S4 E09: Oral Health is Health

Wright: [00:00:00] Today we're talking about how innovations connecting patient’s oral care to the rest of their health care are changing the dental profession. Hello, hello, everyone. I'm Dr. ArNelle Wright.

Ioannidou: [00:00:11] And I'm Dr. Effie Ioannidou and get this oral health is health. Like I'm breaking the news to you, right? Who would think?

Oral health is health. Yes, it is. Yeah. So I'm so excited about this topic today.

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Ioannidou: [00:00:53] And please leave a review for us. It will help us continue bringing great episodes and great guests. As the guests that we have today.

Wright: [00:01:01] Yeah. So what innovations are connecting patients' oral care to the rest of their health care and changing the dental profession, you ask? Well, that's what we are going to be talking about today.

Ioannidou: [00:01:13] Let's go. Kick it off with the two very special guests, Dr. Jonathan Levine and Ms. Mariya Filippova. See, I used my Greek accent for this.

Welcome to the Dental Sound Bites. We are so happy to have you. And why don't you tell us a little bit about yourself, your work and your podcast, Think Oral Health?

Filipova: [00:01:36] Well, I'll kick it off. Thank you, Effie, for making us feel welcome. And I appreciate the Bulgarian pronunciation of my last name, Filippova. I come to Oral Health as a healthcare executive.

I led innovation and digital care delivery for Anthem, now Elevance Health. So we took care of the healthcare benefits for over 100 million Americans. And in the last couple of years, I've been spending time in Oral Health with partners in crime like Dr. Johnathan Levine to build bridges between different teams in the health ecosystem.

So medical teams, dental teams, mental health, nutrition, all of that contributes to our overall health outcomes. I like to describe myself also as a recovering banker. I served as a banker on the trading floor at Barclays. And so I'm also most recently. Spending a lot of time thinking about encouraging the investment ecosystem and the startup and entrepreneurship ecosystem in oral health, because, as you just said, I believe actually that venture capital and early stage investing is a powerful tool for transformation in oral health and overall health. That's a little bit about me and I have the pleasure and the privilege to co-host a podcast called Think Oral Health with Dr. Jonathan Levine. I'll let him tell you a little bit about himself.

Ioannidou: [00:02:59] Oh, that's great.

Levine: [00:03:00] Thank you, Mariya. Thank you. Well, great to be here. Effie, thank you.

Dr. Wright, great to be on your podcast. You know, for me, my background is immunology and microbiology. I think I just want you to know I went to Cornell, went to Boston University, Goldman School of Dentistry first year and a half, almost two years, was in the medical school. So the dental students, medical students, PhD students were all together.

Got over to dental school, came out, start practicing and I realized that this industry is pretty fragmented. Dentists don't really talk to the physicians and vice versa. We're very siloed. And I will say that from day one, I've been trying to rebrand and change this industry because I think it has needed it.

So I'm three and a half decades in, I'm still at it. I've lived in a lot of different worlds within the industry. I'm a clinician first. I'm a prosthodontist. I lead a team of specialists. I love practicing dentistry, but I've always practiced in a way where I balance it with both academics and entrepreneurial ventures.

And with Mariya Filipova and other colleagues, we're very focused on building awareness of this disconnect and the need for connecting the dots between the two disciplines so that we have an integrated kind of health care approach. Well, I guess we're going to talk a lot about that and, you know, a big focus on that.

So it's just a pleasure and an honor to be here with you today.

Wright: [00:04:18] Oh, we are so glad to have you. I'm very excited about this conversation. I think Effie is too, right?

Ioannidou: [00:04:23] Very excited.

Wright: [00:04:24] Yeah, yeah, yeah. We've been waiting.

Ioannidou: [00:04:26] As a periodontist, obviously we really look into this connection between oral health and general health.

So I'm really interested in listening to your perspective. So Let's dive in.

Wright: Yeah, let's get to it. So you know what? I was going to start off by just jumping into some of the innovations, but you'd said something that piques my interest. You said disconnect between two disciplines. So can you just walk us through that?

And then we'll jump into some innovative conversation.

