AI employees for orthodontics groups
Every orthodontics location is leaking the same revenue. You just can't see all of it.
Across a multi-location orthodontics group, the same work leaks at every office: benefits quoted wrong, Medicaid pre-determinations buried, banding claims missed, chairs left empty when a patient no-shows.
Relay builds AI employees that work on top of the practice-management system your group already runs, covering Dolphin, Cloud 9, Ortho2, OrthoTrac, and Greyfinch. A staff member finalizes every action.
We are not an EHR. We are the execution layer between what your software surfaces and what your admin team can actually get to each day. In 30 minutes we show you exactly where your group is leaking.
Where your orthodontics group is leaking revenue.
Seven places the back office leaks at every location. Open the ones that sound like your group.
Multi-location orthodontics groups do not have a unique problem at each office. They have the same problem at every office, running in parallel with no one seeing all of it at once.
Benefits get quoted from memory or a phone call to the payer instead of a normalized pre-consult card. Medicaid pre-determination packets sit half-assembled because no one person owns the chase. Banding claims are the largest single claims in a case, and they still miss filing windows at a rate that would be unacceptable if anyone were tracking it across locations. No-shows leave chairs empty while the waitlist waits for a phone call.
AI employees that work on top of the PM system you already run close each one of these gaps, with a staff member finalizing every action. The leak stops being invisible.
Orthodontic consult conversion runs on speed. Families shop a few practices and book with whoever responds first, so a lead sitting two days in a shared inbox is a comprehensive case that walked across town.
At three or more locations, nobody owns cross-location triage. Inquiries arrive from website forms, phone, text, insurance-portal referrals, and physician referral pads all at once, and none of it lands in one place. The coordinator at each office handles whatever showed up in their queue, and the rest waits.
An AI employee watches every inquiry channel across every location in one queue, sends a personalized first response within minutes, presents real consult slots, and sends the intake packet the moment the consult is booked. It pre-populates what it can from the inquiry, tracks completion field by field, and flags the specific blanks (subscriber ID, group number) before the appointment. When the coordinator sits down for the consult, the packet is done and the AI handled the volume and the back-and-forth.
The new-patient packet is still a paper-or-PDF chase at most orthodontics groups. Health history, HIPAA authorization, financial consent, and referring-doctor records show up half-finished at the consult, compressing the coordinator's selling time and stalling the eligibility check by a full day. Relay closes this before it reaches the coordinator's desk: the AI does the chasing, and a staff member confirms before the file is final. So leads stop expiring in a shared inbox and coordinators walk into the consult with a complete packet.
Quoting the wrong out-of-pocket in the consult kills case acceptance.
Orthodontic insurance is its own category. Plans carry lifetime orthodontic maximums, waiting periods, age cutoffs, ortho-specific riders, and coordination of benefits when a child sits under two plans at once. Insurance verification in ortho is still largely manual: staff confirm lifetime maximums, age limits, waiting periods, and coordination-of-benefits rules by phone or portal before treatment can be quoted, and no major ortho PM system proactively tracks authorization expiration.
An AI employee runs eligibility for every scheduled new patient across primary and secondary plans as soon as intake is complete. It normalizes the result into one pre-consult card the coordinator reviews before quoting: lifetime max, remaining benefit, waiting period, and age cutoff in one place. For Medicaid and CHIP cases, it identifies every patient who needs pre-determination, pre-assembles the packet from the clinical record, and routes it for one-click staff submission. After submission it tracks status and alerts staff when an approval lands or an approval window is about to close with treatment not yet started. The coordinator signs off and the AI does the assembly and the tracking.
This is the exact step where most ortho groups lose cases: the gap between intake completion and the consult-day quote.
Aligner treatment has the most invisible attrition. A patient misses a few check-ins, wears aligners inconsistently, or delays to the next tray without a clinical review, and treatment time stretches, outcomes slip, and the chair-time efficiency built into the aligner model disappears.
At three or more locations with a mix of Invisalign, SureSmile, and in-house clear-aligner cases, tracking compliance across the patient roster is a manual job nobody has bandwidth for. DentalMonitoring (with 3Shape and Medit scan data) surfaces non-compliance. The problem is that flagged cases sit in a queue that front-desk staff cannot get to every day.
An AI employee monitors the aligner compliance feed across every location, identifies patients who have missed a scan, delayed a check-in, or received a flag from the remote-monitoring platform, and drafts outreach to re-engage them with a concrete next step. For cases approaching a tray-progression decision, it flags the clinical summary for the orthodontist to review before the next appointment. The coordinator approves every message before it goes out, and nothing moves without a staff sign-off. So non-compliant cases get caught and re-engaged before treatment time stretches and the schedule falls behind.
