dentlinQ: Dental Care Made Easy For Minorities

Dental technology is growing at an accelerated rate, and the digitalization of all aspects of dental care is on the near horizon. But for the 82 million minority people, or nearly 25% of Americans, those technologies aren't much helpful in helping find better accessible and affordable dental care. In New York State alone, oral diseases still affect over 70% of adults with disparities in underserved communities clearly observed. 

Moreover, the lack of alignment between the number of underrepresented minority dentists and the size of the minority communities that seek care from them is consistently large, although it varies greatly across geographic regions and population groups.

There are several factors that contribute to oral health inequalities, including socioeconomic status, education level, and occupation. However, these inequalities are magnified by a lack of access to quality dental health care treatment and are very costly. 

dentlinQ takes the hassle out of the search process for dental care and uses the power of AI to match underrepresented minority dentists to people living in underserved communities with quality dental care at their fingertips. 

Providers pay a subscription fee to list their businesses or services, and patients can locate and map out free to low-cost care based on their locations. 

Using the app, millions of minority people (with or without dental insurance who would normally lack access) will now be able to get access to routine dental care, save money, and stay healthy. Some dental technology already helped us find services, but dentlinQ is the only app that uses some of the same technology to match key players together and make it easier for everyone while solving one of the world's most overlooked public health crises: oral diseases.

Populations of Blacks, Hispanics or Latinos, and American Indians or Alaska Natives in the United States experience large disparities in both access to dental care and oral health status. 

In addition, Black, Hispanic or Latino, and American Indian or Alaska Native dentists are underrepresented within the overall dental workforce. Evidence suggests that improving workforce diversity promotes social justice and also increases access, health equity, and health care quality, particularly for minority populations.

Since areas with greater dissimilarity in income and greater residential segregation have been shown to provide poorer access to care. We quantified the shortage of underrepresented minority dentists and examined these dentists’ practice patterns in relation to the characteristics of the communities they serve. 

One of the most interesting aspects of our team as responsible leaders is our ability to show compassion, humility and inspire emotional engagement. By simply listening to the affected community, the environment, as well as ourselves, we have taken a path forward when others aren't able to act. For so long, oral health has been ignored or forgotten in favor of other non-communicable diseases. But by being truly human, we continue to remind everyone that the impact of poor oral health is a pressing one, and one that affects communities of all colors and creeds around the world. 

Our goal with dentlinQ is to break down the access and cost barriers that stand before our minority community. Our approach to leadership certainly includes those individuals in the strategy and decision-making of our organization. In fact, the relationship we built with our community has influenced how much community members trusted us and thus, ultimately, how they reacted to our venture. For all these reasons, effective community involvement has been and will always be an important part of our mission’s impact. 

As a leader of one of the leading dental nonprofit, I have dedicated my entire adult life to bring this issue to the forefront of people’s minds and showcase why it matters now on a global, regional, or local scale. My non-profit organization Unspoken Smiles has directly impacted many lives across the world, but dentlinQ will for sure create systemic changes in the near future.

As someone who has experienced the success of the SOLVE program, it is with great excitement and optimism that I apply to join this prestigious program. Considering that we are very early stage, and that we don’t have an operating company yet, I strongly believe that SOLVE could offer the right mentorship and connections with a comprehensive curriculum that could help me transition from the nonprofit mindset to entrepreneur, test my startup ideas, build a team, get our first customers, raise funding, and more.

Moreover, I strongly believe that SOLVE can significantly help grow the size and value of my company in a short period of time and can be an ideal gateway to venture capital, particularly because we are new to the startup ecosystem. In addition to capital which is the life-blood for us, SOLVE can help drive our early-stage company forward by providing:

• Network: access to expertise and influential people in the industry.

• Strategic Advice: “insider” advice and perspective on entrepreneurship.

• Validation: immediate validation and “startup stamp of approval”.

At dentlinQ, our aim is to create a more equitable future in dental care. And I truly hope you will give my application all due consideration. 

I truly believe that technological innovation will ultimately improve and broaden access to dental care, allowing for same-day care that translates to fewer office visits—making a healthy smile more affordable. As more high-quality digital information becomes available to dental professionals, the potential for more precise diagnosis and treatment will only continue to grow. 

Our vision over the next 12 months to five years is to have our app become an integral part of dental missions around the United States, as well as increasing access to dental service opportunities to millions of people who have never previously had access to care. The future of dentistry will look very different from the practice of today: no need to drill, no injections, easier access, and shorter treatment time. Overall, there will be a greater emphasis on prevention that translates into fewer cavities and less periodontal disease. The predictions: dentistry will increasingly provide nice, white, healthy smiles.

Universal health coverage (UHC) is broadly defined as all individuals hav- ing access to needed health services without financial hardship. Over the last decade, the push for UHC has gained considerable momentum, having become a priority area in reaching the sustainable development goals (SDGs) by 2030. Initial evaluations indicate progress in important areas such as coverage of human immunodeficiency virus, tuberculosis and malaria services.1 Oral health, by contrast, has been largely absent from the UHC discussion, and limited progress has been made in ad- dressing oral diseases around the world over the last twenty years.

In many countries, oral health is deemed low priority and attributed to individual, rather than social responsi- bility. However, a few countries working towards UHC include dental services for some or all population groups, sug- gesting that the exclusion of oral health from UHC is no conceptual inevitability. Failing to broaden UHC to encompass oral health risks undermining sys- temic health outcomes and exacerbating health disparities. As countries plan and align strategies towards UHC, reviewing whether excluding oral health is com- patible with the overall goals of UHC is necessary.