Levine: [00:04:54] Absolutely. And I'm going to talk through it. I'm going to put my clinician hat on, my prosthodontist, taking care of my patients, which has always been my focus. But the disconnect lies in the fact that 58 systemic inflammatory diseases are connected to chronic inflammation in the mouth. That the mouth is connected to the rest of the body and when the grand rebuke happened in 1840, when the medical school told these doctors who said, let's create a discipline of dentistry within the medical school,  they said, “nah, go open up your own school”. It's been wrong ever since. And what I mean wrong, is that we miss the opportunity because people go to the dental practice and we’re not dentists, we're oral physicians, let's call it what it is. Then they come to the dental practice more than they come to their primary care physician. And we know what the problem is with health care. Healthcare is, it's unfortunately in the West, it's a sickness oriented type of discipline. And we talk about this all the time, Mariya and myself.

And what I mean by that is that we're dealing with chronic diseases. So what are we dealing with? Cardiovascular disease, diabetes, Alzheimer's, all these chronic inflammatory diseases. And really, there's a number of people that do have it right that talk about “let's go upstream, let's build a wellness model, let's get there earlier before these diseases are formed”.

And dentistry, we can really precede a lot of this, we can get upstream. So I call it a disconnect, because I really feel that if we get it right, and if people start understanding, we build bridges between dentistry and medicine, and medicine and dentistry, and we work together, and we can go on and on and talk about you know, health records that we share information and when you refer patients to each other, that we could have a more efficient model, right? 20 percent of GDP is healthcare today. That's a lot of money. That's trillions of dollars. And that can get much more efficient and we can have better outcomes for our patients and get them before they get into these chronic diseases.

Wright: [00:06:55] Okay.

Filipova: [00:06:56] Yeah, I just to add to that disconnect, the thing Jonathan portrayed beautifully, the clinical side of it. When it comes to workflow and payment side of it, there is a vast chasm as well because we know that actually, dentistry lags healthcare in adoption of technologies, but also electronic medical records, and it's not only about technology adoption. It's about mindset of using the technology, and there's studies that show that over 80 percent of medical and dental providers co-located in the same facility. So they're physically located in the same facility on the same EHR. They're still not able to revise mutual patient treatment plans. So the dentist to look into the medical provider treatment plan for the same patient and the PCP to look in the treatment plan on the dental side.

And these might be patients with periodontal disease who also have cardiometabolic issues, where those two connections clinically make a ton of sense. So, technology, we need to get these connected, but also mindset, we need to make sure that our care teams, both the oral health physicians, as Jonathan calls them, And the healthcare team is there.

And the last disconnect at the risk of calling this a doomsday environment or scenario, if you will, from an investment point of view, if I ask you, how much do we spend as percentage of total spending on dental care? The percentage is between five to eight percent. Yet, when we look at the investment we put in, in dental startups, as percentage of healthcare investment in healthcare startup, the percentage is less than one.

So there's a disconnect in the amount of money and investment that we're spending in innovation as measured by early stage venture investing. So no wonder we decided that there's need to talk about bridging gaps and bridging silos with our podcast.

Wright: [00:08:56] I like that. So, Jonathan, can you tell us about some interesting innovations?

Can you make us and our listeners aware about some of these innovations that are changing the way we approach oral health? And maybe just walk us through the importance of these.

Levine: [00:09:11] I'm happy to answer that question. It's a near and dear to my heart. So people understand the concept of microbiome. They're becoming educated about the gut brain axis.

They understand about leaky gut. When they start learning about that, the mouth has microbiomes and that there's a balancing act of good versus bad bacteria, and that there are certain environmental effects that will impact the health of the mouth when they understand that the mouth can see the gut and that the body is an ecosystem and that one connects to the other. There are things that we do in dentistry that can elevate this awareness. So for instance, salivary testing will tell you what's happening microbiologically, right? So we've come a long way. Beyond just telling our patients to brush and floss and to, you know, to do a good job with home care.

We have diagnostic tools today in the dental office that allow us to explain to a patient and to show them and to discuss what is that microbiome like. We have CBCTs, cone beams, computerized demography, the ability to take CAT scans as a standard of care. So instead of 16 x-rays, let's take these high tech CBCTs that give us incredible amount of information.

