vast majority of patients, what works well for me, it's in my Eaglesoft.

X rays come up in Eaglesoft, and it's already there. They can toggle things on and off, but it's integrated into the software, and that's where the speed really comes. Again, if you're gonna view it online, not a not a problem, but it is faster if it's integrated within the software. I wanna give everyone just really quickly to go over this.

For those large group practices or even if you're bringing on your first associate, but even for you as a provider, anyone that's a new dentist in my practice, when I bring on a new associate, we do these time studies. Because the question is, is a forty minute appointment really a forty minute appointment? You don't know how long each one of those practitioners take. You don't know how long each one of your clinical assistants take.

If Sheila comes in my office as a new hygienist, even if she has lots of experience, I don't know how long she needs to do an appropriate job for each appointment. So we do these time studies, and you can take a screen printer. If you want, you can email me, and I'm happy to send this to you. But we do these time studies for everyone, and then we know exactly that exact practitioner, that that hygienist, that dentist, that assistant, how long does it take them to do that procedure?

And that's start to finish. Set up room and clean up room. I will tell you this can increase your production by thousands of dollars a day.

And as importantly, you may have appointments that are too short, and you may be stressing your staffs your staffs out because you don't have enough time.

So I mentioned I bring a lot of technology in my practice only if it increases my clinical acuity, the way I can communicate, the ease it is for patients and for parents to understand. So number one, I've been a client with Pearl for two and a half years, I think, now. Even before integration of Eaglesoft was a thing, I use this on a daily basis for every single patient.

You know, one quick story was back in December when Eaglesoft was doing an update. I needed to do an update with all our computers, and so Pearl wasn't running at that time. And I just didn't find time to do the update as we all get busy. And I went a couple weeks without Pearl, and it was pandemonium in my head because I and I I promise you, I'm not making this story up.

I lost that ability to show a parent this. Right? I wish to go back to my days with the light box of holding things up. Mom, do you see this?

No. They didn't see that. Right? I lost the ability for that teenager to look at this image and understand I'm not making this stuff up.

Right? When you're eating Cheetos at eleven o'clock at night in Takis and then you've got all these holes in your teeth, buddy, number one, you've got holes in your teeth. They're gonna be there forever. Number two, your parents have to pay for these things, you have to go through treatment.

So how do we improve so we don't have to fix teeth? That, to me can only really be effectively communicated when you have an image like this. And I use so this is Kevo's device. This is Diagnocam.

This is one of my favorite things to talk about and use. This is intraoral camera transillumination and fluorescence for diagnostics. And then I've integrated intraoral scanning in my practice. So this is Panda Smart Scanner, very fast, super small.

It's like the size of a curing light. These three tools, these three pieces of equipment allow me to have the most accurate and and clinically relevant diagnosis possible. So if I know if I do all these three things and I know all three things forever. Everybody gets Pearl and gets radiographs.

Right? But if I can do all these three things, I have the most complete documentation possible. So let's talk about AI and how we integrate that into our practice. It's a everything is AI now.

Right? I I went to the hardware store, and there was for sale. It's something AI had agreed like, I don't know if your refrigerator really is AI, but they're calling it AI. Right?

So what we're gonna focus on today is really this diagnostic assistance.

I like the term automated interpretation. That's what it's doing. I need everyone to remember that the AI is not taking over your job. It is not going to diagnose and make the final diagnose for you.

It is helping you to not miss caries. It's helping you to communicate. It's helping your team. It's not gonna tell you to do a MON number three.

That's what you went to dental school for. That's what you went to hygiene school for. You know, it is helping you with that diagnosis, but it's not making decision for you.

Pearl does a lot of other things with scheduling insurance verification and what I have just integrated, which I am super, super excited about. I mean, I mean, had it long enough to to talk about it fully in a webinar like this is Pearl voice.

Just last week, I had a long consultation with a parent, fifteen minutes. They had lot of medical history, and there was you know, child had a lot of stuff going on. There was stuff going on at home. Child needed, I don't know, sixteen out of twenty teeth restored.

