Laine

The Caller Who Tried Twice

"We must have been on the other line" is a guess, and patients can hear it. Once the scheduling coordinator has looked at the call log, she can say what actually happened, ask what the call was about, and find everyone else who tried twice and never made it to the counter.

October 14, 2026 · 5 min read

Reading Your Own Call Log

"I called earlier and nobody picked up." The front desk apologizes and guesses. The phone system knows: it wrote a row for that call the moment it came in. This post walks through a call log column by column, shows why the word "missed" means something different in each phone system, and says what a row will never tell you.

October 7, 2026 · 6 min read

What a Trial Is Actually For

The email says your trial ends tomorrow. In a lot of practices nobody can say whether anyone used it, because nobody decided at the start that this was the thing to find out. A trial is not for confirming you like a product. It is for finding out whether your team will use it before the money is spent.

September 25, 2026 · 7 min read

The Third Message

Your after-hours recording was written for your patients. The person listening to it at night with a broken tooth may not be one. The ADA has been specific about what that person should hear, and the Code of Ethics has a sentence about what happens afterward that nobody quotes.

September 23, 2026 · 6 min read

How to Tell If It Worked

Last week's post said to start AI where you can see the result, then did not say how. This is how. The ADA's list of ten commonly tracked KPIs never measures the phone, but your phone system keeps a log and your practice management system knows who ended up on the schedule. Two lists, one afternoon, and a number that describes your practice and nobody else's.

September 11, 2026 · 7 min read

AiroDental Raises $0 to Keep Dental AI Accountable to Dentists

AiroDental today announced that it has raised $0 in outside funding. No venture capital, no private equity, no debt, no board. Founder Deren Flesher, DDS, a practicing dentist in Edmond, Oklahoma, owns 100 percent of the company, and explains why the person deciding what dental software does should be someone who has to use it in a dental practice.

September 8, 2026 · 5 min read

What Dentists Want AI to Do First

The ADA's Health Policy Institute asked 552 dentists in private practice which tasks they use AI for, and then asked the ones who plan to adopt when they intend to start. The two answers run close to opposite. Charting has nearly twice the intent behind it. The front desk is the thing people are moving on now. Here is why that is, and what it means if you are the one deciding.

September 4, 2026 · 7 min read

Explaining a Dental Benefit Plan Without Making It Sound Like an Excuse

The front desk is being asked to translate a benefit design they did not create, to a patient who did not read the plan document, in the middle of a moment when the patient is deciding whether to accept treatment. It is one of the harder small conversations in a dental office.

August 26, 2026 · 7 min read

What to Say When a Patient Says They Cannot Afford It

Almost everything written for dental teams treats that moment as a hurdle. Acknowledge, reframe, close. There is a better way to read the sentence, and it comes from federal regulation rather than sales training.

August 19, 2026 · 7 min read

Recall and Reactivation: Reaching Patients Who Have Drifted Away

Most reactivation outreach assumes the patient forgot, so it reminds them they are due. ADA Health Policy Institute data suggests forgetting is rarely the whole story, and that cost is a bigger barrier in dentistry than in any other category of care. Sorting the list into four groups and answering the real question does more than any reminder can.

August 13, 2026 · 6 min read

The Treatment Plan Nobody Followed Up On

Two patients hear the same recommendation. One declines, and the refusal goes in the chart. The other says they need to think about it, and nothing gets recorded at all, because as far as the software is concerned nothing happened. The second patient is the whole problem.

August 12, 2026 · 7 min read

Integration Is Not One Thing: What "Works With Your PMS" Actually Means

Ask three vendors whether their product integrates with your practice management system and you will get three yeses that mean three different things. Reading is not writing, a copy is not live data, and one connected system is not all of them. The ADA has been telling federal regulators why dentistry ended up here, and the explanation gives buyers a much better set of questions to ask.

August 5, 2026 · 6 min read