So all the way from the temporal mandibular joints and the top of the sinus to the airway. And we can start diagnosing sleep. Sleep, it has to be diagnosed jointly. You have to have the dental and you have to have the medical working collaboratively. So we can go on and on about this, but there is these research that has turned into technology that is allowing us to work jointly, that we need to work jointly with our medical colleagues. 

Medicine in general is fairly siloed, right? You know, there's areas there that they can improve and they don't have a universal health record. Well, when it comes to medicine and dentistry, you know, we're, we're behind that one. And what we're saying is because of new innovation, whether it's, you understand your microbiome, you, you have an opportunity for the dentist to help a patient, not through a CPAP, but maybe a mandibular advancement device.

There are lasers that tighten up palatal tissue called NightLase from Fotona. There are all these tools that we have that we can really do a lot more as, as these oral physicians. Okay, I really do believe that dentistry needs to be rebranded, rebranded in the eyes of the dentists themselves, because it will help elevate.

And this comes down to, you know, which is more Mariya's world, because she knows a lot more about this than I do, we talk about a lot, is the payers, is how do we get insurance companies to help the preventative approach so that the dentists are incentivized properly through different, you know, insurance companies, because it's basically insurance is kind of broken in this country.

And we spoke to, uh, from the ADA, Marko Vujicic. And I got his last name perfectly stated. I think that was a miracle. We had an amazing chat with Marko and it really, having that conversation with him, he built so much awareness because he gave us the data. To support a lot of this conversation that I'm having.

Ioannidou: [00:12:29] Since you're bringing this up, this was my next question. You really did have an amazing segment with Marko. What was the biggest takeaway from this conversation? And I know Marko has so many great ideas and so much data to present. He's unbelievable.

Levine: [00:12:43] Energy is unbelievable. Yeah. Mariya, we've never met such an optimistic economist in our lives, right?

Filipova: [00:12:49] We love optimistic economists. That's the, because they're, they have the passion for the connection between oral health and overall health and the facts to back it up. First of all, I invite your listeners to come to the Think Oral Health podcast and find that episode with Marko because we won't do it full justice here and it's worth a listen.

I think the overarching theme of that episode, the reason both Jonathan and I love that episode is because it truly encapsulates what we've committed our careers to do. And ultimately what the episode provides multiple, multiple data points on is the notion that by incorporating oral health interventions into the treatment plan for a patient that leads to overall higher clinical outcomes, improved clinical outcomes, and reduce total cost of care.

I'll say that again.

Wright: [00:13:45] Yeah.

Filipova: [00:13:45] The way to improve overall health or clinical outcomes and reduce total cost of care is to incorporate the dental team, the oral health team into the care team of the patient. And that's true for all the different conditions that Jonathan was describing. It’s true for the chronic diseases, from diabetes to hypertension, to cardiovascular disease to oral cancer, colon cancer.

And the most expensive things like preterm labor, I mentioned I was part of the Anthem Digital Healthcare Delivery and Innovation Team, and one preterm labor to get mom and baby out of the NICU costs upwards of $500,000. And on average, that mom and baby later down the road are more expensive members to take care of.

And we know, I don't need to, I mean, I'm in the company of great physicians here. Periodontal disease has increases your risk of preterm labor four to five times. And so when we look at the true ability to deliver care in a fully integrated way where the patient is the center, not the payment model, not well, you have dental insurance that covers this and you have medical insurance that covers this and these are two separate teams.

So I think that's fundamentally the economist's point of view is by adding preventative services, by adding oral health care services to the care team, what are the end outcomes? Oh, and by the way, those five conditions that we talked about, diabetes, cardiovascular, preterm labor, oral care, sleep apnea, the combined total is over $1.5 trillion of spending.

These are the most costly comorbidities in the healthcare system, and all of them have connections, increased risk to oral health conditions. So that's the perspective I have, because it's not only making clinical sense, but it also makes good business sense to do it.

Levine: [00:15:45] Marko had a great line.