A denial that sits past its appeal window is revenue written off. Work the aging queue automatically and it stops quietly draining revenue.
Ortho billing does not look like general dentistry. Most revenue is monthly installment billing against a banded or contracted case fee, not episodic per-visit billing. The banding claim is the single largest claim in the case, and monthly continuation claims have to match the active treatment period. For Medicaid, CDT codes and required narratives vary by MCO. Clearinghouse rejections bounce back to staff who may not know the fix, so claims age in a rejection queue while the timely-filing clock runs.
An AI employee monitors the submission queue daily across all locations, cross-checks the active treatment roster against submitted claims to catch missed monthly continuation claims, and flags any claim approaching its filing window. When denials land, it pulls them from the PM system and clearinghouse, categorizes each by root cause, prioritizes by appeal deadline, batches the ones sharing a cause, and pre-drafts the appeal or corrected claim for common types. On the AR side it reconciles daily EOBs against the PM system, flags unposted payments and mismatched adjustments, and texts patients on a same-day failed auto-pay with a one-click payment link. The billing coordinator reviews and approves every submission and write-off.
A broken chair from a no-show hurts twice: the slot is empty and the waitlist that should fill it almost always needs a phone call nobody has time to make.
Ortho scheduling is not a simple appointment book. A case moves through a defined sequence: consult, records, banding or aligner delivery, adjustment intervals, debanding, retainer check. At three or more locations that sequencing drifts. Patients get booked inconsistently across offices, adjustment intervals slip, and production doctors end up doing recall checks an assistant could handle. Every week a patient slips past their adjustment window adds a week of treatment time, stretching the schedule and pushing debanding and retainer-phase revenue further out.
An AI employee monitors every active case against its treatment-stage protocol, builds a prioritized reactivation list by location each morning, and drafts outreach to patients approaching or past their next-appointment window with available slot options. When a cancellation opens a slot, it works the waitlist and surfaces confirmed fills for one-click coordinator approval, and flags clinically significant intervals for the clinical team. Every send is approved by a staff member before it goes out.
At the scheduling layer that means your coordinator spends time confirming fills, not hunting for them.
Multi-location ortho groups run a mix of salaried associates, contracted production doctors, and hourly clinical staff. Provider credentialing across all of them usually lives in a shared spreadsheet nobody fully owns. In states where Medicaid reimbursement is tied to active CAQH/DataSpring enrollment, a lapsed or stale provider profile can suspend claims payment until it is corrected.
An AI employee tracks each provider's license expiration dates, continuing-education deadlines, and CAQH/DataSpring recredentialing windows across every location, and alerts at 90, 60, and 30 days. The administrator confirms and routes each renewal. Automation that only covers billing leaves credentialing as the silent stopper, and this closes that gap.
A lapsed profile gets renewed before a payer suspends claims rather than after a rejection surfaces the problem.
Running Invisalign or clear aligners at multiple locations? In 30 minutes we show you exactly where your compliance follow-up is falling through.
See where you're leakingHow this approach compares.
Buyers comparing options typically land on one of four paths. A new PM system is a migration stacked on top of the execution gap you already have. An AI employee layer leaves your system of record in place and adds capacity on top of it.
| Approach | What it means for your group | The tradeoff |
|---|---|---|
| Rip-and-replace (new PM system) | Replaces the platform your team knows, requires a migration that has been documented as taking over a year | Stacks a new disruption on top of the execution gap you already have |
| Generic point tools (scheduling app, billing app) | Solves one workflow at one location type, ignores ortho-specific payer rules | Adds another login, another vendor contract, and another tool that does not talk to the rest of the stack |
| Hire more admin staff | Scales cost linearly with location count | Does not solve the coordination problem across locations; institutional knowledge leaves with each person |
| AI employees on top of your existing stack (Relay) | Reads the platforms you already run, drafts the actions your team would otherwise do manually | Nothing gets ripped out; your team keeps judgment and sign-off; monthly recurring |
Rip-and-replace (new PM system)
What it means for your group
Replaces the platform your team knows, requires a migration that has been documented as taking over a year
The tradeoff
Stacks a new disruption on top of the execution gap you already have
Generic point tools (scheduling app, billing app)
What it means for your group
Solves one workflow at one location type, ignores ortho-specific payer rules
The tradeoff
Adds another login, another vendor contract, and another tool that does not talk to the rest of the stack
Hire more admin staff
What it means for your group
Scales cost linearly with location count
The tradeoff
Does not solve the coordination problem across locations; institutional knowledge leaves with each person
AI employees on top of your existing stack (Relay)
What it means for your group
Reads the platforms you already run, drafts the actions your team would otherwise do manually
The tradeoff
Nothing gets ripped out; your team keeps judgment and sign-off; monthly recurring
Relay is human-in-the-loop by design, so a staff member at your clinic finalizes every claim, every appeal, and every patient message. You are not handing your revenue cycle to a black box or an outside service. The workflows, the insurance logic, and the denial classification are written for orthodontics, not adapted from a generic dental tool.
