How AI is Transforming Dentistry with Dr. Wardah Inam, CEO of Overjet

Narrator: This is The Thriving Dentist Show with Gary Takacs, where we help you develop your ideal dental practice — one that provides personal, professional, and financial satisfaction.

Gary Takacs: Welcome to another episode of The Thriving Dentist Show. I’m Gary Takacs, your podcast co-host. Very excited to have a special guest that I’m interviewing for today’s podcast. For those of you that are regular listeners, you know that we like to mix up the format on The Thriving Dentist Show. We do that to keep it interesting for our listeners, and we do a number of interviews. We bring authorities in dentistry to share some of the things they’re doing that we think you might be interested in. And today, I have the CEO of Overjet. You’ve probably all heard of Overjet. If you haven’t, then you’re sure gonna learn about it here. I have the CEO of Overjet, Dr. Wardah Inam. Wardah, welcome to the podcast.

Dr. Wardah Inam: Thank you, Gary. Thank you so much for having me here.

Gary Takacs: Well, it’s such an honor. I’ve been following your work, and as you know, I’m a nerd. I wear my nerd badge with honor, and I think I’m speaking to a fellow nerd. Would that be fair? I mean that as a compliment.

Dr. Wardah Inam: Yes, I’ve been a nerd all my life. Sometimes I hide it, but if you talk to me long enough, you know it comes out.

Gary Takacs: Well, I used to have to hide it. I’m old enough to remember when being a nerd was not a term of endearment. So I used to have to hide it, but now I wear it as a badge of honor. But I know you’re very, very busy. You’re doing some very cool things with Overjet, and I really appreciate you sharing your thoughts with our listeners. I think of Overjet — if I was to summarize it in a simple sentence — I think of Overjet as the world leader in dental AI. Would you expand it from there? And if we have listeners that don’t know what Overjet is up to, can you share a little bit more?

Dr. Wardah Inam: Absolutely. So Overjet started to help dental organizations serve their patients better by utilizing AI, improving the care that was being provided, as well as automating administrative work, so that we can have lower cost and higher quality care. That’s the mission that we’re on and really focused on — something that we take a lot of pride in when we help achieve it.

Gary Takacs: Well, you had me at “hello” on those two points — lower cost and higher quality care. I believe we have all of our listeners on high alert on those. I think our listeners might be interested a little bit in your personal background. Would you mind sharing a little bit about your education and your personal background?

Dr. Wardah Inam: Sure. So, as you mentioned, I was a nerd. My background is in engineering. I did my PhD at MIT, working on autonomous systems — more specifically, clean energy. How do you have more penetration of solar on the grid? How do you make the energy cleaner? How do you make it more autonomous so that you can have the right load balancing, etc.?

Then I realized that although we were building great technology, a lot of it wasn’t getting to the market because of policy decisions and other barriers. So, I made a conscious effort to move towards healthcare because I realized that was a field where the needs were so strong that if you built something good and it provided value, it would reach the market.

And dentistry seemed like an amazing area where dentists could make decisions around what they would adopt in their practices and what they wouldn’t. These weren’t large conglomerates — though, of course, there are larger companies — but you could actually connect with the people who are making the difference, chat with them, understand their challenges, and build solutions for them as well. That’s how I ended up in dentistry after spending some time in healthcare.

I did my postdoctoral fellowship at MIT as well, working on biomedical sensing using machine learning. We were working on how to use wireless signals around you to detect breathing and heart rate automatically — for example, if there’s a fall, it could detect it for an elderly person, or if there’s a sleep-related condition, it could help detect that too. I then worked on biomedical imaging and started Overjet in 2018, focusing on how we can improve dentistry after having an experience at the dentist and changing my own dentist — realizing that there was so much untapped value in technology for improving patient care.

Gary Takacs: Well, I think you made a brilliant decision to look at dentistry. I have a bias, of course, because I love this profession. I like to say “dentistry rocks,” and I truly believe that dentistry rocks because we have the ability to change lives every day. It could be something we do clinically, or it could be something we do behaviorally.

