Mike's Newsletter June 2026 | 1
- Mike Vidikan
- Jun 2
- 7 min read
Welcome Orthopreneurs!
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🦾 Mike’s Prompt
🗓️ Plan Your 2026 CE Calendar
📢 Juan’s Marketing Tip
🔥Trending in the OrthoPreneurs Facebook Group
🎙️ The Orthopreneurs Podcast
✨ Final Thought
🚨 News Update
🧠 Claude Opus 4.8 Launches — With a Bigger Focus on Honesty
Anthropic released Claude Opus 4.8, positioning it as a stronger model for coding, agentic workflows, reasoning, and practical professional work. The most useful upgrade may not be raw intelligence — it may be reliability. Anthropic says early testers found Opus 4.8 more likely to flag uncertainty, less likely to make unsupported claims, and better at handling longer, more complex work. It also added dynamic workflows in Claude Code, allowing the model to plan work and coordinate hundreds of parallel subagents.
Anthropic is also having a major market moment: recent reporting says the company confidentially filed for an IPO after a funding round that valued it above OpenAI.
Why it matters: Orthodontic practices do not just need smarter AI. They need AI that knows when it is unsure. For treatment notes, financial summaries, patient communication, SOPs, hiring plans, and team training, a model that slows down and flags uncertainty is far more valuable than one that confidently guesses.
🛡️ Mythos Shows How Fast AI Security Is Moving
Anthropic’s Mythos Preview is already showing how powerful AI-assisted security work is becoming. In Anthropic’s Project Glasswing update, partner teams collectively found more than 10,000 high- or critical-severity vulnerabilities, and Mozilla found and fixed 271 vulnerabilities in Firefox 150 while testing Mythos Preview.
Why it matters: Better defensive tools are good news — but more capable AI security tools also raise the stakes. Orthodontic practices hold sensitive patient, payment, and family data. Before adding another AI vendor, ask about MFA, backups, audit logs, permission controls, HIPAA posture, incident response, and how vendor access is monitored.
🦾 Stop Prompting, Start Delegating — How to Level Up With Claude Cowork
Most orthodontists who use AI are still doing it the slow way: open a chat, type a question, copy the answer, paste it somewhere, repeat. That’s the 2024 way of working. In 2026, the real leverage has moved from asking AI to delegating to it — handing over a whole task and getting back a finished result while you go see patients.
Two tools from Anthropic (the maker of Claude) make this possible, and most practice owners haven’t tried either yet.
Claude Cowork is the one to start with. It’s an app for your Mac or Windows desktop that lets Claude actually work with your files, not just talk about them. In regular chat, Claude responds to your messages but can’t access your files; in Cowork, Claude can read, edit, and create files in folders you choose, so it can actually complete tasks rather than just describe how to do them. It was built specifically for non-technical people — operators, marketers, researchers, founders — rather than engineers , and it’s included on all paid Claude plans.
The shift in how you work is the whole point. Instead of a back-and-forth where you ask and Claude responds, you describe a goal, and Claude breaks it into steps, runs them, reads and writes real files, and delivers a finished result — you come back to the output rather than supervising each step.
🦷What that looks like in an ortho practice:
Point it at a folder of monthly P&Ls and ask for a variance report showing where overhead crept up.
Hand it your last 12 months of production data and have it build a clean spreadsheet flagging your slowest start months
Drop in a messy folder of vendor contracts and ask it to summarize renewal dates and rates into one document
Claude Code is the same engine for power users. It’s a command-line tool designed for developers — so it’s not where most orthodontists should start — but it’s worth knowing about, because it’s where the most advanced capabilities land first. And what just landed there is a genuine glimpse of the future.
💻“Dynamic Workflows” and the autonomous back office
On May 28, Anthropic launched Claude Opus 4.8 and, alongside it, a new feature called Dynamic Workflows in Claude Code. Instead of doing one task at a time, Claude now writes its own game plan and spins up hundreds of parallel “subagents” to manage complex tasks, which check each other’s work and keep iterating until the answers line up, then hand back the finished result. The headline demo was staggering: a developer used it to rewrite a major piece of software, generating roughly 750,000 lines of code in eleven days while keeping 99.8% of the existing test suite passing — work that would normally take a team months.
Why should an orthodontist care about a coding demo? Because the same architecture — multi-agent execution with subagent coordination and scheduled tasks — is exactly what Cowork is built on, and what’s quietly making its way into the practice-management tools you already use. The direction is unmistakable: AI that can take one big, messy instruction — “verify tomorrow’s insurance, run today’s recall list, flag any accounts 90 days past due” — and self-manage a fleet of workers to finish all of it overnight, so the work is done before your team walks in.
👆 How to actually level up this week:
If you have a paid Claude plan, download the desktop app and open the Cowork tab. Point it at one folder you already know well.