He said, we have to rebrand the value proposition of oral health. And I love that. And I stated as a statistic that over COVID. People with periodontal disease, active periodontal disease, were five times more likely to end up on a ventilator. Think about it. And everybody understands about comorbidity factors and cytokine storms and the elevation of our immune response from these inflammatory systemic diseases, and it's no different from the mouth.

If anybody's getting this right, it's the functional medicine people. They're amazing. When you listen to Mark Hyman and Andrew Huberman and a number of these people, and they really talk about the body as an ecosystem. So that's what has to happen. And when you elevate dentistry from a standpoint of where it is within the whole healthcare milieu, you start to understand that we can be much more cost effective and with greater outcomes for our patients.

Ioannidou: [00:16:39] Interestingly enough, though, and I hear you, my entire career, all my research, when I was back at UConn, but now also at UCSF. was focused on this periodontal medicine, basically oral systemic connections, mainly with chronic kidney disease. But interestingly enough, as you mentioned, Jonathan, all these are very complicated, very complex chronic diseases.

And it's really, really, really, really hard to isolate the effect of periodontal therapy on the actual inflammatory status of all these, you know, diabetics, cardiovascular, kidney disease patients, preterm, right? So that's why we don't really, up to now, we don't have really very strong randomized controlled trials that really justify this.

And we can put our finger on and say, okay, this is what it is. We can treat the patient and we can prevent preterm birth. We still don't have this data. We have the biological plausibility and we have the understanding and we have the associations, but we are still a little bit behind to making these very, very strong statements.

But I hear you. This is, you know, there are the connections. I work with dialysis patients for the last more than 15 years. Complicated people. They're very sick people. You know, you can treat their mouth. All day long. And we did. It's very hard to see CRP drop.

Levine: [00:18:06] Yeah. Yeah. You know, I know Moise Devereaux from Columbia, the epidemiologist that did all the InVEST studies.

Ioannidou: [00:18:13] Sure.

Levine: [00:18:13] And he says to me, he says, look, cardiovascular disease is a constellation of risk factors.

Ioannidou: [00:18:19] Yep. Exactly right.

Levine: [00:18:20] Right. So if you're looking for periodontal disease, and if you're just looking at specifically causality, it gets hard to prove. But if we, we understand. The immune response in my background is immunology, and then, of course, we all study it, you know, in graduate school and postgraduate school, but as we understand that, we can understand how, if you have the body that's overwhelmed from an immune response standpoint, because of these multiple chronic inflammatory diseases in the body, that, of course, knowing cellular immunity and how the cells work, you start to understand these conversations very well.

The truth of the matter, and you said it very early on, oral health is health.

Whether you say oral health is health or healthcare. And we know that we have diagnostics today that we can make our patients healthier by getting upstream before those chronic inflammatory diseases. Even if we just saw the patients more often and made a referral because they had high blood pressure.

Just that, or that the physician is dealing with a diabetic patient and hasn't had a dental examination for two years. And we understand the effect of inflammation of the gums on, on diabetes. So again, you know, I think we have enough data to start ringing the bell that, you know what?

You doctors and dentists should really start working together a little more.

Filipova: [00:19:44] Yeah.

Ioannidou: [00:19:44] Good point. Very good point.

Filipova: [00:19:46] Yeah. I'm far from it to debate the literature on it, but I do believe that there is enough published studies at least from 2008 2018 to now where we're seeing the connection and by the time we see it in claims, it's going to take a couple of models integrated care delivery models where even if their savings from taking care of a mom who is high risk pregnancy and avoiding preterm labor, the savings would accrue on the medical side, not on the downside.

And so it's hard to keep, to design those studies in clinical settings and workflow settings because the incentives are not aligned. So the literature that exists, there's clinical connections. We just need to operationalize them in workflow now.

Ioannidou: [00:20:29] Oh, for sure.

Wright: [00:20:30] We'll be right back.

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Wright: [00:21:41] Welcome back to Dental Sound Bites. We're having a conversation about how innovations connecting patients oral care to the rest of their health care are changing the dental profession with Dr. Jonathan Levine and Ms. Mariya Filippova.