I think we’re in a very special segment of healthcare where we get that opportunity every day. And it’s very, very clear to me that Overjet is changing lives. I did some research in preparation for our interview today, and I have to tell you that the research led me down a rabbit hole that I can’t wait to dive back into.

Because prior to my research, I was thinking that Overjet was more on the clinical side. Then I realized, wait a minute — it’s much deeper than just the clinical side. There are operational workflows and other workflows that lend themselves very naturally to your application. But can we start by talking about what many of our listeners recognize Overjet for — its clinical applications? Can we talk about some of those?

Dr. Wardah Inam: Absolutely. So, that’s what we’re known for — what we build. We’ve spent a lot of time developing technology around this. The idea was simple: clinical data — think about X-rays and notes — but particularly, we started off with X-rays.

X-rays are something that dentists can read pretty well, but patients often can’t understand at all. Dentists were using X-rays to communicate with patients, and patients weren’t understanding them or accepting the recommended treatments. So, the first idea was: can we start to analyze this data through computers in a way that helps in multiple ways?

First, through quantification. For example, when you’re talking about bone loss — a bone level above a certain threshold — that’s a measurement.

Gary Takacs: It’s another quantitative, isn’t it?

Dr. Wardah Inam: It’s very quantitative. Can we go and measure it so that there’s no variability? When the dentist says, “Hey, you have bone loss,” or, “You have four millimeters of bone level,” the patient can understand what the dentist means, rather than guessing. If you try to explain that there’s a CEJ and a crest of bone and a distance between them — and that it’s in pixels converted into millimeters — that’s a very hard thing for someone to visualize if they don’t know what they’re looking at.

So, the first idea was to use computers to quantify it. Then, once we could quantify it, could we visualize it for patients as well?

That helps dentists provide a much more comprehensive diagnosis, because dentists do so much in a day. They’re surgeons, they’re managing their offices, they’re helping their assistants — they’re everywhere all day. How do we help them provide a better, more comprehensive diagnosis quickly, without the fear of missing something or second-guessing what they see?

These are challenges many dentists face — not every dentist, but many. So, how do we help them make more confident, complete diagnoses, and how do we help them communicate those findings clearly to patients?

And then the third piece was: how do we give general dentists the abilities of specialists? Think about periodontal disease for periodontists, periapical radiolucencies for endodontists, or orthodontic cases. How do we help general dentists diagnose at the level of a specialist?

Because a patient doesn’t go to a specialist unless they first see a general dentist. If we can elevate diagnostic accuracy at that first point, they can refer more effectively, guide care to the right providers, and — hopefully — catch things sooner, allowing them to treat cases before referral becomes necessary.

Gary Takacs: Very ambitious. And I want to go back and reinforce something you said, Wardah. This is my 45th year in dentistry, and I go back to a time when radiographs used to be kind of grainy images on film. That was before your time, but I’m sure you’ve seen your share of old, grainy radiographs.

I’ve often joked — as you mentioned — that patients don’t understand anything they see, even now with our advanced technology. I’ve said, jokingly, that you could have one generic set of X-rays, put them on the screen — they could be of a horse — and as you point and nod, the patient will nod right along with you, having no idea what they’re looking at.

Now, don’t do that, of course — I’m not condoning it! But the truth is, they don’t get it. I was a big fan of using digital photos for patient education because people understand photos — especially now with smartphones everywhere.

But the things you’re doing with Overjet are just incredible. The way you’re transferring that data into patient understanding — it’s not perfect, mainly because of the human factor on the patient side — but you’re able to convey some really powerful information that leads to understanding and, hopefully, case acceptance when indicated.

I had thought that’s where Overjet started and stopped, but it’s barely scratching the surface. You’ve got a lot of operational workflows, too. For example, a subject I’m passionate about: RCM — and we won’t just bounce around acronyms here — revenue cycle management. Talk about the application of Overjet in RCM.

Dr. Wardah Inam: So I think for us, what was very important was looking at that end-to-end patient journey and asking, “How do we improve that more effectively?” — without worrying about where it fell, which department it came from, or what label it had.

