Orthodontics Resident Creates App for Dentists with Questions

Photo: Seton Hill Center for Orthodontics assistant professor and clinic director Dr. Beth Troy and first year resident Nick Wilson presented side by side at Celebration of Scholarship on campus this spring.

At Nick Wilson’s first job out of dental school, he had questions. And as the only dentist in his office, he didn’t have a great place to go to get quick answers.

“I didn’t have time to read through dozens of research papers and wanted to make sure I had the right answers for my patients,” Nick said. “When you start practicing and have no mentorship, you have to rely on only what you learned in school, texting other dentists you know and hoping they reply in a timely manner or sometimes just searching the web for information.”

Having just completed his first year in the orthodontics residency program at Seton Hill, Nick is hopeful that in the future dentists who find themselves in his situation – and anyone who works in a dentist’s office – will have a reputable place to go for those quick answers.

Nick has spent the last year and a half working on developing an app, Xental Chat, an AI assistant designed specifically for dental practices. After seeing patients for the day Nick has been working on the app during his free evenings, interviewing dentists about their daily pain points to help guide the feature choices and development, finding an open reliable source of information and using his limited background in engineering/robotics coupled with the help of AI coding tools like Claude Code.

While Nick was inspired to create the app when he lacked a mentor as a dentist, he has found two mentors at the Seton Hill Center for Orthodontics. He credits program director Dr. Daniel Rinchuse for instilling the importance of evidence-based practice and assistant professor and clinic director Dr. Beth Troy for being a mentor at the clinic in addition to helping with early testing and feedback on Xental.

“I am proud of Nick for taking the initiative to develop a dental AI bot grounded in legitimate and trusted sources,” said Dr. Troy. “His commitment to advancing AI resources in dentistry will help many dentists and specialists provide exceptional care to their patients.”

He designed his chatbot tool to be useful for the entire practice: dentists and specialists can use Xental for clinical questions and treatment planning support; front office staff can search for answers to insurance coding and compliance questions; and practice managers and owners can find information useful for staff onboarding, OSHA documentation and operational consistency.

“Xental Chat was built to answer the wide range of clinical and operational questions that come up in a dental office every day,” Nick said. “By giving every team member fast access to accurate, evidence-based answers, this app aims to reduce the time clinicians spend searching for information and improve decision-making across both clinical and business sides of the practice.”

To avoid the issues that can accompany using data pulled from unverified sources, Nick built Xental Chat to pull its data from a proprietary knowledge base along with open source research databases. The app cites its sources for every answer it provides, and even tells users when sufficient evidence is limited or lacking.

Nick feels that the integrity of the data Xental is referring to is one of its key features, and something that is a cause for concern in asking available AI chatbots with wide knowledge bases.

“Rather than relying on general-purpose tools like ChatGPT, which raise HIPAA concerns and lack dental specialization/guardrails, Xental Chat is grounded in dental evidence such as peer-reviewed studies, clinical practice guidelines, billing code references, and operational protocols,” he said. “The platform is built to meet HIPAA standards, addressing one of the key concerns that has limited safe adoption of general-purpose AI tools in healthcare."

Nick’s next goal for the app is to integrate with different practice management systems to give providers a true AI copilot for their practice. After completing his program at Seton Hill, he plans to return to the greater Chicago region to practice orthodontics and continue developing clinical tools to improve patient care.

More information about Xental Chat is available at xental.ai, and the app is now in beta testing.