Mike's Newsletter | AI Moves Into Calls, Data, and Patient Records.
Welcome Orthoprenuers!
Every week, we bring you the latest in practice management, marketing, profitability, and next-level ortho techniques so you can work smarter, grow faster, and build the practice you want.
In this issue:
🚨 News Update
📚 New Book Recommendation: Priced to Win
🦾 Mike’s Prompt
📢 Juan’s Marketing Tip
✨ Astro Outlook
🗓️ Plan Your 2026 CE Calendar
©️ Close More Cases Meeting
🔥 Trending in the OrthoPreneurs Facebook Group
🎙️ The Orthopreneurs Podcast
✨ Final Thought
📰 News Updates
📞AI Voice Is Getting Good Enough to Answer the Phone
OpenAI released GPT-Live-1 through its API, giving developers access to much more natural real-time voice AI. It can listen and speak simultaneously, handle interruptions and background noise, maintain longer conversations, and connect to other AI models and business tools to take actions.
Why it matters: This gets us much closer to a truly natural AI front desk. Scheduling, answering questions, lead follow-up and routine patient calls could increasingly be handled by AI without the clunky pauses and scripts of traditional automated phone systems. Read More
📊ChatGPT Can Now Investigate Your Business Data for You
OpenAI launched a new Data agent in ChatGPT Work that can connect to company data, investigate why metrics changed, and create reports and interactive dashboards through normal conversation.
Why it matters: Imagine asking, “Why did starts drop last month?” or “Which locations have declining conversion rates?” and having AI investigate the underlying data and come back with an answer. Business intelligence is becoming conversational. Read More
🤖 Google Is Turning Workspace Into One Giant AI Agent
Google added new agentic capabilities across Gmail, Drive, Docs, Sheets, Slides and Chat. Gemini can gather information across those applications and use it to complete multi-step work without forcing the user to jump between programs.
Why it matters: AI is becoming a layer that sits above all the software we already use. Instead of finding an email, opening an attachment, moving information into a spreadsheet and then creating a report, you can increasingly tell AI the outcome you want and let it work across the applications for you.
📃ChatGPT Can Now Work Directly With Patient Records
OpenAI expanded ChatGPT for Healthcare so healthcare organizations can connect electronic health records and other clinical data directly to ChatGPT. The new Epic integration allows authorized clinicians to work with patient notes, medications, labs and specialist documentation while maintaining existing access permissions.
OpenAI also added access to authoritative healthcare sources including PubMed, ClinicalTrials.gov, DailyMed, openFDA and CMS data.
Why it matters: This is a major step toward AI sitting securely alongside the actual patient chart instead of clinicians copying and pasting information into a chatbot. For orthodontics, it’s easy to see where this could eventually go - consult recordings and transcripts, treatment notes, imaging, patient communications and practice-management data all working together inside a secure AI environment.
📈 Chinese AI Labs Were Secretly Harvesting Claude at Massive Scale
Anthropic says seven China-based AI labs ran large-scale campaigns to extract Claude’s capabilities for use in training their own models. According to Anthropic, Alibaba generated more than 151 million Claude exchanges, at times approaching 3 million per day. Anthropic also says Moonshot/Kimi and DeepSeek sometimes routed user prompts through Claude without making that clear to users, then captured the responses for training.
Why it matters: Frontier AI models are becoming valuable enough that competitors are willing to spend enormous resources trying to copy their capabilities. The more concerning business issue is privacy: users may think they are interacting with one AI provider while their prompts or company information are being passed through another model behind the scenes.
📚 New Book Recommendation: Priced to Win
Our friend Victor Antonio has a new book out, Priced to Win: The Sales Leader’s Framework for Closing Deals Without Caving on Price. It’s focused on defending value, handling price pressure, and closing more business without unnecessary discounting - obviously a very relevant topic for orthodontists right now.
🦾 Mike’s Tip of the Week: Create your own AI focus group
Once you've built your customer personas (from last weeks prompt), here's where things get really interesting. Now you can turn them into a virtual focus group. Before launching an ad, changing your website, introducing a new offer, changing your consult script, or even sending an email, you can ask AI to simulate how each type of customer might react. It isn't the same as actual market research. But it's an incredibly inexpensive way to identify problems before you put something in front of thousands of real people.
TRY THIS PROMPT:
I want you to create a simulated customer panel using the personas we developed.
Each persona should behave like an independent person with their own motivations, biases, objections, priorities, and personality.
I am going to show the panel marketing ideas, advertisements, offers, website copy, emails, sales scripts, pricing options, or other business decisions.
Whenever I show you something, have each persona respond independently.
For each persona tell me:
Their immediate reaction
What caught their attention
What confused them
What they liked
What they disliked
What made them skeptical
What questions they would still have
Whether the message increased or decreased their likelihood of buying
What would make the offer more compelling specifically to them
Then act as a moderator and summarize:
What worked across the panel.
Where reactions differed significantly.
The biggest weaknesses.
Changes most likely to improve the response.
Whether we should launch, revise, or rethink the idea.
Do not have the personas agree with one another just to create consensus. I specifically want disagreement when different customers would plausibly react differently.