If you look at the patient journey, it starts from — well, I won’t go all the way back to scheduling, though there’s value there too — but we really focused on the steps from diagnosis to payments. Some of that money gets collected from insurance companies, and some from the patient directly. So, how do we make that workflow as seamless as possible? We still call it the treatment workflow, but part of it is clinical and part of it is operational.

For us, it actually started with the insurance verification piece. When a patient comes in, the dentist — or the dental practice — needs to know what’s covered, what’s not, whether they’re in-network or out-of-network, and how much of the cost the patient will be responsible for. We started building insurance verification automation so that practices could get this information quickly and accurately.

A lot of time and money was being wasted on phone calls, logging into portals, and manually retrieving EDI data. So, we created a dashboard where you can access all that information with a click of a button — all collected automatically. And not just the basic information, but comprehensive details that, if done manually, might take 30–40 minutes per patient or more.

Once that’s automated, you can instantly see whether a treatment will be covered or not.

Then, moving forward in the workflow, you have claim submission. Interestingly, in dentistry, you actually submit clinical data — unlike in many medical specialties where you just send ICD codes (diagnostic codes) with CPT codes. In dentistry, you send the actual clinical data — not just an ICD-10 code.

That means insurance companies have to review that clinical data and make determinations, which introduces a lot of variation and potential errors. So, we enabled our technology to be used by insurance companies as well — allowing both sides to look at the same information.

For example, if there’s bone loss, both parties — the provider and the payer — should see it clearly. It shouldn’t be subjective or something that requires back-and-forth debate. If bone loss is visible and periodontal disease is present, and scaling and root planing is needed, both sides should agree immediately.

Having that alignment allows much faster, more accurate decisions and helps us improve operational efficiency overall.

This led us to introduce a new capability — which is being rolled out in a limited way now but will expand soon — called ReviewPass.

Gary Takacs: I’d love to hear more.

Dr. Wardah Inam: So, ReviewPass is a special capability that we launched, where, with just a click of a button, the provider can get a review by the insurance company in real time — and receive a decision that the claim will be accepted. That means the claim doesn’t have to go through manual review afterward.

What that allows the provider to do is confidently tell the patient that the insurance will cover the treatment — no guessing, no waiting weeks for a predetermination check. The patient can immediately understand how much they’ll owe, how much the payer will pay, and make better, more informed decisions for themselves.

Gary Takacs: You know, it seems like that whole process — and again, I’ve been doing this long enough to remember when we didn’t have any automation in any of this — used to have such time delays between diagnosis and determining eligibility or benefits paid. And, of course, those delays often played into the hands of insurance companies, because a patient might think, “Well, I guess I just don’t need it.” And that would affect case acceptance.

I want to make a point of clarification for our listeners. I want everyone to know that I’m a fan of many different kinds of practice models. Of course, I’m also a fan of successfully reducing insurance dependence in the practice. But at the same time, if a patient has insurance benefits — whether we’re in-network or not — we want to help the patient use those benefits fully.

There’s nothing incongruent about being fee-for-service while still being insurance-friendly when it comes to helping patients. Would you agree with me on that?

Dr. Wardah Inam: Absolutely. I think this is one area where we look at the world through one lens — what’s best for the patient. That’s why providers are here, that’s why payers are here. None of us would exist in this industry otherwise.

Gary, you wouldn’t have created a practice if you didn’t believe you could provide great care for patients and help them receive the best care possible. And different models exist for a reason — they need to. The majority of people simply can’t afford to pay out of pocket. So, how do we enable them to take advantage of the benefits available to them through insurance?

Gary Takacs: Yes.

I’ll share a statistic with you that I learned recently, and it really surprised me. I learned this from the National Association of Dental Insurance Plan Executives. As you know, most dental insurance has an annual maximum that varies by plan quality.

But here’s the surprising part — and I’ll make it a quiz for you. Do you think most patients who have dental insurance actually use their annual benefits?

Dr. Wardah Inam: No, they don’t. I think it’s something like 44% or 64%.

Gary Takacs: Here’s the sobering statistic — and I’ll answer it a bit differently. About 44% of patients use some benefits, but new data shows that only 2.8% of all patients who have dental insurance actually use their full annual maximum.

Dr. Wardah Inam: I actually know that statistic — and I was shocked when I learned it. It’s true!

