Episode 206 | Dental Unfiltered | Title AI and VAs w/Cory Pinegar

Speaker A: Foreign.

Speaker B: Hey everybody, welcome back to Dental Unfiltered. I'm, um, Matt Brown and we have a really awesome guest today, Corey Pinniger. Um, Corey is probably the king in dental of VAs and insurance processing and he. I know anyone knows more. And right now if you go to a dental event, every other booth is a VA or insurance processing booth. I think many office managers that are like trying to do things on their own or trying to do insurance processing, I think a lot of you guys like, I'm going to get a va, they're going to do this stuff, I'm going to go find them on their own. And there's some real stumbling blocks with that. First, Corey, why don't you tell the audience a little bit about yourself and then we'll get into the VA conversation.

Speaker A: I like, I'm just writing down some notes that you kind of triggered me on there. This is my, this is my play. I'm definitely not the king outsourcing or VAs, but uh, happy to share some insights from working with thousands of practices over the last few years and seeing it work really well and also seeing it blow up on the launch pad. Just a little bit about myself. Live in Salt Lake City, Utah. I am a born and bred entrepreneur for the worst and best cases of it. I have always loved entrepreneurship. When I was a little kid I would uh, take anything my parents didn't want in their home and listed on ebay and I charged them 15% in fees and it's probably what my dad ended up paying in ebay fees to even list it there. But have really enjoyed the idea of making something better. There's a lot of entrepreneurship in the world right now where there's radical innovation from an Elon or from these, these AI companies. What I really enjoy is the unsexy. I want to be the garbage men because if the garbage doesn't get picked up in New York on a summer day, the next day it smells horrendous and the whole city will be complaining about it. And that's what I've spent my last 10 years doing. Building solutions that I think add value are less pretty but really practical.

Speaker B: Let's talk about vas. So right now Dennis are in a mode of like I'm going to hire a VA to do that. I'm going to hire a VA to do this. And I find that it really doesn't work out the way everyone thinks it does. And in frustration and failures and some other stuff, it ends up costing you more than you realize. I think Docs think like, I get the va, set it and forget it. They're going to book appointments and do everything right? And then they wake up and they come out of the operatory and they look at what's going on and there's this hot mess and. And they're like. And I talk to docs all the time. I've tried five VAs. And I'm like, did you go find them on your own? Yeah, found them online on, you know, whatever website. And I'm like, well, you should have gone through a group. Well, they're so much more expensive from you. From a VA point of view, the usage of VAs in the marketplace, right? Like, where do you see the most effective and also the most failure in the use of a va?

Speaker A: I think there's been an interesting. And how many years have you been in dental, Matt?

Speaker B: I am m a dental baby, just

Speaker A: about coming up on six years, a veteran. But some people have, I mean, you look at some people, they've done a lot of time. So I actually think there's been an interesting transition from the early mid 2010s to where we're at today. What you're just talking about where you feel like every other booth is kind of doing these outsourcing activities. Ten years ago it was revenue cycle management and more core outsourcing, where it's you hire us, we'll process your insurance, we'll pick up and schedule your phone calls. The industry has shifted to more of a VA model over the last few years because people want someone to work directly for them. In outsourcing, you could have one person processing your verifications one night and another person processing the next day. And sometimes because of the big incumbent outsourcers within our space, outsourcing I think got a bad reputation. Outsourcing is not broken. But some of the activities I think tarnished some of the reputation. But doctors are also at the point right now where they can't even hire and retain their own staff, let alone cost is killing everybody. So going to your question, where is a VA or even outsourcing practical is what are you trying to solve? That's like going to the doctor and saying, hey doc, I need testosterone or I really want to take this type of peptide. Before you even go into that conversation, it's like, well, what are VAs good at solving and where are they not helpful? You nailed where they're not helpful. If you are looking for a set it and forget it solution like software, or if you're like, I have true Immense backlog in my billing. You need a partner who manages that. VAs are just another version of a remote team member. Where do they help? Missed calls, recare calls that you're not doing, unscheduled, uh, treatment calls, you're not doing insurance verification, revenue cycle management or admin tasks. But guess what? They're a remote team member that you have to integrate into your team and consistently invest in. They help when you're missing stuff. You're struggling with cost or you're struggling with retention, but they are not this light switch that you hire after one week and then you don't have to communicate or train or integrate after that. And if you come in with the set it and forget it mindset, uh, it's going to be a lot of disappointment.

