AI Across the Board by Dr. David Wank

by Dr. David Wank

Like it or not, AI is here to stay. Whether it’s baked into the software we use in the office, the updates it brings to marketing, or its effect on how patients perceive and understand dental care, AI cannot be ignored. In this article, we’re going to take a 10,000-foot look at how AI affects certain aspects of your practice.


AI phone receptionists
An AI receptionist or “AI front desk” is a great idea in concept because it takes the burden of answering dozens of phone calls away from the front desk team, freeing them up for other work in the office. However, one of the key parts of the patient-doctor relationship is communicating with your patients, whether in the chair or on the phone. If you implement an AI front desk, be aware that this approach may be a turnoff to a percentage of your patient population. Patients want to know that if they have an emergency, they can speak to a human and not AI. So while having a patient make or confirm an appointment with AI is convenient, make certain that your patients still have an option to speak to a human about their needs. If you don’t, you run the risk that your patients will flee to a practice that still has the 100% human touch.


HIPAA compliance and AI
Because of the manner in which AIs process information, it’s critical to ensure that you have a business associate agreement (BAA) under HIPAA with any provider that provides your practice with AI services. This layer of security and confidentiality is especially important if you are using an AI receptionist or a Google Ads/paid ads campaign, as many of these services record phone calls and process the transcripts for actionable data (e.g., did the call result in a booked appointment? Was the interaction positive, neutral, or negative?).


AI website chats
The same concepts that apply to AI phone receptionists apply to AI chat widgets (or any type of chat) on your website. If the widget is able to gather personal health information from a website visitor, such as is needed for the widget to schedule, cancel, or modify appointments, it must be HIPAA compliant.


Website edits with AI
When it comes to updating your practice’s website, AIs are a tempting choice to help avoid the cost of using a marketing agency. AIs can scan your website code and make recommendations about edits to make (e.g., content), and how to make improvements for SEO. But before you make any changes to your website (with AI or otherwise), make sure that you have a working backup (if you don’t have one, ask your web provider for a backup).

There are some caveats you need to be aware of before using AI to manage your website:

• AIs generally don’t have access to your website’s full codebase, so AIs make recommendations without a full picture; think of it like planning an extraction but without seeing the apex radiographically. It’s all straightforward until you get “surprised” by curvature of the root. Similarly, AI might not see Google Analytics (GA4) listed in your code and recommend that you add it to your site. But because there are many ways to add GA4 to your website, you may end up adding a second GA4 code block, which will result in duplicate entries and inaccurate reporting.

• AIs don’t always know the best way to implement changes. For example, AI might recommend that you add code to your website, which may result in duplicate code (see above) or code that’s added to the wrong place that causes the site to crash. The fact that AIs also make mistakes is a big risk if you add code to your website without a working backup and without explicitly understanding the potential risks of the updates (crashing the site, damaging your Google visibility). That’s not to say you can’t manage your own site with the help of AI, but try to do it in a manner that minimizes the risk to your live website.


Local SEO, SEO, and AI
AIs are essentially large databases of information that are very smart and excel in conversations with human users. And when the AI doesn’t have the exact information, it will head to the internet to find a result. With that information in mind, consider that AIs are often providing the exact same function as a Google search (e.g., “What are veneers?”, “What dentist in my area takes xyz insurance?”) but in a different format and interface. It is for this reason that “optimizing your website for AI” is more of a series of updates and potential tweaks versus earth-shattering changes.

Generally speaking, the same concepts that we’ve used for SEO for the last decade have not changed. What has changed, for example, is that AIs provide facts AND recommendations. AIs such as ChatGPT and Claude will use available information (e.g., from Google) to highlight and recommend a particular dental practice. And in order for your practice to have the best chance of being recommended by AIs (and in traditional local SEO), it’s imperative that you demonstrate consistency and trust by following this general guidance:

• Maintain an updated Google Business Profile (especially for Gemini) and make sure the hours on your profile match the hours on your website.

• Keep your citations current and up to date (including GPS listings).

• Have a dedicated biography page on your website where you list your credentials (BA, DDS, etc.) along with where you trained and any professional memberships. It’s difficult for AIs to truly know which providers in any field are trustworthy, so having your background present on your website is an important foundation.

• Consider adding FAQs to your service pages so that when people ask questions (“What is take-home whitening?”) that you have the information already in place in a question-and-answer format. Do not turn your service pages into large lists of Q&A, but add two to four relevant topics to the most popular or most critical pages.

• Schema. A schema is a description of how information is organized. For example, airplanes and automobiles are transportation vehicles, and we can break automobiles down into passenger and commercial categories, and we can break passenger vehicles into cars and SUVs. Website schemas are similar in that they describe the information present on your website.

And while there’s no guarantee that having schema (i.e., Organization -> Local Business -> Dentist) or any of the other above recommendations in place will leapfrog your website to the top of the AI-recommended list, it’s the combination of multiple factors, as always, that gives your practice the best chance to be in the AI conversation.


Conclusion
Don’t panic. The AI revolution has not passed by you or your practice. Speak to your vendors about making sure that any AI-related products are HIPAA compliant and that your website is up to date on Google’s recommended best practices. While these changes may not catapult you to the No. 1 spot, you’ll at least be in the conversation, and that’s the important first step.

Dr. David Wank is a practicing general dentist in New York City and the CEO of Short Hills Design, a digital marketing agency for health care clients. He received his DMD from Harvard in 2003 and is an authority on topics including website development, hosting, SEO, local SEO, and analytics. Wank writes CE courses for dentaltown.com and is the author of The Small Business Website Owner’s Manual. He is the creator and instructor of courses including Google Analytics 4 Migration Process Training and the Local SEO Process Training (localseoprocess.com). Contact him at davidw@shorthillsdesign.com or find him running around on the Dentaltown message boards.