Gary Takacs: Doesn’t that blow you away? Now, sure, some people might just be really healthy and not need care, but I think it’s more about workflow, information, and education. That 2.8% number is exactly why insurance companies don’t need to raise the annual benefit — because only 2.8% ever reach the max.

But just to clarify — we’re not saying we should do treatment only because it’s covered by insurance. We’re going to recommend treatment based on clinical need, not insurance coverage. I suspect you and I are completely aligned on that.

Dr. Wardah Inam: Absolutely. And I’d say most dentists are, too. Nobody went into dentistry thinking, “How can I make money easily?” There are much easier ways to make money than putting your hands in people’s mouths all day! Being a dentist is actually a hard way to make a living.

Gary Takacs: Our listeners chose the hard way to make money.

Dr. Wardah Inam: Exactly. Being a dentist is demanding work. If someone only wanted to make money, I’d tell them to go into crypto instead! But when you talk to dental students — and we meet many — you see how passionate they are. Many chose dentistry because they were inspired by a dentist, or because they saw it as a way to serve others and build a meaningful career.

Most will tell you they got into dentistry to provide great care and do good for their patients. Running a successful business is secondary — but still necessary. You can’t provide good care if your business isn’t sustainable. Thriving financially allows dentists to expand, care for more patients, and even do charitable work when possible — because now they have the profits to support it.

Gary Takacs: You can’t give from an empty wagon.

Dr. Wardah Inam: Exactly. And that’s the positive mindset — aligning revenue and profit with better patient care. We think about that all the time. What does that alignment look like? But yes, I completely agree — most people didn’t go into dentistry just to make money. It’s always about providing the right care.

Gary Takacs: Back to crypto for a minute — I’m going to make sure you have my personal cell phone, so the next time you get a crypto tip, please message me!

But I love the way you’re thinking about this. We come from very different backgrounds, but we see things in so many similar ways.

And I’ll brag about our listeners for just a moment — they’re in 188 countries, and these are dentists who are truly passionate about what they do. They’re passionate about serving their patients, helping them become as healthy as possible, and at the same time, providing a great living for themselves and their teams.

We’ve got a really good audience for this discussion. So, what are some other workflows that might not be as obvious to our listeners — areas where Overjet can help, that we haven’t talked about yet?

Dr. Wardah Inam: I would say our products are being utilized by customers in many different ways. Even with our current clinical products, for example, some practices are using them to generate call lists and reach out to patients, while others are integrating them with software to communicate through SMS or other channels. So, there are lots of variations in how the product is used and how people are finding value from it.

Another one we recently built — and it’s not the most glamorous thing — is credentialing.

Gary Takacs: Oh my goodness, you just struck a nerve — a very sensitive nerve — with me, Wardah. Credentialing is one of those things no one thinks about until they have to. And honestly, there’s a lot about credentialing that I’d love to see corrected at the provider level.

For example, you often have a situation where a doctor buys a practice and assumes the insurance plans the practice had before — but they’re not credentialed with those plans. Then they might start filing claims under the previous owner’s credentials, with permission, of course, but that’s just the wrong way to do it.

Talk about credentialing, and how Overjet can create less of a headache for any dentist going through that process.

Dr. Wardah Inam: One thing we found is that dentists typically get credentialed with multiple organizations — on average, around 30 payers. And right now, there are only a few ways to do it. There’s CAQH, but it’s a painful application to fill out, it doesn’t always stay updated, and it still requires manual work. Then you have individual portals where you have to log in and complete separate forms, or even paper forms for some payers. It’s just a huge waste of time for everyone.

No one likes filling out forms — I haven’t met a single person who does!

Gary Takacs: I have scar tissue from that — it goes all the way back to applying for student loans in college. I can’t even look at a form without reliving that anguish!

Dr. Wardah Inam: Exactly! And with all that manual entry, mistakes happen. Then there’s back-and-forth communication to fix errors, which drags the process out even longer. So, we started asking, “Can we make credentialing instant? What would it take for a provider to complete one form, click a button, and be credentialed — not just with one payer, but across all the ones they choose?”

Gary Takacs: Like a universal form?