Speaker B: I know docs do this because I know a few. I think they hire these things and think of these people in other places and they think, oh, I don't have to manage this. This is one less thing I have to manage. No, no, it's one thing you have to manage. And managing it's going to actually be harder because it's remote. It's somewhere else. There's m. Possibly language barriers, comprehension problems. They don't understand, like, American culture and nuances, the way we say things. So I think there's two flawed attitudes here. I think they reflect each other. I think docs hire office managers with the attitude of, you do all that other stuff. I don't have to worry about it. And that's when you get embezzled and that's when things get horrible, right? I think they hire VAs with the same spirit. I'll hire a VA then I don't need that person anymore. No, no, no. You hired a different kind of management, right? Like, uh, you hired a, like a completely new style of management. Honestly, you have no idea to do and you're probably not good at it, right? So, like, if I was a doc and I'm out there shopping in the world, okay, what were, what are, like, three things I should be thinking about approaching these companies or even individual vascular. Like, like, uh, what are three or four things I should have forward in my mind as I approach these things?

Speaker A: I think the truest form of sales and problem solving in a business comes down to, like, the quintessential doctor's visit. If I went to my general practitioner, they probably have 10,000 different medications available at their disposal, but they spend 60% of the first time taking my blood, talking through the symptoms, hitting my knee, that I'm Complaining about doing all of these diagnostics. Before you go and say I need to hire a va, you need to say what am I actually trying to solve? And then secondary to that, what are the things that I value out of a partner? Do I want them to be pre trained? Do I want them to have an active trainer with them? Do I want to get performance insights? Do I value retention or Spanish or someone who's been integrated into American culture? But what matters for you? Because then you can go out there and say, here's what I'm looking to solve and here's the differential or unique things that I need to find in a partner. Okay, you want a Suburban, well, guess what, you can have a Tahoe, you can have an Escalade, you can have a Denali, and all of them have different features or functions. You deciding what you need then allows you to look at the cost difference and the spec differences and make a decision based on solving a problem.

Speaker B: Problem, I think that's a really good point is like do you understand the problem you're solving?

Speaker A: And most don't.

Speaker B: Most don't. They think it's a blanket statement of like they're going to answer phones and book appointments. But what are the nuances of that problem? Right? What are, what are the details and are you conveying it properly to the people you're trying to buy the service from? So you know, we had an interesting conversation. Uh, it was either at Hinman or Midwinter, I can't remember. You talked about what nationalities or like what countries are better at what, like things in the VA world. Like this one's good at appointment booking, this one's good in insurance processing, this one's good at X. What is that breakdown like for your experience? So here's a question actually. How would you quantify your VA experience? Not in years, like how many VAs or how would you quantify your VA experience so the audience knows that what we say next is very founded and not bs.

Speaker A: So I've been in business for nine plus years now. To give an example, without going a, ah, mile deep, we're just wrapping up or we just finished Q1 of 2026 and in the first 90 days of 2026 we as a business added 377 new hires during that 90 day stretch. During that stretch we, or during last year we also took over half a million unique inbound job applications.

Speaker B: So you have a lot of information,

Speaker A: like got a lot of data on uh, what works and what doesn't work.

Speaker B: So you might know more than everyone in dental about this, which is what I said earlier.

Speaker A: I, hey, I, I hope so. And maybe we can prove it one of these days.

Speaker B: So if you had to pair a culture or country to a task, what are your pairings?