We had to do general anesthesia in office. So that's a fifteen, twenty minute conversation. Correct? I timed myself and it was a fourteen minute note after when that parent left because we all know if you didn't enter it in the notes, it didn't happen.

Right? I could have talked about something for twenty minutes, but if it's not in the note six months from now, it never occurred. So what I'm excited about is now having the ability oh, I took my little mic off, Is having my little mic on my oh, I got one right here. And having my little mic on, and boom, I take this on.

It goes as soon as I go in treatment room, I click pro voice, and it is gonna dictate as I'm talking to the parent and the parent's responses to me. And that twenty or sixteen minute or however long it took me to do that note, thirteen minutes, that's done. Right? And it's done and it's completely accurate with that exact with that transcription.

Right? Both my conversation and with the parents. Medical legally, I cannot stress that enough why that is so important. Right?

Because not only before when I was doing notes, it was, well, parents said this, blah blah blah. Well, question is, did the parent really say that, or did I just put that in my notes? Well, it's now on AI. So I'm not gonna go into a ton of detail here, but I really encourage this is the way of the future.

Even if you don't want to do this or not, it's gonna happen at some time. I go to my doctor and either have a medical scribe or they have AI doing it for you and for them, and this is just part of what the world is gonna be in the future. So let's really talk about second opinion. So second opinion is really that.

It's a second opinion on looking at the diagnosis for radiographic and evident caries. So what does it do for us?

I a hundred percent believe that I am more accurate with Pearl than without Pearl. I know for a fact I am. I've been doing this for twenty three years. I think I have a good idea of how to read x rays.

You know, I started with digerat radiography a long time ago with I got on a bunny suit in New York and watched them build my sensors. I've been around this for a long time, but we all miss things. I don't care how good you are in it. You can miss things because of the quality of the radiograph.

You can miss things because you're just going fast or you just didn't see it. Right? And I don't wanna perform supervised neglect. I that word is so appropriate, and it just kills me because it happens.

Right? Are we gonna watch, watch, watch, or am I gonna miss something? That supervised neglect, that patient, that parent is putting that child in your hands and they're saying, please check my baby. And if you're not accurate, not so great.

So I wanna lower the chances of of me missing things. I wanna improve my communication. I wanna have a high a high acceptance rate for treatment, and I wanna build trust. If I build trust at first, and I mentioned this, that second, third, fourth appointment, parents tell me all the time, nope.

Don't, you know, don't worry about it. You know, I understand they need work done. Great. No problem.

I also find this is an issue too. In my area, you know, I'm in a community. I'm really close to Silicon Valley, and I have all these families coming in from all over the world, people that are ten times smarter than I am, you know, engineers, and, you know, they can probably program AI stuff like this themselves, but a lot of those parents also did not have early dental care early on because where they grew up, they mostly went to the dentist when they had pain. Not everybody, but a lot of parents have done that.

And what this allows them to do is truly have that second opinion. I'm not making this up. This is really what's going on with your child, and let me have the computer show you. Right?

So these are all of or just some of the features that Pearl AI detection will help us with. So enamel lesions, incarious lesions, calculus know knowable margins, periapical radiolucencies, bone level, not apropos so much in a pediatric practice. But I don't care who you are and how good you are. You are not gonna be able to see all these things all the time with every single one of your actions without fail.

Right? I have all of this built in, and it comes up like that within Eaglesoft. So here's an example of Eaglesoft. I just randomly grabbed a patient and so you can see they've had all these x rays over time.

This is integrated into my Eaglesoft imaging. So there's the x-ray and I can turn on caries yes, caries no. I can turn on the tooth parts. I can turn on bone heights.

I can put on noble margins. Right? I can show where the fillings are. It's integrated and it comes up right away and I need to have this gets into that speed or efficiency.

So are the computers gonna take over the world? I kind of thought that a little bit on AI. Sometimes I do think that, you know, over time, but please I'm joking.