To monitor progress towards UHC, the World Health Organization (WHO) and the World Bank use 16 tracer indica- tors in four categories: (i) reproductive, maternal, and child health; (ii) infec- tious diseases; (iii) noncommunicable diseases; and (iv) service capacity and access.1 Though poor oral health is rec- ognized as a noncommunicable disease, it was excluded from being an indicator for the health-related SDG, which aims to broadly improve health outcomes.

Underrepresented minority dentists reported being motivated to serve minority communities, but translating these motivations into actual practice requires opportunities and support that may not always be present. In their senior year, minority dental students were more likely than white dental students and all dental students to report that serving their own racial or ethnic group was a very important or important reason for pursuing dentistry.  We found that underrepresented minority dentists do not practice in counties with high rates of poverty, which indicates that other barriers exist to working in these chronically underserved areas. 

For example, research has shown that minority dentists graduate with more debt than their non-minority peers. Most underrepresented minority dentists work in traditional, private, fee-for-service practices where required out-of-pocket spending and lack of meaningful insurance coverage present significant barriers to the receipt of care even where there is an adequate workforce. Therefore, it is not surprising that economic and geographic factors had the most influence on underrepresented minority dentists’ initial choices of practice despite the dentists’ expressed intent to work in high-need areas. These findings extend the evidence about the relationship between intentions and actual choices of underrepresented minority dentists and raise the question of whether racial concordance is a sufficient incentive for dentists to practice in the highest-need areas, unless sustainable reimbursement opportunities, adequate public health infrastructure, and practice support are available in those communities.  

Increasing diversity among dentists is seen as the default approach to improving access to care for minority populations, but this view relies on a faulty set of assumptions and expectations—including the belief that minority dentists, themselves already disadvantaged by systemic discrimination that results in a lack of workforce parity, will through their existence alone solve large structural inequalities in access to dental care and oral health outcomes. It is likely that the model of dental care delivery must evolve, with diversity becoming a core value, if these structural disparities are to be successfully addressed.

Policy makers and stakeholders have an opportunity to create a dental practice environment that relies on workforce diversity by design, infusing the value of diversity into improvements in dental education, financing, and delivery systems and leveraging diversity as a way to increase innovation and improve performance.  Workforce diversity by design is rooted in social justice and provides adequate support and incentives to increase the delivery system’s capacity to care for all patients, especially those in the greatest need. 

Source: healthaffairs.org

While several dental technologies already helped us find services, dentlinQ is the only app that uses some of the same technology to bring key players together and make it easier for everyone while solving one of the world's most overlooked public health crises: oral diseases. Some alternatives to our product include SmileSnap, VolunteerMatch, Teledentrix, NexHealth, DentalPost, and Doctible. Currently none of them bring key users under the same platform. 

This provides our platform with:

FIRST MOVER ADVANTAGE: Ecosystem that connects providers, organizations, and patients to all inn one platform

AI-POWERED: Data driven insights and Teledentistry

DENTAL DATA: First in-app digital patient chart Provide reliable data for the healthcare industry

EASE OF USE: Search by location and map out FREE too low-cost dental services

EMPATHY IN DESIGN: Easy and simple to access

THE RIGHT “EXPERT” ENDORSEMENTS: Henry Schein, CareQuest, ADA

In addition, our technology is unique/superior because we are different from anything else out there as it is the only app focusing on dentistry. We have a competitive advantage because of our speed to market. We do not anticipate new companies to enter this market. As our capabilities grow, so too will our moat. By activating scalable digital sponsorship and a single-source branded content portal we become both sticky and indispensable.

Using the dentlinQ app, millions of people (who would normally lack access) will now be able to get routine dental care, save money, and stay healthy.

Over the new few months, we will formalized a set of Diversity Commitments to hold us accountable to this view, building on the work we’ve been doing over the selection of our diverse team.

The aim of sharing our journey publicly is to show how our efforts in New York have positively impacted our team, and above all to share our process in the hope that those reading it find it helpful when looking to build their own commitments.

These commitments impact how and who we hire, what investments we make, and how we strive to positively impact the technology and investment dental community at large. The whole operations team in New York has been instrumental in helping to develop the diversity commitments. Importantly we have also recognized that we cannot act alone and we will be looking to partner with some Inclusive Boards for unconscious bias training.

In order to measure our efforts we will collect more data and report our progress bi-annually. This will start with dentlinQ employees and over time our customers. 

Our diversity statistics will be available on our website. 

Providers/Organizations: Pay a monthly/annual subscription fee to list their businesses or services on the platform. We also charge for additional features such as verified status for quality care, or to bump them up the lists. We take a commission on all paid services from patients recommendation. 

The best and only way is to embed our mission with the product/service we offer, so that sales to customers fulfill our mission. In addition, we don't plan to use outside investors and instead self-finance our company through programs like Echoing Green and operating team, friends and family and then bootstrap our growth through reinvesting and borrowing against customer revenue along the way.  Moreover, we can ensure that any angel investor money we might be open to taking also comes with a person attached to that money who not only "gets" what our mission is about, but also has the hots for making it happen in every way, i.e. is as mission driven as we are. 

We have not yet generated any revenue. However, we have already gained interests from the world's largest dental supplier: Henry Schein as a potential client and/or investor. 

Moreover, we have also gained interests from CareQuest and Revere Partners, the world's first dental VC.