Speaker A: There's two main functionalities within a dental practice. One of them is more front desk or scheduling based customer service or sales. For that you want a warmer personality. And the Latin culture being central and South America is more warm than other parts of the globe. Central and South America obviously are also connected to North America. So they assimilate American culture better than someone who lives in a much more isolated or unconnected way to America. So Latin America, when I think about sales and support, anything that requires patient interaction. Now on the other hand, we have a ton of things that happen in the practice that are claims adjudications, uh, following up on patient billing, reconciling balances, detail oriented work. The Filipino culture is really built on backend support of companies. You look at the mega organizations. 50 plus years ago the Filipino government, the president of the Philippines made m a decision to make English the first language and to make them the back end support partner for countries. They said, how are we going to economically differentiate ourselves? Well, we can get in American dollars. If English is your most commonly spoken language. There's 27 million people in the Philippines that speak English. It's your highest concentration of English speakers where Tagalog is still your main language, but English is pretty much spoken by almost everybody. And then they have built a culture not over the last five or 10 years, but over the last 50 years of being support organizations. Where does Delta Dental, where does United, where does Blue Cross Blue Shield have massive support operations in the Philippines? And so you can get that culture of detail orientedness and even deep healthcare revenue cycle management and billing company insights from people who have worked for the major players.

Speaker B: Your growth you've seen over the years, right? Like the spaces, your space has grown a lot, right as it's grown. Where have you seen like the most growth as far as in the practice? So we have like answering the phones, we have insurance processing. What sector of, of that has actually been the highest growth area? Like where have they become the most utilized and the most effective?

Speaker A: The trend kind of going back to one of our original conversations when we got started of uh, outsourcing when we joined, when I joined this industry 10 years ago, was insurance verification and revenue cycle management or billing work? Because that was less scary to give up. And if you're verifying insurance when Somebody comes into the practice, you're distracted for five or ten minutes.

Speaker B: Oh, it sucks. Yeah, a hundred percent.

Speaker A: And so that was where the trend is. If you look at the data now, your average missed call rate last year in dentistry was right above 30% for all practices. I looked at a mid size dental group last week. They've taken half a million calls since the start of the year. Um, 160,000 of those have gone unanswered. This is a well run household group name within our industry. And so where we see the greatest momentum today is on phone calls. Because when that patient calls and they don't pick up, they call the next Google listing. And so I think that the trend or the, like the original form of adoption was back office. The trend now is in front office. We also probably get more of the trend because a lot of our speakers speak Spanish and obviously there's a huge growing bilingual, multilingual population within the United States.

Speaker B: Where do you think AI is going to take this? Because everyone's talking about artificial intelligence. It was on every booth at the event. I think half of it's crap, right? Like, and everyone right now, like, I was actually a midwinter. No, I was a, I was at Yankee and I shared a, uh, what a, uh, Uber with a doc from my hotel at her hop in and she turned to me and said, hey Matt, what AI should I have? I was like, excuse me? She's like, I need AI I have no AI in my practice. Which AI is the right AI. And that was such an odd question to me because it wasn't like, should I get AI for my phones? Should I get AI treatment planning? It was I just need AI. And I feel like there's kind of like an attitude about that right now of like, uh, like I don't have AI. So like, where do you see AI taking this?

Speaker A: This is so like there's so much of an evolution because as you and I and most in the industry can acknowledge right now, AI is not in a full state of perfect function. It helps in certain areas, but there's a lot of opportunity for it to grow. I think AI, though, in the practical uses that I'm seeing in dental, is really more of an evolution of helping people be more efficient. You think about when the original sewing machine came out, it just allowed people to do more with less to be more efficient. Well, if you have AI verifying as many insurances as they can or following up automatically on patient billing as a human within the practice, you can be focused on connecting with the human beings. And so AI is going to continue to move on where it can solve and where it will provide value and that will rapidly evolve. But there's a really interesting study from BYU. They studied 309,000 people in total over the course. I think it's a ten year plus study. And they said what's the biggest differential in people living long and that people yearn for it's human connection. What is not going away at ah, the same time within a dental practice and all of business and is the desire when my kid's tooth gets knocked out by a baseball to talk to someone who is knowledgeable and empathetic. Instead of online scheduling or going through AI bot now after hours, I would rather talk to AI and attempt to get scheduled than have nothing. And so really I see AI leading the charge going forward and helping filter what really needs that empathetic human connection. But I don't think as humans, the reason you and I are chatting right now and I'm not chatting to an 11 Labs voice coming back to me is we desire to talk to each other. I don't think that's going away. But what we are going to be having AI do is going to continue evolve. I truly believe and will die on the Hill that I think the differential for a practice five to 10 years from now will be the empathy and human connection it's able to provide.