If we were going to do some rebranding or reimagining dentistry, I heard that that word come up twice today, rebranding. What do you think the future of dentistry looks like in terms of technology and integrated patient care?

Levine: [00:22:07] Yeah. Well, we should ask ourselves, why do we want to do it, right?

And I want to make a big argument. Mariya and I and Marko talked a lot about this. We want to rebrand it. We want to create awareness because it's the young dentists that are coming out of dental school, that are coming out of specialty program, that are working in practices, that are bringing the new technology, that are, are going to be the future of the profession.

And we want them to be hyper, knowledgeable about this connection between the mouth and the rest of the body. If we don't adopt new technologies, we're going to stand still. And we know in every profession, in every industry, if you stand still, you're going to move backwards. If we look to innovate, if we look to be creative, if we look to learn and be open minded and really get out of our comfort zone and push ourselves to that next level, there's going to be better outcomes.

This is across every industry. But we're talking healthcare, and I'm talking the profession that I've spent the last 35 years in. And for me, it's really taking some risks. It's these academic institutions really pushing the new knowledge, not overselling it, but based on good research and good science and the adoption rate.

You know, 17 years in medicine, longer in dentistry to adopt new technology that has to be accelerated, and it's really elevating and reinventing, I think, a profession that, I'm going to go back to this Marko conversation because we're all, you know, we're talking to folks, you know, we're all involved with the ADA and he was talking about we’re in a golden age of dentistry. There's a convergence of trends that need to happen, right?

The payer model needs to change. Adoption of these new technologies need to change, right? People's awareness of the importance of the connection of how important the oral physicians are and the young dentists to elevate from a self esteem standpoint of how relevant they are in the whole healthcare model, you know, that's going to happen.

So that's where I get real excited because it's really, I hate to say it, it's like the youth, you youth is going to be our future, you know, and these are the people coming out of these programs and, and are going to be lighting it up within their profession that have the energy and, and bring the optimism and bring this change both to, you know, our, our overall people in our profession, but really in our patients.

Ioannidou: [00:24:36] This is a very good point. And you mentioned before electronic health records and how disconnected we are or how connected we could be. And what I see in academia, right, what I see is this. So in San Francisco, where UCSF is located, dental medical schools on the same street next to electronic health system that speaks to each other.

So there is a direct connection. The students are trained with this philosophy of the direct communication with their friends, medical students, right? So they do have access to the entire patient record. They treat the patients as a whole, or at least our goal is this, right? We are aiming at this.

And I think this generation being trained like this, having access to this, using now UCSF developed AI system to analyze data of these records, right? So it's a very different mindset. And I completely agree with you that technology and innovation is starting to become part of the dental student, medical student training, and perhaps bridging these divisive, you know, whatever, culture or myth or philosophy that pre-existed.

Wright: [00:25:52] Yeah.

Filipova: [00:25:52] Dr. Effie, how much of the training that you see in UCSF, the dental school students are exposed to includes basic business fundamentals about the business of healthcare or technology literacy.

Ioannidou: [00:26:05] Very little. Don't even go further. Very little. I mean, I don't know if there is any school that expands on this.

We have discussed with ArNelle extensively about this, even simple practice management techniques. Very little. I mean, this is another barrier that we have to break for sure. For sure, we always have these discussions.

Wright: [00:26:23] I'm not too far removed. I'm kind of getting close to being far removed from dental school.

But yeah, it's very, very little. And it would be very beneficial coming out of dental school if there were more, to be honest with you.

Filipova: [00:26:34] I'll share just an example. That's a bright initiative that's moving in that direction. I haven't seen, to your point, standard curriculum incorporated or classes or, uh, trainings incorporated in the standard curriculum.

But what I've seen, at least in my own Alma mater, I'm a graduate of the business school at Harvard. We have an innovation lab at Harvard. And just as I just asked you now, I, I went to our alma mater, the business school, and I asked them how many of the mentors or the resources in the iLab cover innovation in healthcare or specifically oral health.

The answer was zero. Right. And then conversely, Dean Ginobili at the Harvard School of Dental Medicine, there was nothing that they were offering that was two years ago to, to the students there. So now they've created a new program. It's called an Expert in Residence.

