Advancing Oral Health With Teledentistry — Full
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 care through teledentistry.
Key takeaways from this episode of StartUp Health NOW can be found here.
[00:04] Unity Stoakes: Welcome to StartUp Health NOW! The weekly web show that celebrates the Health Transformers and changemakers reimagining healthcare. My name is Unity Stoakes and today we have a very special guest, the CEO and founder of MouthWatch, Brand Herman.
[00:19] Music Intro
[00:57] Unity: Welcome back to StartUp Health NOW! Today we are with Brant Herman, CEO, and founder of MouthWatch. Serial entrepreneur and Health Transformer in StartUp Health. I just found out you come from a family of dentists, which is very cool.
[01:11] Brant Herman: I do.
[01:12] Unity: So, tell us about MouthWatch. What is MouthWatch and your mission, really?
[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.
[01:32] Unity: You brought this device today. Talk to us about this. What is this?
[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. 10 years ago, 20 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: 10 or 20 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.
[02:38] Unity: Now you’ve evolved since then. I think this is really interesting. Talk to us about what you learned in your pivot process and where you are today?
[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 10,000 dental practices. People love it. They talk highly about the price point, the value point for it.
[03:35] Unity: Now you’re in all 50 states and how many countries?
[03:40] Brant: We’re probably in over 50 countries, all 50 states, and yeah, practices adore it and we usually see a process where a practice buys one because they wonder how can we have this great a camera for this price and then they’ll come back and they’ll order three or six and put it into every room in the office.
[03:55] Unity: There’s a really interesting new aspect to your platform today where you’re going into say a school system or maybe the VA. Talk to us about that and where your vision is.
[04:07] Brant: Yeah. So, we ultimately want to connect patients to treatment 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.
[06:30] Unity: Take us out a few years. Five years, seven years. What does the world of teledentistry look like? How does the game change?
[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.
[08:46] Unity: So it could be the school nurse like we talked about or it could be right in the nursing home or in a rural community. The GP and all of a sudden there’s teledentistry and opening that up to the community there.
[09:01] Brant: Yeah and we see a lot of cool opportunities where we’ve talked to dental oncologists. So, people going through chemotherapy need extra attention for soft tissue issues that are gonna happen during treatment. Our camera helps connect those patients to an expert, even though they might be in an area where the nearest dental oncologist or someone with that level of expertise might be three states away. So we’re really excited about that.
[09:28] Unity: So, you’ve been a digital health entrepreneur for over five years or a serial entrepreneur for more years than that. What lessons learned, what have you learned, what advice and wisdom would you share with other entrepreneurs that are maybe thinking about getting started in this industry, this sector?
[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.
[10:17] Unity: And, you guys did that.
[10:18] Brant: Yeah we did and 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, and you need to start
[10:35] Unity: How do you know when to do one versus the other?
[10:37] Brant: That’s a, 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 other 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. Sometimes tempering enthusiasm is great. I think there’s a love of validation as an entrepreneur when you find someone is interested in what you’re making, you’re producing, and put so much time and energy into, that you’ve got to be able to appreciate the attention and then filter through it and really look at it with fresh eyes.
[11:21] Unity: What are you most excited about today or for where we’re going as an industry?
[11:31] Brant: I think access to care for patients in need. I think that’s really what gets me excited about pilot programs we’re doing. When you look at how many people have a hard time. If you’ve got money and you’ve got access, it’s pretty easy to get great care whether it’s dentistry, or physicians, or medical care. It’s the groups that are either very far away from treatment or care options, people who have a difficult time getting to experts or leaders in their fields. I like seeing that opportunity. I think that more and more people are going to be able to offer that top tier of information and consultation.
[12:15] Unity: Mainly in the U.S. or globally?
[12:18] Brant: I think it’s getting there globally. I think the U.S. in my opinion, is leading that right now. I think a lot of the methods of reimbursement and ways to incent providers to participate in that is starting to change, but that’s what I think is happening.
[12:33] Unity: So, two last questions.
[12:34] Brant: Yeah.
[12:35] Unity: What do you do to stay healthy?
[12:38] Brant: What do I do? Not enough but I try to walk around the city. I try to take the stairs where I can.
[12:45] Unity: You’re here in New York City.
[12:46] Brant: Yeah so, the little phone vibrates that you’ve done enough steps just by getting to the office and taking time on the weekends to play with the kids and
[12:58] Unity: So, now the most important question and I know everybody wants to know the answer to this. How many times a year are we supposed to go to the dentist?
[13:10] Brant: So they say six months is the standard time.
[13:12] Unity: That’s legit? We should be listening?
[13:14] Brant: That’s legit. They say, I mean for people, it really depends on your DNA.
[13:20] Unity: And it depends if you have MouthWatch.
[13:22] Brant: And if you’re taking good care and if you’re taking good care at home. But yeah, it could be more often, it could be less.
[13:26] Unity: Alright. Well, thank you so much for being here and thank you for everything you do as a Health Transformer.
[13:31] Brant: Appreciate it. Thanks so much .
[13:32] Chime