Speaker B: If you're shopping for one of these companies, right, what are like three or four red flags that you should notice before you move forward with one of these companies that do VAs? Like there's a lot of these companies, they're all pretty small, they're like mom and pop are sitting in their office of their house, they have two laptops, Internet connection and they found like this little workforce in this country and they're getting them for $6 an hour or $8 an hour and the market up to $12 an hour and they're honestly gonna piss people off. They're VA pimps, right? I mean they're pimping out VAs and there's really probably no quality control when you talk to these individuals. What are three or four red flags that you, if you hear these things are common, you should really be worried.

Speaker A: I'm almost gonna caveat what you're saying or disagree to some degree, but then

Speaker B: I'm gonna go for it.

Speaker A: Listen, and I don't disagree all day long. Oh no, I, and I know, I know you like this, but yeah, you have run your own businesses for years. What is the basis of a great business is damn good people. If the VA company can find you damn good people, almost everything else does not relate. There are a few things that are mission critical beyond that. But what you need to see by talking to your peers is if they can find damn good people in a reliable and sustainable format, that's what matters the most. Like training is helpful, a performance dashboard is helpful. But there's a guy that we hired in our business, we hired him to run some internal projects today he's our creative director, he leads all internal events. But we hired the right person and he's grown with us. He joined us when we had no training and he was still kickass because he figured it out. And so all of the training and the performance are things that really help. But what matters below everything else is do they find you cutting edge people that are going to stay with you in the long term. The two parts that you cannot negotiate on that I think are often left behind is compliance. Many people are not properly employing or setting up the entities within these countries. Where then if they hire somebody and something goes wrong, how do you actually have the right legal structure? Just like you said when we got on, I'm um, talking to someone who's thinking about hiring a VA for themselves. They're not going to go set up an entity in Argentina. No, they're going to Zell or whatever, you know, method is used. Well then what if there's a phi breach? How are you enforcing that? How are you enforcing that the right employment is actually done. And so I think the two things that actually matter is legally, are they compliant? And then the second thing is from a HIPAA perspective, how are they helping be the intermediary, the risk mitigator of making sure your data is securely stored. Why do you want, or, you know, what do I think is a pro to having a US company on the line? Well, guess what, they have insurance. They should have insurance. They are also legally suable within the United States. For you to go enforce something in Argentina, you would have to go hire an Argentina law firm and then for them to go after it. But then is your agreement and setup even enforceable? And so I just think really understanding how are they structured to be scalable when things go wrong and then secondarily, how are they securing things to be that partner in a scenario where we have an agent do wrong or a HIPAA breach take place, which luckily we have not, but business is about, if not when we absorb the risk through our insurance and our own protection. Now we will, if something's done in a malicious way, go after the team member. But part of being a partner is bringing the right safety from a legal standpoint, from an IT standpoint, and then being that buffer when things do go wrong. And HIPAA is changing vastly right now and so people need to make sure that their partner is supporting with proper infrastructure and proper legal compliance so that they can sleep well at night.

Speaker B: All that compliance stuff, that's a whole nother level because you know, we do business, we have a BAA in place and all this stuff and a doc shopping for the stuff. He might just commit and give a credit card and do like a little E sign and he has no idea if he's covered or not. And then it's a mom or pop shop, you know, what could you really sue them for? Like you're going to get nothing, right? And then you're dealing with the fines and stuff and the board with the HIPAA breach. Oh yeah, that's a whole mess. I didn't even think about like that part of it.

Speaker A: This is the total number of technology layers that we build in between us, our practices and our team members so that we can securely host, manage and properly protect data and the connection just within the United States. But there as you see here, are 19 layers that go into this and the whole document that I won't pull up here then kind of goes into our supporting documentation. But this isn't just about remote access. I don't know if you saw Claude stopped the release of one of their newest bots the other day. I think it's called Mythos or something else because it is hacking at such a rate that they don't know how governments or financial institutions would be able to be secure in its current format. As uh, you've probably heard, there's like the Blue Ocean hacks where like, there's uh, a zero day hack where like a vulnerability is found in a Microsoft or an Apple that like is mission critical in the first 10 minutes of release. When Claude uh, dropped this publicly, it was able to find a three year old zero day exploit from Microsoft that no one has ever been aware of. 10 minutes in Microsoft offers bounties in the 10 to $50 million for threshold to discover and report a zero day exploit to them. So there are hundreds if not thousands of people looking into this. Mythos or whatever the name is, was able to isolate one in the first 10 minutes with where we're moving in our world, security and compliance, especially in the global world and the changing Regulations of hipaa, uh, matter more than ever.