Dr. Wardah Inam: Exactly. One universal form that could credential you with 30 different payers — instantly. That’s what we’ve been building toward.

To make that happen, we’ve had to collaborate with both payers and providers. We’ve started offering this solution to payers as well, so they can enable instant credentialing rather than making providers wait weeks or even months. Because, as you mentioned, if a dentist just bought a practice, they need to start generating revenue immediately. They can’t stop seeing patients while waiting on paperwork.

So, now we’ve launched a system where you fill out one digital form, and it automatically populates all the required applications. Beginning in January, we’ll have our first payer-direct connection for instant credentialing — and others will follow soon after.

Here’s how it works: when a provider submits their information, our system automatically performs all the background checks that a human would normally do. It verifies the NPI number, checks driver’s license details, education history, employment history, and specialty databases. Everything is validated in real time.

If anything looks incomplete or needs clarification, the system flags it. That way, payers can focus their attention only on red flags, while the majority of providers — who have clean records — can be processed automatically.

Right now, the industry treats every provider as if there’s something wrong, which slows everyone down. We’re building a system that assumes most providers are compliant and trustworthy — and lets automation handle their credentialing instantly, while still reserving careful review for the few with potential issues.

That’s how we move from a months-long manual process to something that can happen in minutes.

Gary Takacs: You described that in such a cool way, Wardah. This issue is one that I know many of our listeners have encountered, and the current system feels so archaic — the way information is siloed, the lack of shared databases — it’s just outdated. You’re providing real-time solutions for something that’s been a major pain point for years.

Let’s take the discussion in a bit of a different direction. Our listeners are largely badge-wearing nerds, but many of their team members have varying levels of comfort with technology. Some are just as enthusiastic as the dentist, while others are a bit fearful.

Can you talk a little about how your technology helps team members embrace the full applications of Overjet?

Dr. Wardah Inam: Here, I’d say, Gary, what I’ve noticed is that people aren’t necessarily scared of technology — they’re just busy. Dentists are extremely busy, and their staff is too. This is a high-velocity environment.

Gary Takacs: There’s no free time — that’s for sure. Some of it’s inefficient, of course, but you’re bringing levels of efficiency that are enviable. Still, there’s not a lot of free time.

Dr. Wardah Inam: Exactly. And getting everyone free at the same time for training or implementation is nearly impossible. So, that’s how we’ve approached product design from the start — everything needs to be as simple as possible.

Even if someone doesn’t go through our training, they should still be able to use it right away. It’s just one button to click — not a hundred. You can get 80% of the value instantly.

We’ve also built our own imaging software, which is fully AI-native. The AI is always on — you don’t even have to click an “AI” button. It’s just there, seamlessly integrated.

Our goal is to remove as much friction as possible, to make adoption easy. We know the staff doesn’t have time for long training sessions.

The second part is helping people feel comfortable doing things a little differently than they’ve always done them. That’s a big ask — changing habits after years of practicing a certain way.

That’s where change management comes in for us. We lead with clinicians and hygienists as our spokespeople. All of our training sessions are led by hygienists or clinical staff who can speak their language and understand their workflow.

We also track metrics — we can see which providers aren’t fully utilizing the product and step in proactively before they even realize it.

Gary Takacs: Oh, very cool.

Dr. Wardah Inam: Right? We’ll reach out and ask, “Would you like another quick session?” or pair them with another dentist or hygienist who’s using it successfully.

We also work closely with large DSOs — some have hundreds of dentists — and we often attend their in-person training events to help teams get hands-on experience.

What’s interesting is that once people actually start using Overjet, and they see the value, it’s hard to go back. We’ve had providers move to a new practice and say, “I can’t believe they don’t have Overjet here — I don’t want to practice without it.”

And the real magic moment comes when they show it to a patient for the first time. The patient sees their X-rays with Overjet’s AI annotations and says, “Oh, now I get it,” or, “Wow, my dentist is really high-tech.”

Gary Takacs: The aha moment.

Dr. Wardah Inam: Exactly. Or they say, “I trust you more now.” It’s not that they didn’t trust you before, but it deepens that trust — because they can finally see and understand what’s happening.