Works on top of the stack you already run.
Automation only works if the AI employees read the actual data where it lives. Relay works on top of the platform each location already runs, so no office has to switch systems first.
Dolphin is the dominant ortho-specific PM platform. Its own AI features are clinical (cephalometric tracing, treatment simulation), not back-office. Relay's AI employees read appointment and treatment data from Dolphin to automate pre-appointment communications, eligibility checks, denial triage, and post-visit follow-up, with your team finalizing in Dolphin. Weave integrates natively into Blue by Dolphin, so Relay drafts the content and timing while Weave handles delivery. No migration, no new PM login.
Cloud 9 is cloud-native and built for multi-location groups and orthodontic service organizations. Planet DDS launched an open API program in July 2024, covering patient, appointment, financial, and clinical data with event-driven webhooks and OAuth 2.0. Relay sits on top to monitor authorization and insurance status across locations, flag scheduling gaps, and draft patient follow-up that a coordinator finalizes.
Ortho2 has a gated API developer portal on Azure API Management. The DSO-facing API can aggregate KPIs across practices. Relay layers on top through the gated portal to handle insurance verification, treatment-plan follow-up, and recall automation that Ortho2 surfaces but leaves staff to execute.
OrthoTrac has no public open API. Integration is via structured report exports or middleware under a vendor agreement. The migration to Sensei Cloud is a conversion ortho groups consistently describe as disruptive. Relay automates eligibility lookups, denial follow-up triage, and appointment-reminder drafting that front-desk staff finalize in OrthoTrac, with no dependence on the migration completing.
Greyfinch is the most API-friendly ortho PM system available today. It exposes a real public GraphQL API, Greyfinch Connect, documented at connect.greyfinch.com. As of mid-2026 it offers Queries (read) only, with mutations being added as the API develops. Relay reads scheduling, treatment-plan status, and payment balances now. Write-back is gated on mutations as they ship.
CareStack is a cloud dental and ortho PM system built for DSOs and multi-location groups, with an open API that supports eligibility automation, denial routing, and patient communication. Dentrix Ascend (Henry Schein One) serves larger DSOs that include ortho locations. Its API Exchange exposes 700+ REST endpoints (per vendor claim) with OAuth 2.0 and required SOC 2 Type II for partners. Henry Schein One shipped an MCP layer in April 2026 that explicitly invites AI integrations. Relay runs as an AI employee inside that ecosystem, finalized by your team.
Relay works alongside the tools your group already chose. OrthoFi handles much of the insurance and patient-financing workflow natively. Relay flags verified-but-unbooked cases, drafts payment-plan follow-up for unsigned patients, and surfaces expired verifications to rerun. It never replaces OrthoFi. Gaidge tells you where the gap is across locations. Relay closes it: when Gaidge surfaces a location with low case-acceptance conversion, Relay audits that location's follow-up cadence and drafts the corrective workflow for the operations lead. The same pattern applies to Weave and Solutionreach (Relay drafts the content and timing; they deliver), Availity and DentalXChange (Relay triages eligibility and denial feeds), and Phreesia and IntakeQ (Relay chases incomplete intake). Every tool stays in place.
Running multiple systems across locations? In 30 minutes we map exactly where your stack is leaking and which workflow we build first.
See where you're leakingHow we build it.
We start from the problem you feel, then build the fix on the systems you already run. Discovery and your first working AI employee take 2 to 3 weeks. The full build runs 8 to 12 weeks.
Start with a free 30-minute call
A short call about where the work is piling up and what that is costing you while it stays manual. No commitment, and you leave knowing where you would start.
Discovery and your first AI employee (weeks 1 to 3)
A few working sessions with your team. We map your operation end to end, every workflow across your locations, and find where the money leaks and what closing it is worth. You do not walk away with just a document. By the end of discovery we have built your first working AI employee on top of the systems you already run, so you see it pay off in your real setup before the full build starts.
The full build (8 to 12 weeks, start to finish)
We build the rest of the AI employees you mapped and wire them across every location. Nothing goes out until your team approves it, so you stay in control the whole way. One pediatric therapy client had all seven locations live within 90 days.