Speaker B: What are the scary parts of AI for you? What are you in fear of?

Speaker A: I am lucky that uh, I got all of my anxiety out as a teenager, God bless my parents, because as a teenager I think I was just an anxious, angsty teen. I don't think I have a lot of fear today in the traditional sense. I just understand that this is the evolution we've got to go through. If you read people's responses when the original Internet was released in the 80s and 90s, people are like, nope, this is crazy. And today we could not imagine doing what we do without it. So I understand that again, there's a part of the evolution that I don't understand. But from a personality standpoint, I'm pretty comfortable riding the wave for me as a business owner and I was talking to my father playing tennis about this this morning. Before, when you were the incumbent IBM, um, making mainframe servers in the 80s or 90s, you kind of knew that there was a competitor coming and for a year or two they were getting better. Then Apple's better than you, then Windows is better, then Google kind of pops up in our world today. A new model in AI can pop up tomorrow and fundamentally change everything. Claude released Claude Design yesterday and Figma, which is one of your largest design companies in the world, took a 9% equity drop on the morning's release of the news. And so as a business owner, instead of being like, oh, we're running a war or we're running a race, but we kind of have, you know, six months, three months, 12 months of advanced knowledge, we have to be more on our toes than ever from a security, from an innovation standpoint and embracing those things because the world is changing truly faster than it ever has. For 20 years, software kind of iterated and innovated, but it didn't take a quantum leap forward. Now with AI, I feel like we are running at a marathon pace, but the length is hundreds of miles. And that to me is exhausting and scary.

Speaker B: It's scary to me is like you said, the rate of innovation. It's like next week is going to be different than today 100, you want

Speaker A: to go sign a three year license to buy an AI, it could be five years behind in three months.

Speaker B: It's pretty crazy. Like the rate of innovation, I think right now in the business landscape, it's like, how are you planning with such a fast rate of innovation? Like, like it's going to affect all of our businesses. I mean mine and you, the Traditional

Speaker A: cycle of planning I actually think will become obsolete because the rate before you could be like, oh, yeah, HubSpot's releasing this, or go high levels dropping this. Now you have to be a little bit more nimble and know where you're going to place consistent bets, but also know where you're going, allow for quicker innovation and iteration based on what the market is making available.

Speaker B: It's nuts. Do. Do you believe in any, like, the science fiction fears that, like, tinfoil hat people have of, like, AI taking over and us not being able to control it at some point? I mean, there was the whole thing about the two AI bots that were talking to each other in a different language and they had to shut them down. Like, do you.

Speaker A: Oh, I actually think there's a very real. I. I don't even think it's tinfoil because you watch the level of OpenAI ChatGPT we all had when we first discovered it. 3 plus years to where we are today is crazy. And these beasts in true generative AI form, which we may not be at today, are a snowball that rolls itself. And so I do think security and safeguards truly does matter because these are the most boundless creatures probably made. I don't think we're there yet, but I do think having proper safeguards is important because we are playing with a very, uh, deadly and enriching uranium at the same time.

Speaker B: It's scary. Do you think this needs government oversight?

Speaker A: I think government oversight stifles most innovation because then you develop all these corporate approvals. I mean, as a business owner working with the US Government, I'm so grateful to live in America. I'm a deep patriot. They drive me bonkers because they make everything way more difficult. It's hard to pay your taxes online. Feels like you got to mail them and you got to wait six weeks back for mail.

Speaker B: I deal with the va. I had to fight for two years for my prosthetic. I had to testify in front of Congress. So I get it, bro. I'm a deep.

Speaker A: But then at the same time, where do you get good oversight? And so I see the argument for oversight, but also with overregulated oversight, we will be passed in leaps and bounds by others.