I see this I can't even tell you. I've told you this before. Get so frustrated because I've seen this quote on so many Facebook groups that I want it right back and sometimes I just let it go. I've been a dentist for x amount of years.

I don't need a computer to find cavities for me. Well, sir, ma'am, you miss stuff. Okay? Our eye can only detect, what, about thirty to maybe sixty shades of gray at the most.

And if I'm at the paint store with my wife, I can only see two, and she can see a hundred, but hypothetically.

But the computer is the AI. You know, it's it is machine learning looking for patterns. It's looking for these shades of gray. I can see maybe thirty to sixty of them.

And as maybe as I'm getting older, maybe it's only thirty or twenty of them. But the computer is gonna see thousands of gradations of grade, and that's what it's picking up. It's not taking over your jobs. You know, there has been multiple studies both done within Pearl and outside looking at clinical accuracy and repeatability.

So it's not just one time sitting down with a set of bitewings and looking through. You know, if I gave all of us that are clinicians on here an hour to look through a set of bitewings, we're probably gonna diagnose pretty correctly. Now do that five times. Do that ten times, twenty times, thirty times, forty times, fifty times.

Sometimes we'll see spring break, we may see sixty, seventy patients in my practice. Right? Not by myself, right, with associates.

But that is a lot of patients to come through, and I don't want anything missed for any single one of them.

And if you think as a practitioner that you are gonna be a hundred percent accurate all the time, calm. Calm. And we'll sit down. We'll do one of these studies because we all miss things.

Now you're not gonna necessarily miss large caries lesions. You're gonna miss what I call the we call this the opportunity for for minimally invasive dentistry. It's the small therapeutic window that we have, and this is more apropos than ever now that we have things like CuraDot. Now we have things like SDF.

We have fluoride varnishes. It's that chemotherapeutic window that's very small.

If you diagnose early, you may not be telling that patient, well, you need a restoration, but I may be able to put SDF in your teeth and just paint something on and never drill a hole in your tooth. That's what I want people to understand is big holes in teeth, yes, you're gonna find them. But if we're looking for more incipient types of decay, that gets missed. And you also have to base your examination on junk in, junk out.

If you don't have you know, this is a light bite wing, Sheila, would you say, you know, that's probably a little bit underexposed, but am I going to now ask my team member to re snap that that X-ray? And it's always gonna be on that patient that or that parent that doesn't want X rays. Right? Those are always the ones that are gonna be, like, overlapped and underexposed.

So let's look at this clinically and say, well, I see some things here. I see some things here. Right? Where's the the decay here?

Well, that's the Pearl diagnosis. Right?

Incipient decay and then decay into the dentin. And not only is it showing me the areas of where the decay is, it is now a legal medical record on looking at progression of decay over time. It doesn't pop up here, but I'll show you in in another slide. It will say what is your percentage of decalcification or decay or that e one e two in the enamel and where is in the dentin.

That is exponentially important now that we have more of these chemotherapeutics. Right? The SDFs, the curodonts, the varnishes. Right?

And even for bone loss, right, Sheila, if you're putting antibiotics in that area, it's one thing to put your probe down there. Right? And I'm sure everyone's super accurate with their probes, and their angulation may be off. But if you take it the same angulation of that PA or that bite wing every single time, now you have a medical record of that bone loss, right, down to the millimeter tenth of the millimeter, I should say.

Right?

I don't know if everybody's gonna pick up seven lesions from there, and I don't blame them. This is not an easy to read X-ray, but machine learning is gonna pick that up. It's gonna pick that up. Right?

And now we have this, parts of the tooth. I'm no longer I don't remember the last time I grabbed a piece of paper and a pen and draw, like, little tooth parts. I'm sure many of us have done that. But parents, patients, grandparents, whomever's there, they need to understand because if they understand you know, they can tell the difference between colors.

