The Potential for AI to Impact Dental Care

Artificial intelligence is starting to impact every aspect of medical care. For instance, a Boston-based startup called VideaHealth is partnering with large dental service organizations such as Heartland Dental to advance precision dental diagnostics and care with AI-generated workflow tools and revenue cycle management solutions. Founder and CEO Florian Hillen recently spoke with Healthcare Innovation about the potential for applying AI to dental care.

Launched in 2022, VideaHealth recently raised $40 million in an oversubscribed Series B funding round led by Emily Melton, co-founder and managing partner of Threshold Ventures, with participation from Avenir Ventures, BAM Ventures, and existing investors Spark Capital, Zetta Venture Partners, and Pillar VC. VideaHealth says its AI-powered platform is used by dental professionals across North America to analyze millions of patients annually, supporting clinicians in identifying and treating critical dental conditions.

VideaHealth collaborates with the largest dental service organizations (DSOs) in North America including Heartland Dental in the U.S. and DentalCorp in Canada. Over 40,000 dental professionals worldwide use VideaHealth AI platform, the company said. 

Before founding VideaHealth, Hillen did stints at Eko Health, which created a digital stethoscope, as well as at consultancy McKinsey, before studying the nexus of AI and healthcare at MIT. 

Healthcare Innovation: Could you talk about how you came to found this company? 

Hillen: Dentistry is a really great market where you have very innovative dentists trying to lean into technology in order to overcome a lot of other challenges they have right now, such as staffing shortages. I founded this company just out of MIT, right? I looked on Google Maps for dentists near MIT, and I walked into every single office and asked them if they wanted to help me build this thing. So very early on, I had what I would call design partners. Funnily enough, I probably know every dentist in Cambridge. But now we have over 100 dentists on the payroll. 

We built an algorithm and had early adopter dental practices use it and had them report feedback on what they liked and what they didn't like. Also, we were able to measure early on if they actually can increase their revenue. That's how I was able to raise my first seed round, which was $1 million. Then with that seed round, I was able to go from that early concept algorithm to actually building software and doing a proper pilot. The outcome of the pilot was so good that I was able to raise my next round.

HCI: How does your AI solution streamline the workflow and lead to increased revenue growth for dentists?

Hillen: When you go to a dentist, they take X-rays, and then the dentist might come in and tell you, ‘Hey, do you see this gray blob on this tooth in the X-ray? You need a $2,000 crown.’ Ideally you would schedule that, but often people think I don't know if I need that. They say, ‘Let me not schedule this right now. Let me think about it.’ And then they may call another dentist and ask for a second opinion. That is really common in dentistry. In fact, dentistry is one of the markets with the most second opinions. 

Now with VideaHealth, when you go to the dentist, they take the X-rays, and then our platform automatically analyzes the X-rays and shows you on your X-rays all the disease based on FDA-approved algorithms, which have been trained on hundreds of millions of dental X-rays. So it's almost like the power of 100 dentists looking over the dentist’s shoulder. So this time, they're not saying, ‘Hey, you need periodontal work.’ They show you in greater detail your bone loss in red, yellow, and green. It is a really a great patient communication tool, as well as it supports the dental clinicians to not miss anything. It is a win-win proposition. The patient wins because they get the right treatment earlier and don't delay treatment. Perhaps they can do a $200 filling now and then it never becomes a $2,000 crown, but also the dentist makes more money. 

HCI: You’ve got this new funding round. What are some of the things it's going to allow the company to do?

Hillen: The first thing is, we will double down in terms of focusing on our customers, working with the dental service organization segment, and getting more products to more people, and increasing customer success — just ensuring that we can serve them well. The second thing is, we are also doubling down on our partnerships. We have a very great partnership with Henry Schein, bringing AI to the dental education market.

We will also innovate and release a lot of new products. Act One was about clinical AI, which we just discussed, which ensures that the patients get the right treatment at the right time. Act Two, which we are building now based on the funding, is to automate as many administrative processes as possible in the dental office to enable the dentist to spend more time doing what they love to do, and that is being together with the patient. So we are working on a lot of AI to automate a lot of workflows — scheduling, documentation, charting — you name it, we will automate it.