Gary Takacs: It’s like a backhanded compliment — they trusted you before, but now it’s, “I really trust you.”

Dr. Wardah Inam: Exactly. It’s their health, after all. If I just said, “I’m going to drill your arm,” you’d be like, “What are you talking about?” But if I show you an image and say, “Here’s your condition, here’s the infection, and here’s why we need to do this,” you’ll feel much more aligned and confident in moving forward.

Gary Takacs: You know, I’ve often said I have the best job security in the world — as a coach and trainer helping dentists and their teams navigate these challenges.

But AI provides so many amazing advantages — and I think we’re only scratching the surface. Even though Overjet goes back to 2018, you’re now seven years in. That’s an eternity in technology, isn’t it?

Dr. Wardah Inam: I think we’ve seen just about everything there is to see!

Gary Takacs: And yet, it feels like we’re still at the beginning of AI’s implementation in dentistry. What’s coming next excites the heck out of me — and I know I’m preaching to the choir here. Do you feel the same way?

Dr. Wardah Inam: No, and I think it’s actually accelerating — the pace of development is faster than ever. How quickly we can build and deploy now has really transformed.

What we’ve done is unlock unstructured data that had never been analyzed before — the clinical data. And that opens up a world of new opportunities: how we do things, how we automate processes that weren’t even possible before.

Encoding a dentist’s understanding of disease into AI models is complex work. These are large models that require vast amounts of data for training. There are also exceptions — different sensors, image artifacts, patient conditions, commercial versus Medicaid demographics, and variations across age groups.

We’ve had to build technology that accounts for all of those variables. But once that’s done, it’s like, “Okay — now how do we apply this in new ways?” How do we help improve the lives of dentists and patients in as many ways as possible?

Gary Takacs: You know, one of the things that strikes me is just how cost-effective this is. Sure, there’s an investment involved, but the opportunity for a great ROI is clear — even just looking at one area, like case acceptance.

I’m particularly passionate about helping doctors develop the full potential of conservative periodontal therapy in their practices. There’s still so much untreated perio. Many patients think that if it doesn’t hurt, there’s no problem — but that’s not true.

Until recently, we didn’t have tools that could help patients really see and understand what’s going on with an infection in their gums. Now, with technology like Overjet, I’m excited to see case acceptance rise — because patients finally understand the “why” behind the diagnosis.

The doctor can communicate the issue visually and clearly, and the patient can make the obvious, informed choice: “What should I do about this?”

Dr. Wardah Inam: Absolutely.

Gary Takacs: And right now, it’s sort of a hit-or-miss situation in many practices — it doesn’t have to be that way.

Dr. Wardah Inam: And it’s interesting you mentioned periodontal disease, because that’s actually where we started when building the product. Our first model was focused on periodontal disease — and I actually coded that part myself early on, so I know it very deeply.

Gary Takacs: You were up to your eyebrows in that.

Dr. Wardah Inam: Yes, absolutely. And the surprising thing for me was, when I started analyzing the data — this was when our models had just started working — I looked at the practice data and thought, “No, something’s wrong here.”

Coming from outside of dentistry, I had heard the perception that there’s overdiagnosis in dentistry. If you ask most people on the street whether dentistry suffers from overdiagnosis or underdiagnosis, most would say overdiagnosis.

Gary Takacs: Can I give you a little historical reference for that? You may know this, but it was probably before your time in dentistry. There was a famous Reader’s Digest investigative report, where a reporter went to several different practices posing as a patient. I don’t remember the exact number of practices, but quite a few. The treatment recommendations ranged from “You don’t need a thing, everything’s fine,” on one end, to “You need a full-mouth reconstruction” on the other. Do you know about that?

Dr. Wardah Inam: Yes, absolutely — and we did something similar. We took X-rays, and since people often assume that financial motivation drives overdiagnosis, we removed that variable. We gave the same X-rays to 70 different dentists and asked them to diagnose independently. Then we looked at the spread of results.

What we found was that there was far more underdiagnosis than overdiagnosis — especially for periodontal disease.