---
I’d love to know what you get from your results. Please reply if you got something really useful out of it.
✨ Astro Outlook: Mercury in Libra Wants a Better Conversation
Week of September 14: Mercury is in ♎Libra♎, which makes communication, fairness, and thoughtful decision-making the theme of the week. You do not need to know astrology for the takeaway here. This is a good moment to look at where conversations in your practice are creating confusion instead of clarity.
The practical moment: pay attention to the handoffs that depend on tone, timing, or interpretation. Financial conversations. Team feedback. Consult follow-up. Vendor decisions. A parent who “needs to think about it.” A team member who says “I’m fine” but clearly is not. This is the week to make the conversation cleaner.
Best use of the week: rewrite one script or talking point your team uses often. Make it clearer, calmer, and more specific. The right words will not fix a broken system, but vague words can absolutely weaken a good one.
🗓️ Plan Your 2026 CE Calendar
The Sleep & Airway Meeting
Fri, Dec 04 | Arizona Biltmore, LXR Hotels & Resorts
THE MOST UP-TO-DATE CLINICAL INFORMATION ON
SLEEP-DISORDERED BREATHING & AIRWAY.
CLOSE MORE CASES
April 1–3, 2027 | Fairmont Austin
Close More Cases is here — the fastest money in orthodontics isn't more leads or more ads, it's closing more of the patients already in your chair. In this 1.5-day intensive, Dr. Glenn Krieger sharpens the clinical close while sales expert Victor Antonio unlocks the psychology of yes — and it's training you put to work the Monday you get back, no long rollout.
Bring your TCs, walk out with one shared process, and start closing more cases immediately.
Tickets are live now — secure your spot before it sells out.
LEARN MORE ABOUT CMC
The Orthopreneurs CE Calendar keeps every major workshop, congress, and study club event in one place — searchable by month, so you can plan your travel and your team's coverage well ahead of time instead of scrambling the week before.
Whether you're chasing CE credits, looking for your next study club, or just want to see what's coming up before you lock in your schedule for the quarter, it's worth a five-minute look every month.
Bookmark the calendar, pick your priorities early, and stop letting CE planning become a last-minute scramble.
📢 Juan’s Maktering Tip
Make the “Almost Ready” Parent Easier to Convert
Not every parent who visits your site is ready to schedule today.
Some are comparing options. Some are worried about cost. Some are wondering if their child is too young. Some just need a little more trust before they raise their hand.
Most practice websites only speak to the parent who is already ready to book.
That leaves a lot of opportunity on the table.
Here’s the play:
● Add a simple “Not sure if it’s time?” section to your website.
● Create a short page or form for parents who want guidance before scheduling a consult.
● Answer the most common hesitation questions: age, cost, insurance, treatment timing, aligners vs. braces, and whether early treatment is actually needed.
● Offer a low-pressure next step: “Send us a few details and we’ll help you understand whether it’s time to come in.”
● Use this as a lead source, but treat it differently from a hot consult request. These parents need education first, not a hard push.
● Follow up with helpful language, not sales language: “Based on what you shared, here’s what we’d recommend as the next step.”
The bottom line:
Some families are not ignoring you.
They are just not ready to be sold to yet.
Give them a softer doorway into the practice, and you may capture the patients who would have otherwise waited, wandered, or booked somewhere that made the decision feel easier.
🔥Trending in the Orthopreneurs Facebook Group🔥
💬 401K
It has been about 3 years since anyone had a meaningful post about 401K providers. I am looking for recommendations for a 401K provider with low fees. My CPA and FAS have recommended that I start a safe harbor 401(k) with profit sharing capability. I do not think I am ready for a cash balance plan just yet, but that may be coming in a few years. The FA's recommended Vestwell, but it seems like the last post from 3 years ago, a lot of people were working with Guideline and Ubiquity. What are you all using? Why do you like or dislike it?
🗣️Sharing experiences can help make the right choice for you!
🎙️ On the Podcast: 5 Things That Drive Orthodontists CRAZY l 5MF
In this Five Minute Friday, I’m having a little fun with the frustrations almost every orthodontist knows too well. From referring dentists taking on cases they probably shouldn’t, to patients armed with questionable Google advice, to parents insisting their child wears elastics when the evidence says otherwise, I’m counting down a few of the things that make practicing orthodontics uniquely entertaining — and occasionally maddening.
This isn’t a deep clinical lecture or a practice-management masterclass. It’s a reminder that sometimes the best thing we can do is laugh at the situations we all experience. I share a few stories from my own career, including one unforgettable headgear compliance story, and talk about why boundaries, patient cooperation, and realistic expectations matter. If you’ve ever stared at a patient and thought, “There is absolutely no way you’re wearing those elastics,” this episode is for you.
✨ Final Thoughts
The common thread this week is that AI is moving deeper into the actual work - answering phones, analyzing company data, operating across software, accessing patient records, and increasingly acting on our behalf.
Your action item this week: pick one repetitive workflow in your practice and map out what it would look like if AI handled 50% of it.
Don’t automate it yet. Just identify the steps, the data involved, where a human still needs to make decisions, and what tools would need to connect.
That exercise alone will probably show you where AI can create the most leverage next.
– Mike Vidikan
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