Proof: Sensory Speech & Occupational Therapy.
Sensory Speech & OT is a multi-location pediatric speech and OT group. Relay built two AI employees on top of their existing EHR and Drive, with a staff member finalizing every action.
The intake AI employee runs the full new-client lifecycle: it schedules clinic tours, gets ROIs signed, requests records from schools and prior speech and OT clinics, requests IEPs, sends medical orders to the child's PCP and follows up until signed, starts authorization renewals about a month out, and sends three-month progress reports and evaluations to PCPs for signature.
The internal auditing AI employee reviews every note nightly against the clinic's clinical requirements, confirms the billing code matches the note, and after billing finds and appeals denied claims and reconciles remittances against the EHR notes.
The group saw 100% claim accuracy, staff 33% more productive, claim denials down 12%, and faster documentation turnaround. Every result is attributed to the client's own reporting, and results vary by clinic.
The same two-AI-employee pattern, intake plus auditing, applies to orthodontics groups. The vertical is different; the leak is the same.
AI employees for orthodontics groups: frequently asked questions.
Relay is not an EHR or a PM system. AI employees read appointment, treatment, and claim data from the platform you already run, through its API, structured exports, or middleware, draft the next action, and hand it to a staff member to finalize inside your existing system. Nothing gets ripped out.
Yes. An AI employee identifies every Medicaid and CHIP patient that needs pre-determination, pre-assembles the packet (photos, X-rays, crowding documentation) from the clinical record, routes it for one-click staff submission, then tracks status and alerts you before an approval window closes with treatment not yet started.
A denial that sits past its appeal window becomes revenue written off. An AI employee pulls denials from the PM system and clearinghouse daily, categorizes by root cause, prioritizes by appeal deadline, and pre-drafts the appeal or corrected claim, so your billing coordinator approves instead of researching from scratch.
No. Relay works alongside them. OrthoFi runs the financing and insurance workflow. Relay flags verified-but-unbooked cases and unsigned payment plans on top of it. Gaidge shows where the gap is across locations. Relay drafts the follow-up that closes it.
The waitlist being full is the point. When a cancellation opens a slot, an AI employee works the waitlist automatically, drafts the reschedule outreach, and surfaces confirmed fills for one-click coordinator approval, closing the gap between the slot opening and a coordinator finding time to call.
No. Relay is human-in-the-loop by design. The AI does the monitoring, drafting, and assembly. A staff member reviews and finalizes every claim, appeal, and patient message before it goes out. Your team stays in control.
An AI employee runs eligibility across primary and secondary plans as soon as intake is complete. It normalizes lifetime ortho maximum, remaining benefit, waiting period, and age cutoff into one pre-consult card. The coordinator uses that card to quote accurately before the case is presented, not after the claim denies.
Yes. An AI employee tracks each provider's license, CE, and CAQH/DataSpring recredentialing windows across every location and alerts at 90, 60, and 30 days, so a stale profile gets renewed before a claim rejects.
It is built for orthodontics. The AI employees account for lifetime ortho maximums, monthly continuation billing against a case fee, Medicaid pre-determination, medical crossover for skeletal cases, and the sequenced ortho appointment chain. A generic dental tool handles none of it.
An AI employee monitors the aligner compliance feed from DentalMonitoring or your remote-monitoring platform, identifies patients who missed a scan or delayed a check-in, and drafts re-engagement outreach for a coordinator to approve and send. Every message goes out with staff sign-off.
Relay is a recurring monthly service, no one-time build and no dollar figure quoted here. You start with a free 30-minute intro call where we show you exactly where your group is leaking, then a short discovery period maps the operation and builds your first AI employee.
Discovery runs the first two to three weeks: team working sessions, mapping the operation, building the first AI employee. Full builds run roughly eight to twelve weeks, depending on the workflows and the platforms in your stack.
Yes. Because Relay works on top of whatever each location already runs, Dolphin at one office, Cloud 9 or Greyfinch at another, the AI employees consolidate the work into one view rather than forcing every location onto one system.
AI employees is how Relay describes the output: a role-based AI that does a defined job (intake coordinator, billing analyst, scheduling monitor) and hands every action to a staff member to finalize. AI agents is the under-the-hood technical term for the software components. The distinction matters because AI employees are designed for human-in-the-loop sign-off, not autonomous execution.
Every orthodontics location is leaking the same revenue. In 30 minutes we show you where.
Free 30-minute intro call, no commitment. We show you exactly where your group is leaking across intake, authorization, billing, scheduling, and aligner compliance follow-up. The work is built for orthodontics, and a staff member at your clinic stays in the loop on every action.