Wright: [00:27:28] Wow.

Filipova: [00:27:29] In the iLab that is available as a resource to medical school students, dental school students, business school students, that has that experience, that every student can come and has access to that if they want to work on their own startup, if they have a technology question.

All these students are coming together in that shared resource. To me, that's a great model to at least start that dialogue between the different disciplines at student's level.

Wright: [00:27:55] It's amazing.

Ioannidou: [00:27:56] At the graduate school level, there is a lot of innovation at UCSF. You know, we are next to Silicon Valley. So there are definitely at the graduate level, a lot of startup and a lot of innovation, undergraduate level, student level, not much. 

But Will, Will Giannopoulos, who is a very close friend of mine. Yes. He's a very forward thinking as Mike Reddy here at UCSF is. So I think both of them graduate, Harvard graduate, by the way. So in the next few years, I think that we will see a different perspective and a different ideas at dental student level.

Levine: [00:28:28] What I have found, it always starts with leadership. So if you have a certain person at the top at Harvard or UCSF and are bringing these ideas out, it's such a unfortunate, that there's such a silo effect in these different disciplines. I like to say life is a team sport and so is oral health. And so is healthcare.

We have to collaborate. We got to work together. And that's really the truth. You know, in my clinic, that's always been, kind of, my center of the universe. 26 people, we have all specialists under one roof, ceramists. And I finally, after talking about this stuff, I said, you know what, I'm going to do something about it.

And I did. And I never thought I would do this because I got enough on my plate these days, but we're building a new office downtown in Manhattan, and we're going to connect the dots between medicine and dentistry. If it's the last thing I do, and we're going to partner with the healthcare industry. I have a guy who is amazing at product, and we're going to create a patient portal.

The patient owns their, their records. And we're going to connect to the physicians that we're going to be working with down there. And there's so many things we can do in dentistry from a baseline, you know, in 24 states, nurse practitioners can do everything a primary care physician can do. So we can set up with good intake forms, just to give you a little hint of what we'll be doing, good intake forms, nurse practitioner that is talking on a telemed consult, and then learning from them, make the referral or do certain things within the clinic that's within the purview of what we're able to do. 

There's a number of places that are doing this. Pacific Dental has done this with Steve Thorne. They have five offices that they share the same space of medicine and dentistry. And so we're seeing these outliers starting to happen.

And as an optimist, I think this is a fantastic future where building business models that improve upon the current business model that is traditional and needs to get reimagined and redone.

Ioannidou: [00:30:27] This is actually a very nice and maybe you touched upon the next question that I had, but in addition to this, do you think that there is any other way that the dental professionals can be the leaders building this holistic idea of health?

Levine: [00:30:42] Yeah. 110%. I'm going to do it.

Wright: [00:30:45] Problem solved.

Levine: [00:30:48] I'm going to do it. And I'm not doing it alone. Yeah. I'm going to do I'm bringing, I'm a team guy.

Wright: [00:30:52] Absolutely.

Levine: [00:30:53] I grew up at Cornell University. I was, I played this crazy sport called lacrosse. By the time we were seniors, we were national champs. I had this amazing coach and I learned from day one, that you want to do anything in life, you got to do it as a team. 

And I got into dentistry and all of a sudden I see this solo sport and I go, “oh my God, what did I get myself into”? And I've been trying to change it. But I really, I want to bring colleagues in there. We have a Glo Good Foundation, Henry Schein helped us build a 14 chair clinic in Lutheran, the Bahamas, it's near and dear to all of our hearts. We bring down about a hundred people on these missions. But it's so much, that we can do by working together and that's really the difference, whether you're in research, whether you're in business, it's just so hard to do things alone. And, and that's why that woman in the red, that Mariya Filipova, I couldn't do anything on my podcast if I didn't have the partnership with her, because she sees things from her angle and we work together just like this conversation. We all come from a different context.

Wright: [00:31:51] Yeah. Of course, we know that on your podcast, which by the way, we want to link to the podcast that you had with Marko in the show notes, but on that podcast, we know that you all speak to a lot of interesting people and we'd love for you to share with our listeners some of the surprising things that you've learned.

