Founder

I am a full-time practicing dentist and a partner in a private practice in South Philadelphia. I have over two decades of experience in healthcare, thirteen of them in the chair. I started in medicine and came to dentistry after medical school and general surgery training.

Across all of my experience, I kept noticing the same thing. Most of what makes a clinical day harder than it needs to be is not the clinical work. It is the struggle for information. The data is almost always there and almost never in front of the person who needs it.

Dentistry is full of that. Everything about a patient is somewhere in the record, scattered across years and screens. The hygienist should know what issues the patient has been dealing with, for how long, and which provider has been treating them. The front desk needs to know what the insurance plan actually covers today, not what it covered last spring. I want to know what I did four years ago and why I did it that way. It is all in the chart, but everyone needs to dig around to find the information they need. As we all know, once a day starts moving with patients in and out of the chairs, it can be impossible to find time to comb through years of patient data. And in this system, each person is limited to only the data they know, or are told, to look for.

It has become obvious that AI is going to change how anyone works with data, and dentistry will not be an exception. I think it can make the workday better for every member of the dental team. So far, most of what is being built in the dental AI space involves reading radiographs, writing notes, or analyzing practice patterns. These are all great applications of AI, but I wanted something that also answers questions about the patient in the chair, something that makes my day easier and makes my patient's experience better.

So I built a platform that reads the practice management system we already run and puts the needed information about the patient in front of whoever is sitting next to them. The hygienist, the front desk, the assistant, and me, the clinician, all have what we need to know about the patient and their current visit, front and center.

It has been running in my practice every day for months — from chart prep, through the visit, to checkout at the front desk.

It is useful now, and it was built to grow. The AI models will keep getting smarter and there will be more opportunities to integrate deeper into the practice. Once every role is working from the same picture, information can start moving between them on its own, and that is where this platform is going next. What matters is that it is built by someone who understands how it will be used, in an operatory, every day of the week. What matters is that it is built by a dentist, for other dentists and their teams.

That is what Digital Lucency is. Currently, we are in beta testing — running every day in my own practice, with the first outside offices being brought on slowly and by hand. If what I described above sounds like your practice, I would like to hear from you.

— Michael Barnes, MD, DDS

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