They can see this is white, and this one's probably worse than over here. Right? And now I have the ability to say, well, you know, these I never say, you know, you have I try not to say watches. I say, you know, there are cavities, but they thankfully, we've caught these before they progress where I have to restore them.

So these may be great teeth for chemotherapeutics and increasing home care and getting, you know, your prevalence out, you know, having them come back for STF or all these other, you know, topical solutions. But now not only do I have the ability to diagnose, but I have a medical record of progression over time. And that's essential the more of these chemotherapeutics we're putting on teeth because I need to be able to track. I don't trust my eye from six months ago to today, but I can really tell is that get a little bigger or not, the the AI is gonna pick that up and it's gonna give me an accurate measurement.

So doctor, when you say you can tell cavities between teeth with the naked eye, fine. Yes. Can you measure can you tell me from appointment to appointment what percentage is the dentin, what percentage is the enamel?

If you can do that, you shouldn't be in dentistry, and you should be, you know, an engineer and figure these things out yourself. Alright. What's more important or actually as important as a clinician, I can diagnose a bunch of things and I can know I can take my standard X-ray and my light box and I could be sure in my head, well, there's three watches and four teeth to do. K?

That's one thing. But if the patient or parent doesn't buy into how important these are to either monitor or increase hygiene or to restore or now pay you know, you need a last two restoration or routine hour, whatever it is, that's only half the the puzzle. Right? I can diagnose all day, but if I don't have people coming back for treatment, all I did was tell them you had problems, good luck to you.

The circular loop is what's your problem? What's your solution? I always need my patients to be and I don't want them going forward if I can do that going backwards is now here's your problem. Well, we picked up these things early, now we can increase home care.

You may come in for more frequent cleanings. You may need more scaling and root cleaning. You may need now SDF in the areas. Hopefully, that circle is going backwards.

I don't I can't think of a better way of explaining this to a parent or a patient seeing this. I mean, to me, this is why I I talked to Sheila about this last week. I just don't know why people don't jump into having tools like this, and maybe they just don't know. And that's why I'm so passionate about talking about these things.

Because let me tell you that three weeks or so where I didn't have Pearl, it was a whole lot difficult trying to explain things. And what's the other thing I can do with this? I'll show you a slide here in a little bit, but I am able to now take that Pearl image and and one click of a button PDF, now I can send it to that other, you know, the other parent or, you know, the maybe it's a divorce situation. I use this a lot.

It goes one parent shows up and they don't talk. Well, I can at least send that that Pearl image to that other parent, and there it is. I don't think there's a better way to diagnose and to communicate than this. I really don't.

I really don't. So, again, another example. How many areas of decay do we see? Well, yes.

Is it there? You may be able to see it as a clinician. Do I wanna show that to a parent or a patient and try to convince them that they truly have caries in their teeth? What do you wanna work from?

Do wanna work from that, or do you wanna work from that?

You pick. I think the the answer is obvious there. Right? These before and afters are just amazing because I I think about for the last, you know, twenty years, I was working from this, and I really and I know that my treatment acceptance rate was not as good because I can track that.

Right? I have lots of tools and metrics to track. So this whole idea of having tools for this case presentation and building trust is equally important. I used to use this slide a lot, almost for everyone.

I would show them, okay. Here's what a cavity looks like in the X-ray, and then here's what decay looks like on the same two teeth. And I'd go on this whole diatribe, and this is how I was discreet disclose or discussing treatment with parents because I wanted them to believe me.

And this actually worked pretty well, but it takes a whole lot of time to talk about, and it doesn't show on their child or their teenager where decay is. Because we know sometimes you can see things radiographically, and you know your brain is calibrated as a practitioner of how big that lesion is, but look at that difference. Right? Now if I had a tool early on or technology to even pick these things up earlier and not let that lesion be cavitated and just do a surface chemotherapy treatment, things are great.

Right? I pass that chemotherapy window. There's a hole in that tooth. I don't care how much topicals and things you put in there.