Filipova: [00:32:08] Wow. Um, I think this podcast could end up every episode is almost like a chapter of a book of health and healthcare. Actually, the origin story of the podcast and my collaboration with Jonathan was. Years ago, I was speaking at a health care conference in San Diego, and after the conference, we got together at a networking event, and out of the hundreds of people at that healthcare conference, guess how many oral health physicians were there?

One. And the one brave oral health physician who dared to go to the healthcare conference was Dr. Jonathan Levine. We got introduced by a common friend and I had multiple ah ha moments because by that time I've already had experienced the siloed nature of the business model between healthcare and dentistry, from my experience, at  one of the largest health insurance companies in the U.S.

So Jonathan layered in that clinical connection, oral systemic health, clinical connection. So we started having those periodic conversations, him and I, where I would as him questions. He would ask me questions. And at the end of the conversations, we would be like, wow, that was really insightful. Um, and one day we said, well, “we should probably turn this into a podcast” and the podcast was born out of the genuine curiosity and humility with which each one of us approached each other's expertise and areas of domain expertise. That's what drove our podcast together. Because again, it was in the service of raising awareness and building bridges across different silos.

We invite guests to the podcast that are carefully curated from specific silos, if you will. And we invite unexpected guests. Our first guest was a friend of Dr. Jonathan Levine and the inspiration behind why Jonathan does the missions in Eleuthera, Lenny Kravitz. So we started with a rock star literally talking about the importance of oral systemic health.

And since then, we've been inviting guests from cutting edge research from the Foresight Institute, the research around Alzheimer's with Dr. Hattice.

Ioannidou: [00:34:24] Oh, you had Hattice. That's nice. Yeah.

Levine: [00:34:27] Yeah. She's a dear friend.

Ioannidou: [00:34:29] I love her. She's so good. Love her.

Wright: [00:34:31] Oh my gosh.

Ioannidou: [00:34:32] These are my people.

Levine: [00:34:33] That's my, that's my people too.

Ioannidou: [00:34:35] OK, we have the same people.

Levine: [00:34:36] We have good people

Wright: Yeah

Levine: We’re lucky 

Filipova: [00:34:39] That's right.

Levine: [00:34:40] Yeah.

Filipova: [00:34:40] So there's plenty. And I invite you to go to the website ThinkOralHealth.com because you would find anyone from the chairman and CEO of Henry Schein to the CEO and founder, uh, co founder, uh, Steve Thorne at Pacific Dental to, you know, Dr. Maria Ryan, who leads clinical at Colgate. But also probably some unexpected names like, um, pediatric oncologist, who is a thought leader in all things technology and digital, Dr. Daniel Kraft, or an investor in healthcare, who was the first investor in a company called Livongo, which was the first company who had the audacity to connect nutrition and mental health into the clinical pathways for the treatment plan for diabetic patients.

And then, as you know, Livongo got sold to Teladoc for billions of dollars. So Lee Shapiro was on our podcast, one of those enlightened healthcare investors. And countless, countless other great bridge builders, as we call them, across different expertise and silos. Jonathan, who am I forgetting? There's so, so many.

Levine: [00:35:44] You described it beautifully. And I, and I think when we look at our industry, I think what we all look to do is to bring in all of the people that have an impact. Because the truth of the matter is we need business people. We need funding. We need innovators. We need clinicians. We need researchers. We need scientists all the way down. We need academics. 

So many things are changing. Business models are changing. Look at the DSO growth today. Versus the, uh, one dentist, one assistant, one hygienist business model of 25, 30 years ago. So many things are changing just from a digital workflow perspective. Look how we scan design, manufacture in our, in our dental practices.

I'm known in dentistry for diagnostics. I'm just, you know, I'm all over the, the, the opportunity to really diagnose with our new technology and to be able to, you know, get to things early for our patients and push that through into the profession. So, you know, it's, it's a, I really think it's a very exciting time for all of us.

And the podcast you're doing and what we try to do is really just to raise awareness for our profession. And also to, you know, inspire the people who are going to make potentially a big difference. And that's pretty good. What else can we do?