Speaker B: So going back to it, all right, the VA thing, do you think the companies overseas that are right now creating VA that are. That are training these VAs and creating these job positions, how do you think AI is going to be utilized by them to create a better product for us in the form of VAs here? Like do you think there's a way that they're going to adopt AI to work differently here in the us?

Speaker A: So I can even walk through where I view AI being impactful for our business. Some of these are things we're working on today and some of them are more futuristic. When I look at uh, AI, it's number one, even just equipping and uniformly knowledging all of our team members with the basic functions. Think of if you're engaging with a patient and they're being difficult to schedule or they're being there, you're trying to de escalate frustration that they had, you're trying to work on a bill, getting paid. There are times that I get a frustrated email and then I go into Claude and I say, here's what I want to say. Help me make this kind clear but also drive this type of objective. And I think uh, equipping people with just that basic AI enablement makes them way more effective. I can also have a bad call that's recorded and go put it into our system, say hey, gave me coaching feedback on how I could have sold this person better. And all of that is just like practical acceleration, buying 20 or 30 minutes back today, that I think is super important. We as a company do not view ourselves as a technology builder, but what we should be doing is embracing it so that our team members are more equipped to apply it secondarily. There's a lot of conversation in AI on what's called human in the loop. I think there's a misnomer in the market right now. We're part of the problem and AI is part of the problem where people think, oh, you either get service or you get AI. And there's a happy medium between giving patients AI and service and technology where they want it and letting them talk to a human easily when they want it to. Part of what we want to help pioneer is more of a simplistic framework where you can get quick service from technology or AI. But guess what, you can also talk to a real well trained human being that's embedded in these processes. Instead of it feeling very clunky, I feel like the messaging that's pushed in the market right now is one or the other. The final thing that I think really matters with AI is AI is scary and there's some people who are not learning about it or adopting it and you could go hire a great, you know, let's just say you pick up a pearl or an overjet. Can we also have our team members come pre trained Knowing how to implement and utilize these pieces of technology to render the most value. You could have a great system like a dental intelligence, like the cup you have there. And if you're not actually using the reports, is there real value? No. And so how can we use our people to then enable these systems over time? And all of these scenarios are where AI brings a value of one, we bring a value of one and one plus one equals three because they're better together. And that's the narrative I want people to help understand. It's not one or the other, it's using both of them together. Automations plus empathy is really where you build the patient experience that I think matters.

Speaker B: It's one of those scenarios. It is if you utilize it like me. I can't tell you how many DI clients we have. We utilize DI heavily and we look at the user usage and it's like zero. And you go to them and the managers, well, I just don't think I need to use this stuff. I think there is a scenario now of a portion of people that their view of AI is chatgpt and asking questions like it's Google now. I think it's like four years ago. That's not current AI. That's very dated. Right. And I think utilization, I think it's happening. Well, one thing I want to m ask you actually. So is the innovation happening so fast that the common person can't get maximum utilization out of it because of the

Speaker A: fast progression given that there's so much innovation happening in so many different ways? True, 100% utilization does not exist, but I think just as you Talked about with DI utilization that most people use it as 10 to 15 to 20% of what it should be in AI. Can we then help render team members that are 70 to 80% on the cutting edge? Because if you're a developer, you've got cloud code, you've got lovable, you've got project, you know, Basecamp and Project 4. I mean there's so much innovation just in that. Well within dental scheduling there's 20 to 30 companies that have raised a million bucks at minimum. And so there's so many different areas. But if we can then generally help move the tide of the boat up, people can drill down and become an expert in certain niches. I even think getting to that generalist m an embraced continued education model puts you ahead of almost everybody else.

Speaker B: You have to embrace it to stay on the edge. Right? Like at least in your area, I agree 100% utilization isn't possible But I think there is like what is the potential of your personal utilization in your task and are you really reaching that potential with how fast it's evolving? I don't know. I think the majority aren't. So I think on the VA side, is it going to be hard to keep up with that? And really gift utilization you need for maximum potential. Like is there a point where like you can't use the potential of the tool because it's changing so fast to some degree.