It's probably not gonna get that much better when it's already close to the dentin. So but I missed that window. Right? I want these tools early on.

And, again, I want you to remember, it's diagnosis and it's communication to have that patient come back. I want you to be able to close that loop. This is a pediatric webinar, so I wanted to show some examples of what caries looks like. Right?

How much easier is to explain to a parent why they need a floss? And while we may do some SDF on here, maybe I needs a a class two, but I'm able without I think even with someone being a layperson, they can look at this and see where the cavities are between their teeth versus if I have the standard X-ray, it's just not as easy. And this is super cute. I'm I'm I'm glad that Pearl came out with this.

These are sugar bugs. So you can click a button. This isn't you can't do this on integration with with Eaglesoft, so this would be something you pull up in Pearl running online. But it shows little sugar buggies between the teeth, and it's very cute to do with your your patients.

Right? And there's there's the little sugar bugs. So I I they they did a nice job with this, and I do use this because I think, you know, if I wanna talk to a five year old who's fighting their parents about not letting them floss and running down the hallway at nighttime, you know, me just they're not gonna look at colors on the screen. Now are they gonna look at little sugar bugs?

Absolutely. I have many parents that have told me, I don't know what you did to talk to my child, but now they're concerned about these sugar bugs. I had one I wish I wish I kept it. I had one child who drew came in with a picture of the little sugar bug and handed it to me.

Right? I mean, that's adorable. What really what that means is they listened. Right? That five year old who was probably running around the operatory not paying attention, when I showed them sugar bugs on screen, oh, they listened, and now they understand why they need to have their parents help them floss at night time.

Right? So there's your case presentation with sugar bucks. I think it's adorable. Let's talk about acceptance rate.

Right? It's that circular loop. It's diagnosis and then acceptance rate. And this one this is a slide from Pearl.

So this, you know, this study they looked at, I think it was a Gallup poll. Right? Sixty four percent say they didn't understand their x rays. I think that's probably high.

Right? And we see, you know, forty percent say they distrust dentist. That number used to not be that low, I'm sure. Right?

I mean, dentistry has always been, at least what I've heard is kind of up there and, you know, with patients believing they're dentist.

And I think some of that's been eroded over time. I don't know why, but it definitely has.

I wanna show you, and this isn't a show off slide, but I wanna show you what my treatment acceptance rate is in my practice. Right? We have a very high treatment acceptance rate, and, you know, that's a whole lot of patients seen. And so it says, what, thirty two percent of them had needed some diagnosis for treatment.

And I believe this comes from a couple things. It is leveraging technology, and it is increasing my ability to communicate both having technology on the screen and as a practitioner. So one of the things that I talk about when I lecture specifically on treatment planning and communication with parents is stopping. Right?

Let's not just let the technology do the job. Change your body posture. Make sure that there's no distractions. If you're busy, that's when I slow down. That's when I slow down. That's when I put everything down, and I stop, and I concentrate, and I make eye contact. And I want that parent to understand they're the only child in the entire world, including my children, that I'm thinking about right then.

And you can do that. You can have those communication methods and understand body posture. But, again, if they're looking at little, you know, grayscale on a tiny screen, you just don't have that ability. And as dentistry's getting more and more competitive, it's hard to get patients in the door.

I need to have a high acceptance rate because I want my kids getting treatment. I want my teens getting treatment, and I want them coming back. And, also, at the end of that, realize that money that they paid is worthwhile. Right?

It's worthwhile. So it's really it's it's a bunch of things. It's not just cavity yes, cavity no. It's are we gonna do something about it?

And once it's done, do they see the benefit of that in the long term? One quick pearl here is I stopped using the term baby teeth a while ago when I'm discussing treatment with parents. And the reason being is if you were to pull all the parents in your practice or if you just called all your friends and you said, when do baby teeth fall out? Most of them are gonna tell you six to seven years of age.