Ioannidou: [00:36:57] You summarize it so well with the big idea and how you see the future.

And I think that's a very optimistic statement you made.

Levine: [00:37:04] Thank you. I am an optimist and so is Mariya Filipova.

Filipova: [00:37:09] If there's any call to action, because Jonathan knows I'm biased towards action and I don't shy away from calling people out. I think the message hopefully of this conversation is, please get involved.

Medical, dental, integration, oral, systemic health is here. It's happening today. It's happening on multiple fronts, and it's not something that you could wait out until it passes by as a fad. So if you're a dentist, and if you're practicing general dentistry or any of the specialties, just ask yourself, what is, “what can I do that would help my patient's overall health? What happens to my patient when they leave my office?”

If you're a benefits carrier or benefits provider, ask yourself how the funding and the spending on that patient's services today are impacting the overall total cost of care. Because self insured employers, who are the vast majority of payers in our system, they care about that, they care about the bottom line. 

And that would be my, my invitation for everybody to get involved, get curious, ask questions, and even investors on the investor side. There's no shortage of innovative companies in oral health that are driving total cost of care down and improving outcomes. So get involved.

Announcer: [00:38:29] On the next Dental Sound Bites.

Wright: [00:38:33] Hello. Hello friends. Dental Sound Bites is gearing up for an exciting season five.

Ioannidou: [00:38:39] And if you just can't wait for a new season of Dental Sound Bites, and I know you probably can not wait, you can get a sneak peek at SmileCon 2024 in New Orleans. The best location.

Wright: [00:38:52] That's right.

Ioannidou: [00:38:53] Yeah, baby.

Wright: [00:38:54] We're going to be doing a live episode recordings in the podcast and Influencer Hub. Please join us to hear these episodes in person before they hit your podcast feed. You never know. You might just end up on the episode with us.

Ioannidou: Surprise, surprise.

Ioannidou: Thank you guys. This was really, really interesting. Very informative. I really enjoyed speaking with a recovering banker. I love this. 

Mariya and Jonathan, this was a pleasure. I never enjoyed a conversation with a prosthodontist as much as I enjoyed ours. So yeah, that was great. That was great. Oh no, I'm just joking.

I have very good friends that are prosthodontists. But anyway, this was really, really a very nice discussion. If you can tell our listeners where they can find you online and follow your work. So give us the tips now.

Levine: [00:39:55] Yeah. For me, very, very simple. The website for my practice, www.jblnyc.com and, uh, separately, drjonathanlevine.com. 

Anybody want to know about our foundation and like to get involved, we have an amazing time at our missions down in Eleuthera. With Mr. Lenny Kravitz, and we bring down about 100 people every year. That is the glogoodfoundation.org. You can find out more about that.

Filipova: [00:40:21] And I'll echo, you can find us on thinkoralhealth.com. And you can find me and all the work and initiatives that I'm supporting and leading right now at Filipova.health. And then look out for my next article in Forbes, because that's going to be a continuation of this conversation today.

Levine: [00:40:39] Great.

Ioannidou: [00:40:40] Oh, that's great.

Wright: [00:40:41] All right. Thank y'all so much for being on the show today.

Filipova: [00:40:44] Thank you for having us. This was great.

Levine: [00:40:46] Absolutely. A pleasure to be on the show. Thank you so much.

Ioannidou: [00:40:48] Thank you guys. It was so nice.

Filipova: [00:40:50] To be continued.

Ioannidou: [00:40:51] To be continued.

Wright: [00:40:53] Yeah. Hopefully we'll have a part two.

Ioannidou: [00:40:55] If you like this episode, share it with a friend, then be sure to subscribe to this podcast, wherever you're listening. So you can get the latest episode. You can also rate, write a review and follow us on social media.

Wright: [00:41:11] Yeah. And don't forget that the conversation continues on the ADA Member App. Be sure to catch. All of the bonus content and everything that you didn't hear on the show.

Announcer: [00:41:21] Thank you for joining us. Dental Sound Bites is an American Dental Association podcast. You can also find this show, resources and more on the ADA Member App and online at ada.org/podcast.