Advancing Oral Health With Teledentistry

Published in

StartUp Health

7 min readNov 2, 2016

Health Transformer Brant Herman, CEO and Founder of MouthWatch, talks about the company’s mission, what he has learned through the process of pivoting MouthWatch’s original business model, and his vision of improving oral health through teledentistry.

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GUEST: Brant Herman, MouthWatch

HOST: Unity Stoakes, StartUp Health

LOCATION: StartUp Health Living Room, StartUp Health Village, New York, NY

IN THIS EPISODE:

The Mission of MouthWatch
Learning From the Pivot Process
TeleDent: Connecting Patients to Treatments Where They’re Needed

Show Notes and Key Takeaways (Access the full transcript here)

The Mission of MouthWatch

[01:17] Brant: So, MouthWatch, we do two things. We want to help patients understand the dental treatment they need when they’re in the office. Talking to the dentist and the hygienist and then we have a teledentistry platform where we want to connect patients to care no matter where they’re located.

The MouthWatch IntraOral Camera

[01:37] Brant: This is an intraoral camera. A dentist or hygienist would use it to show you areas of your mouth you can’t see in the mirror. So, when you wake up and you brush your teeth you would address any issues you saw, but there’s so much for your mouth that you can’t see in there.
[01:50] Unity: So, coming from a family of dentists. Ten years ago, twenty years ago, what would your family have said about the possibility of something like this or what do they say today about what you’re doing?
[02:02] Brant: Ten or twenty years ago that probably would have cost twenty thousand dollars and taken up the entire trunk of your car if you wanted to move it somewhere. They’re thrilled. We initially started this as a way to connect patients to the dental practice. We wanted to engage patients so that when they left the office they knew more of their oral health condition. They were able to communicate with their dentist and we kind of call it the benevolent nag which dentists used to do, of the postcard and the call to get you to come in. We felt like if patients could own a little more of that and see what they’re missing it wouldn’t become a chore to go to the dentist.

Learning From the Pivot Process

[02:48] Brant: When we launched five years ago we started with the intraoral camera as the way to connect patients and we went to dental meetings and shows and talked to a lot of providers and they said this is a great camera. This is better than what I have in the office and I would put one in every room at the price you’re selling it for. I’m not sure my patients are going to connect to me, that they’re gonna send me an image, that they’re going to want to chat more than I need to chat or the time I have. So we made a pivot. We made software that allowed the cameras to help integrate with all the dental x-ray software that was on the market, so now any dentist who had digital x-rays could easily add this into every room in their practice and we’ve been able to get into over ten thousand dental practices. People love it. They talk highly about the price point, the value point for it.

TeleDent: Connecting Patients to Treatments Where They’re Needed

[04:07] Brant: Yeah. So, we ultimately want to connect patients to treatments where they’re needed. We think there’s a moving evidence toward preventive care and the importance of addressing dental issues early to save money, save time, improve overall health, and if you can reach people where they’re located earlier you can do a lot more to prevent them from having to come into the dental office. So, we launched TeleDent which is an all-in-one teledentistry platform. It allows you to capture images, clinical notes, billing codes, send that information to a dentist located remotely. It could be miles away, across the country, usually within the geographic area, and you can also do a live consult. You could start a video chat with the patient and the caregiver so that the dentist can actually see and talk to the patient, build rapport, which ultimately when they do need treatment helps connect them and bring them into the office.
[05:04] Unity: So, if I’m a school system in South Carolina. How does this change the game for me? How do I use it? What’s the impact?
[05:13] Brant: Yeah. So, we’re seeing a lot of school nurse programs have a telehealth component. They might connect with a local pediatrician, so if your child, God forbid, should get sick at school, it’s no longer just come pick up your kid and do something with them. They can actually take them and give a virtual visit where the doctor can provide some advice. With our system, if they have a telehealth platform, our camera becomes a peripheral that plugs in and we can help connect them with the dentist to provide that consultation. If they don’t, TeleDent becomes the all-in-one platform where just with a laptop or our tablet they could plug in the camera they could do screenings of kids and we also participate with outreach programs. So a lot of the times it’s not in the school but just like they used to do scoliosis screenings in a school now you can send a hygienist or a state oral health coalition might assign a hygienist to go out to schools and do preventive care cleanings, fluoride sealants, for the children, in the school, and what this does is this helps connect that hygienist who doesn’t have direct dental supervision to a dentist if anything comes up. It makes referrals a lot easier. It allows parents to see, maybe, a printout of areas of concern, and say your child needs to go to the dentist, and boom boom here’s why.

The Future of Teledentistry

[06:40] Brant: I think we’re seeing a lot of dental practices that traditional fee-for-service, PPO insurance type practice, stagnate on revenue. So, they’re looking for new ways to keep the revenue increasing and also provide care to more patients. So, we see teledentistry becoming a way that they can connect to groups of patients that currently are not being reached. Whether they have difficulty getting in: be it children, rural areas, special needs patients, the elderly in a nursing home. So we want teledentistry to help connect practices through outreach programs or any care provider to be able to communicate oral health conditions, provide screenings and really close that loop. Right now we see a big gap between screenings and treatment, and we feel like as long as dentists can get in the loop on that they’re gonna wanna and will ultimately get more patients coming in.
[07:38] Unity: What about underserved areas or severely underserved areas? Throughout the U.S. but also other countries? You know a lot of places in the world, dentistry is a luxury. Do you imagine changing the game there as well?
[07:56] Brant: I think we can. I think it’s underestimated how much dentistry is a luxury here. Fifty percent of Americans don’t see dentists regularly. There’s a huge problem as far as rural or poor children seeing dentists. The elderly. Once you’re in a nursing home or managed care facility you’re waiting on a mobile dentist to come to your site to provide a cleaning and by the time they come to you to provide preventive they’re seeing the people who need the urgent care first. So your preventive care keeps getting pushed off. But what’s great is we can connect any healthcare worker in any location to get expert advice. Be it from a dentist, from an oral surgeon, from a periodontist, any dental specialists can connect with almost any clinician. Even if it’s a pediatrician’s office.

Advice and Wisdom to Other Entrepreneurs

[09:48] Brant: I think you’ve got to be confident in your idea and willing to change. Kind of a double-edged sword. We say in our office some day chicken, some day feathers. So, persistence. I think that things are going to come your way and a lot comes from showing up and having that confidence and being interested in pursuing what you’ve built and not getting so locked into that initial concept and being willing to change it.
[10:19] Brant: We saw the market what they were telling us and I think there’s a point where you need to, it’s an interesting line, because sometimes as an entrepreneur you need to listen to advice and a lot of times you need to ignore everyone who wants to throw advice at you.
[10:38] Brant: It’s a challenge. I think experience helps with that. I think people that you trust that you could run a few ideas through. I think that’s been a great part with StartUp Health of having others in the community that you could put out an opportunity that’s come to you, shake out what the real meat of the opportunity might be in the best way to approach it.

Resources, Websites and Tools Mentioned:

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Advancing Oral Health With Teledentistry

Written by StartUp Health