Right? Because they remember losing incisors. So the lexicon, the term I like to use more is primary molar exfoliating at ten or eleven or primary molar exfoliating at twelve. Because if I tell that parent with a three year old, you have cavities in your baby teeth, even if they see my periapical image sitting in eaglesoft, they may go home and tell that other parent, well, they've got cavities in their baby teeth, but they're gonna fall out soon.

Right? No. They have cavities that are in the baby teeth that are gonna fall out at ten or at twelve. And here is the PDF of where all those lesions are, and it's not me printing out that bitewing I used to hear scribbling notes on it.

Here's the Pearl diagnosis, and we can email it. We can it sits in the chart. Medical legally, I'm covered because I have done everything I can humanly possible. I have my scan.

I have my transillumination. I have my fluorescence. I might I grab my pen. I'm doing an intraoral scan.

I've got my Pearl. In my to today's technology, I do not think there's anything else I could integrate to have a more accurate diagnosis and communication ability to my parents. So do we wanna diagnose from this, or do I wanna diagnose from that? Right?

That answers itself. Right? Yes. Everyone can see this, but does that need to be treated or not?

Well, what about here? What about here? We know that radiographs occlusally are not always so great, but you can see the stuff, and it's that accurate. And this is not a very good the exposure is not perfect on this.

Right? It's a little underexposed in, you know, in my eye, but look at that. Right? That speaks for itself.

And that's why I love talking about this because even if I just sat here and just showed you image examples, you're gonna see that this works so well. And it just changes your ability to have to convince someone, and then I can spend more time talking about the actual treatment. So let's talk workflow.

I and I mentioned and alluded this a little bit earlier is that it is not just a workflow for the doctors. It makes everybody's life easier. My parents come up front. They know it needs to be done.

Yep. I saw the little pink, and I saw the little yellow. We've my assistants have already gone over things, and this is the kind of this is the flow in my office. So as soon as that bitewing comes up in Eaglesoft, my team sees all the coloration sees all the coloration, and then what do they do?

So here we go. Yell and pig, stop and think. That's what we talk about. I want my team members.

If I'm seeing we're seeing seventy patients that day, I need my team members to have an actual plan once the Pearl image comes up. Does it mean they're not diagnosing? Right? They're not saying, okay.

We're gonna do all these you know, we're gonna restore all these teeth. What are they doing? They are gonna write down all the areas of concern. And if I mark those as watches, what they've already done is they've said, oh, doctor Josh, I saw the watches in Pearl.

They all look the same as they did six months ago. Right? Because it takes me time to look at the current film and look at the tooth chart and decide if there's any new watches. They can count.

They can look at the chart. They know the tooth numbers and letters. They can be my second or my first pair of eyes actually on that image. So yellow and pink stop and think.

Do I continue with the cleaning? Right? I don't want them spending a half an hour cleaning teeth that have a bunch of holes in them. So they may decide, you know what?

I see a lot of yellow and pink. My rule is usually three or more. If they see a lot of yellow and pink, it's time to get a doctor and not spend a half an hour cleaning teeth when we could be talking about treatment planning. Do I need to get the I need to get disclosing solution out?

Do I need to go over philosophy? The answer is yes for all those things. Do I get that doctor back right away?

I you know, the way that we schedule is I don't want them they can easily do that cleaning at the time of treatment. Right? I'd rather spend the time diagnosing and trying to to head off that problem before it happens in the future. Do I need to bring the parent back?

Yes. Do I get disclosing solution out? Do I you know, am I late for my next patient? Because if they see lots of yellow and pink, they may know intuitively, I'm gonna be here for a while.

So they're now buzzing the treatment communicator for that day, and they're saying, hey, Shelby. I'm probably gonna run behind. I need someone else to get my patient. But they're doing that at the start of the appointment, not when there's four minutes left and they're already running behind and we haven't prepared for it.

And do I need to tell other people at the team, hey, front desk. We're running a you know, patient has a lot going on. We're gonna be running a little bit behind.