Speaker A: But even if we can just be on the modern edge, there's so much value. And dentistry sits not as an innovator or even an adopter, but sits more far behind. And if we can help people that are just even up here on the speedometer, it is going to provide such a differential. I think the biggest thing that we haven't discussed, that I just want to briefly mention, is if you look at reimbursement rates since 2001, they have not gone up on average, not that's not even factoring in comparison to inflation. If you look at cost for dental practice, it's up 86 to 87% over that exact same time frame. Why do I think people have to embrace AI and embrace outsourcing, hybrid teams, remote workers more than ever today is because you as a practitioner have a ceiling that's not going up and a floor that's creeping up and you are getting caught in the squeeze. And so learning to adopt and innovate on AI and build remote teams can actually allow you to run the practice that's profitable and takes care of your patients in its current status. If you don't change, I don't think this is possible. It's not even about innovation now. I genuinely think if we don't change how we operate in dentistry, we could be screwed.

Speaker B: Think dentistry is always behind like uh, uh, most of the server based softwares. We know who they are, they're Windows 95 looking. And I feel like companies like Archie and a few others are innovating. I am partial to Archie. That's my favorite PMS that's coming down the pipe. I think they have the highest potential and the most modernization. I think they're going to embrace AI the absolute most out of everybody. I think they have the best talent and best funding, end of story. Um, I'm pretty vocal if they're going to win the cloud race, end of story. There's just no competition. It's like they're playing in the NBA and everyone else is playing pickup basketball. I think you agree on that and I feel like uh, we have to start in dental. Not pushing to the point of oh it works, but pushing to the point of it's going to work for a long time. And this is current status right now. I feel like dental goes to a point, oh, doc, can use this? No, no, can dock use this? And is it going to be there to be. What is the cutting edge for multiple docks? So the next dock isn't working with something dated.

Speaker A: Your cloud innovation based on the on um PREM model hasn't really changed since the early 90s. You're 30 years plus of stagnation with kind of the first rolling of the tide taking place right now. And if people can make the right partner, I think there's radical improvement of patient care, profitability and reduction of stress on staff that's available.

Speaker B: I think also cloud going back to VA's cloud is better for VAs because you're not remoting into open dental through a laptop in the practice. And then if you have multiple people that need to remote in, you have three laptops stacked on top of each other remoting into a server. There's a whole misconception that server is more secure than cloud and that's just ludicrous.

Speaker A: You're paying someone else to secure the cloud for you instead of you as the solo or one or two office practice owner securing it yourself. I will take the major player like an AWS or an Azure any day of the week, even myself. Or we've got thousands of team members. I mean we pay our Google and Azure licenses in the tunes of millions of dollars a year in compute costs because I would rather store and secure through them.

Speaker B: Let's wrap this up here, Corey. This was a great conversation. It went from VAS and effectiveness and how to approach that to AI and how it's impacting all these things to cloud based and how that's good for VAS and security of them coming in and compliance. I think this is actually, I think this was a really good wide swath of like the VA conversation that needs to be happening right now. Is there any information you'd like to leave the listeners with before we sign off?

Speaker A: I don't think it's anything new, but it's the iteration of one of our earliest conversations. Know what you want before you begin shopping and having that information will allow you to make a more effective decision on um, truly solving the problem. You don't need a va. You're looking at a VA because you need to solve some type of problem. Knowing that problem and knowing what you value before you go to market will allow you to find the right partner.

Speaker B: All right, well, let's sign off, Doc. Or not Doc. Corey, this was an awesome conversation.

Speaker A: I would love to be a doctor, but don't even have an undergrad.

Speaker B: I don't know. Uh, I don't have an undergrad either. I have no college degree. I think we're very similar that way. Uh, you know, Corey, it's always great talking to you. You are a big brain in dental when it comes to this subject. I think you do know more than everyone else about this subject in the industry. When I talk to other industry leaders, you're the only name that comes up about this subject. Just to be transparent, we talk to a lot of the same leaders, and they always say, talk to Corey. He knows more than everybody. Thank you so much for being on the show. Um, hey, guys, if you're listeners, we don't sell sponsorships. There's no way to pay to get on here. Corey did not give a dollar to Dental Unfiltered. He is the leading mind in this. That's why he's on the show. Please, like, subscribe, share, follow, and leave us a review. That's what matters here on the channel. Thank you guys so much for tuning in. Have a great.