According to the CDC, more than 40% of adults have periodontal disease. When we analyzed our data, around 27% of patients had periodontal disease that needed treatment. But in most practices, only about 5–7% of patients were actually being treated for it. That’s a huge gap — meaning a large number of patients who need treatment aren’t receiving it.

And we know periodontal disease isn’t just about gums — it’s linked to diabetes, cardiovascular disease, and more. It’s literally an infection in your mouth.

Gary Takacs: Exactly — and it’s also linked to stroke, preeclampsia, certain cancers like oral squamous cell and pancreatic cancer. There’s even emerging data connecting gum infections to dementia, Alzheimer’s, and fertility issues in women of childbearing age. And yet, the level of untreated perio is still — in my opinion — unacceptable.

Dr. Wardah Inam: I agree completely. And that’s where the opportunity lies. Periodontal diagnosis is tricky because it relies on multiple factors. You have the perio chart, which hygienists spend time on, but they’re not necessarily correlating that with bone levels on radiographs.

Then, around 2017 or 2018, the AAP changed its grading and staging guidelines for periodontal disease. Many dentists didn’t even realize the criteria had changed. There was so much emphasis on bleeding on probing, that if a hygienist didn’t record bleeding on a tooth, and the dentist saw bone loss, they might think, “Oh, there’s no bleeding — so no disease.”

But in reality, you can’t have root surface calculus without some bleeding on probing. So that created confusion — and missed diagnoses.

Then there’s the second issue: even when the diagnosis is made, treatment planning can be challenging. As you said, patients often think, “If it doesn’t hurt, it’s not serious.” And because it’s commonly labeled as a “deep cleaning,” they don’t perceive the urgency.

Gary Takacs: Right. Some patients even call it “that fancy cleaning.”

Dr. Wardah Inam: Exactly. And that’s not good messaging. It should be clearly labeled for what it is — periodontal disease — and the treatment, scaling and root planing, should be understood as a critical procedure, not a premium cleaning.

I think that misconception contributes to patients declining treatment. And of course, dentists are so busy — they often don’t have time to fully explain all the systemic connections and the health implications of untreated infection.

Gary Takacs: Yeah. Well, Wardah, I’m going to bring this back full circle — and thank you. Thanks for your passion for our amazing profession, and for being a fellow nerd who’s helping us bring technology to solve some of dentistry’s biggest challenges.

With your permission, I’d love to bring you back for more discussions like this with our listeners. What’s the best way for them to learn more about Overjet?

Dr. Wardah Inam: We have our website — overjet.ai or overjet.com — both go to the same place. You can explore the site, learn more about what we do, and there’s also a link to request a demo if you’d like an in-person walkthrough.

Gary Takacs: Well, I’d invite all of our listeners to take advantage of that in-person demo — you’ll be absolutely blown away. I suspect the most common reaction people have is, “How did I ever practice without this?”

One more question, if I may, before we wrap up. Look into your crystal ball — without revealing any confidential details — what’s on the horizon that you’re most excited about coming to Overjet?

Final Thoughts

Dr. Wardah Inam: For us, 3D is next. We already have some practices beta testing very cool things in that area. We’re focusing on how to help general dentists read 3D and CBCT data much more easily and effectively. I think that will be a major advancement on the clinical side — giving general dentists diagnostic capabilities they wouldn’t normally have without these tools.

On the operational side, our goal is to fully eliminate the RCM function — to automate it completely so that humans only step in when there’s a problem, not as part of the routine workflow. That’s something we’re confident we’ll achieve within the next year — making the entire process fully automatic.

Gary Takacs: I love that you’re including the payers in this as well, because there’s efficiency motivation for them, too. It really makes sense for everyone to get on board and move toward a more seamless, transparent process.

You used a phrase earlier — engineering the patient experience — and I love that. It goes back to your engineering background: designing the patient journey to be as positive, efficient, and thorough as possible.

Thank you again for your commitment to our profession.

Dr. Wardah Inam: Thank you so much, Gary, for having me.

Gary Takacs: And I want to take a moment to thank all of our listeners here at The Thriving Dentist Show. We appreciate each and every one of you.

For now, thank you for the privilege of your time, and we look forward to connecting with you on the next Thriving Dentist Show.