Start with something low-stakes and repetitive you do every month — a report you build by hand, a folder you’re always reorganizing.
Describe the outcome you want, not the steps. Let it plan.
One real caution: Cowork can read, edit, and create files in folders you give it access to, so grant access deliberately and keep backups — treat it like handing a capable new team member the keys, and start them on a contained project before the whole office.
Start with something simple this week. But don’t let it stay simple. The biggest wins come from handing AI the tasks that feel just out of reach — the multi-step, time-draining work you’ve been meaning to systematize for years. Comfort comes fast; the real leverage shows up when you start delegating the hard stuff.
✨ Astro Outlook: Jupiter Says “Grow”
This week brings a major shift: Jupiter, the planet of expansion and luck, just entered ♋🦀Cancer🦀♋ (June 2). For the next few weeks, this planet will favor growth through relationships, team care, and nurturing — which is perfect timing for an ortho practice. But here's the key: Jupiter rewards action. This week isn't about waiting and hoping. It's about deciding and committing.
The practical moment: June 8 is a decision day. The moon reaches its half-phase, which traditionally marks a moment when you need to make a call on something you've been hesitant about. A staffing decision. An equipment upgrade. A conversation you owe someone. Indecision feels comfortable — but this week, the cosmos is pushing you to choose.
For Cancer ♋, Pisces ♓, and Scorpio ♏ signs especially, this is your power week. Everyone else: Saturn (the planet that demands direct action and accountability) is still pushing hard in Aries, so the message is the same across all signs — commit to something this week that requires courage.
The people who win this week are the ones who make one bold move and stick with it. Not ten small moves. One real one.
Best use of the week: Before Friday, make one staffing, investment, or people decision you've been delaying. Jupiter rewards the move.
🗓️ Plan Your 2026 CE Calendar
June is stacked with opportunities to learn, connect, and get ahead of the second half of the year.
TC & Marketing Mastery Workshop Charleston
Jun 05, 2026, 8:00 AM – 5:00 PM
Charleston Marriott Hotel, 170 Lockwood Dr, Charleston, SC 29403, USA
Upgrade Your TC & Marketing. Earn up to 5 CE credits! For TCs, Doctors, and Teams
Bookmark the calendar, pick your priorities early, and stop letting CE planning become a last-minute scramble.
📢 Juan’s Marketing Tip
📲Turn Missed Calls Into Starts
Your highest-value lead is often the one your team never reaches.
A parent calls during lunch. A consult request comes in after hours. A new-patient inquiry sits in voicemail until the next morning. By then, they may have already booked somewhere else.
Here’s the play:
Track missed-call volume for two weeks. Break it down by business hours, lunch hours, after hours, and weekends.
Create a same-day callback rule. Every new-patient inquiry should get a response before the day ends.
Use an instant text-back. “Thanks for reaching out — we’re with patients right now, but we’ll help you schedule your consultation shortly.”
Audit your greeting. Your voicemail should feel warm, clear, and action-oriented — not like an administrative dead end.
Assign ownership. If everyone owns missed calls, no one owns them.
Measure booked consults from recovered calls. This turns follow-up into a revenue conversation instead of a staffing complaint.
The bottom line:Missed calls are not just phone issues. They are growth leaks. Fix the response system and you may find starts you were already paying to generate.
🔥Trending in the OrthoPreneurs Facebook Group🔥
💬 “Will being in-network with the corporation prevent me from going out-of-network at my own office?”
One doc recently posted:I was in the same situation. The EIN that owns the corp office is different so it doesn’t matter. That being said, there was an insurance co that kept messing up some claims bc I had worked at a corp office on the same street as my private office. But insurance companies will find every excuse to not pay you!
🗣️Sharing experiences can help make the right choice for you!
🎙️ On the Podcast: If Aligners Aren’t Working for You, Watch This l 5MF
🦷 What if I told you the reason you’re getting better finishes with braces might have nothing to do with the technology—and everything to do with your training?
In this Five Minute Friday, I tackle one of the biggest mindset debates in orthodontics today: Are aligners actually inferior… or are most orthodontists simply undertrained in how to use them? After seeing a recent discussion sparked by Dr. Kyle Fagala in The Digital Orthodontist, I felt compelled to jump into the conversation and challenge some assumptions many of us still carry.
If you’ve ever felt frustrated with aligners, questioned whether they can really produce elite finishes, or found yourself defaulting back to braces because they “feel safer,” this episode will push you to ask a hard question: Is the limitation really the appliance… or is it the training?
✨ Final Thoughts: Your Practice Does Not Need More Logins. It Needs Cleaner Systems.
🤖 AI will keep getting more powerful.
That does not mean every tool belongs in your practice.
Start with the workflows that already slow your team down. Fix the process. Then add automation.
Smart growth is not just adopting faster tools.
It is building a practice that can use them safely.
– Mike Vidikan
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