I know the parent is in the waiting room. Will you please tell them it's gonna be another ten minutes? Right? And then we we let the parent know so they're not just sitting there and wondering where their their child is.

I mentioned this earlier, but we use this a lot. This is a PDF that we can and this is gonna be from Pearl online, second opinion online. And we can click a button and download that PDF. And so that parent that's not there, if that team comes by themselves, that patient gets a report card or to another parent or just for documentation for claims submittal purposes, it is not gonna get any more accurate at this.

And if the insurance companies are fighting in this, I don't even know what to do because I don't know what else I could do to tell them that they you know, treatment is required, but this is as much information as possible with today's technology. It's all right there, and it's trackable over time.

Wisdom teeth, I know that, you know, this is something we talk about a lot in pediatrics. Parents can see these things very easily.

And pretty soon, I think sometime this year, I may be integrating CBCT. To be frank, I only know a little bit how to read these just from having an orthodontist that has a CBCT. And unless you look at CBCTs all day, I don't wanna miss anything there. Pathology, god forbid.

Right? We're doing bigger scans in the area that we really need. And having all this in my back pocket is is I'm I'm super excited not about buying CBCT, but having a tool to help me diagnose and read. Alright?

So just last couple of things from me. Shameless plug. So this is my training center if you want to come see me. I talk about Pearl and AI in every single one of my courses because it's integral in diagnosis and treatment planning.

So if you go to pediatric d d s dot com, you'll see all of my courses. And then for the first time this year, we have a orthopedic course together that's gonna be South Carolina. So I'm reachable. We teach a lot of this, you know, treatment planning and really, aesthetic dentistry and the anterior posterior that I don't think I've never seen anybody else teach.

And, again, there's, my contact information. So joshua at pediatric d d s dot com and or pediatric d d s dot com on the web. And I am happy to answer any questions we have today, and we did great on time. And I'm gonna turn things over to Sheila and Erin.

Awesome.

Was staying on time.

Yes. Great job. This was amazing. So much information in there.

So let me just share my screen again, and then we'll pop share on my end?

Okay. You got it.

We'll Okay. Pop over to the questions. There have been a couple that have come in.

And just a reminder, if anybody else has questions, that little q and a text chatbot at the bottom, you can type your questions in, and we'll go through those here. So there was a comment that they loved your, you know, direction to the team of yellow and pink. Stop and think. That was a great idea. So thanks for sharing that.

Thank you.

Another question was, does the patient printout include the IO photos?

It so we do we know the one that we give you know, I I believe we print we send two of them IO photos. Sheila, you're shaking your head. Does it?

Yeah.

We It depends on Just put that in.

So you can select Really? Yes.

I've see, I learned something new. I'm so glad that I did. That must be new new.

New new.

We're See, this is what happens when you work with an AI company is every day, there's something new that comes out. Yeah.

It's important for the patient.

And to your to your point That's great.

That is great.

Another question. What version of Eaglesoft do you have with the integration?

That is a good question. So we upgraded to the most current, and you'll probably know the number better than I do.

It's twenty Twenty five.

Yep. And, you know, I will tell you that the I think when we went from forward to twenty twenty four twenty five is a much bigger step. We a lot of the imaging software and drivers and things in the background needed to be upgraded, and that wasn't a Pearl thing. That was just, I think, with a lot of sensors and things we had. But the most current update was took us no time at all. So that because I'm always worried about, you know, doing upgrades and especially now we've had this whole thing with Windows ten and Windows eleven, but this one was seamless. This one was seamless.

Awesome. Another question was, what type of consent is recommended when using Pearl Voice?

Sheila, you are gonna be able to ask answer that better than I am.

Yeah. Great question. So, typically, we will have this already embedded inside of our forms now. Even our new patient forms have you know, because we're recording most of our patients when we're answering phones.

So you can add the consent right now when you start recording. You know, Bob, do I have your permission to record? You can record it right in there, or you can update your new patient forms if you don't have a current phone system where you are recording with patients. But that's a great question.

I just made myself a note. Yeah. What I'm doing now is just is I know when I pick up my mic is that's when I and I don't know if that's what's recommended, but I know then to ask at that point.

Yep. And then, Sheila, another question for you. Does this trial integration work with Dentrix?

Yes. So we do work directly with Dentrix, and we also have a nice little widget that'll sit there and allow you to open up your patient directly. So we understand our our clients. Right? We're all living in this crazy busy workflow where one minute can make up a difference times eight patients an hour or eight patients a day regardless of your capacity. So lots of ways for us to streamline your efficiency. And the other silver lining I wanted to bring up as far as buying back your time, when we are using AI images in the operatory, and I don't know how you feel, doctor Solomon, but when I was explaining a lot about perio or cavities when the doctor walks out of the room, I kept overexplaining until I started using AI.

Now I can show something. I'm not talking about shades of gray. I'm talking about pink and yellow, and that allowed me to stop talking and allow the patients to actually ask the questions they needed so they could actually move to getting their treatment scheduled. So that's been a huge silver lining with using those tooth parts in the operatory.

Correct. You know, the the way I've described this before is it's like, you know, having them understand the X rays, I want it to be a light switch. I just wanted to come on. I touch a button.

I know it works. We need to get through the light coming on, and then I got other things I need to talk. Like, I need to go in the room and go to sleep. Right?

I wanna be able to just click that white light switch off. My goal is to go to sleep. It's not spend a lot of time figuring out how to do the light switch. So I want to spend the time discussing, is this gonna be a composite?

Is this needs to be a full coverage crown? You know, what behavior do we expect of your child? Are we gonna use nitrous oxide? Are gonna use sedation?

So I I want I would love for the decision of what we need to do to be just done and over with, and then I can talk about how we're gonna do things. Right? And I wanna I just had it thought of next to me. So that's the little microphone.

It is literally a little tiny magnetic clip. I ordered it from Amazon at eight o'clock in the morning, and it showed at my house. A little creepy, but, like, by, I don't know, eleven. And there they are.

And this is the mics that we use. Little tiny. And these were inexpensive. I think thirty dollars or so, forty dollars comes with two of them in that little thing.

So when I clip this on, then I know to ask for permission for voice.

I'm gonna put it on right now.

Here we go.

We're being recorded, Aaron.

I didn't ask your consent, so, no, you're not.

Thank you.

Alright. Well, that looks like all of our questions, and we're just about at time. So I'll I guess I'll leave it open to you, doctor Solomon and Sheila. Is there anything else that you'd like to share before we close out today?

I do. I always have stuff to share, but I think the important thing is for people to understand. One of things I like about Pearl is there's no contract to any stuff, and I'm not don't get paid to tell you this. But I would say just try it.

Right? Just try it. The it pays for itself in my opinion in the first day. And if you don't somehow don't wanna use it or don't like it, then cancel it.

But there's no contract to sign up for a month. It's very easy to to get it up and running. And if you find you don't like it or you don't use it, I haven't met a doctor yet who's told me that, but there's no long commitment because I cannot stand in dentistry where you get signed up for things that are expensive.

Even things are not expensive, but things are, you know, very expensive. They want a year commitment out of here.

And I find in my hands, this literally pays for itself in the first day of that month.

Excellent. Amazing. Well, we are so thankful to have you, Josh Solomon. It's really a huge win when we can see how we can use all these technologies to spend less time on mundane tasks and more time building relationships.

So Right.

Really thankful to you for sharing all your knowledge with us today. Like I always say, we're gonna see you back soon. But and to the Patterson and Eaglesoft team, really thankful for our partnership, and, look out for some more webinars. And we'll see you all soon. Have a great week.

Yes.

Thank you.

Everybody. Take care.

We love bringing these these tools to our Eaglesoft customers to make, everything more run more efficiently and, you know, to build that patient trust. So thank you, everybody, and enjoy the rest of your day.

Thanks so much.

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