The AI Systems Every Ortho Needs w/Lindsay Quinn

AI is going to replace a lot of what consultants do because it has the capacity, it can. So if we go to Clod and give it the brain dump as if you're talking to Lindsay, just see what you can come up with. I've done this on live calls with clients who've said the exact same scenario. We have a high no-show rate. Okay, let's go into Clod and build out the touchpoints and funnels that you need to lower that. It's never been easier. Hello there, everybody, and welcome to another episode of the Orthopreneurs Podcast. I'm your host, Dr. Glenn Krieger. Today's going to be a really good day for everybody listening because we hear so much about AI, but what if I told you that there was a way to bring AI into your practice to really, really make up for a lot of the shortfalls you have currently in terms of systems, policies, marketing, and all the other stuff that you have to assign to people to start from scratch. And let's be honest, with the staffing shortages that we're all facing right now, do we really have the right people in the right seats to do a lot of the stuff that we want to do? And as you know, I tell you all the time, you're the leader of your practice. It should not be your job sitting down and creating policies and systems and developing the marketing plans and all that stuff. That's what you hire people for. But the problem is you can't find the people right now. And when you do, they may not be the people for those seats. And so today we're going to have an amazing opportunity to learn about an alternative that's way more cost-effective. And way more effective. And so put your hands together and let's invite Lindsay Quinn, a founder of HeartWise Collective here. Welcome, Lindsay. Thank you, Glenn. So nice to be here. Appreciate that. Sorry if I start off so fast. I'm so excited. This is going to be really cool because out there in the ether, orthodontists know that I've been a huge advocate of AI for certain uses from the day I started using ChatGPT was literally right after it was launched. And when nobody knew what it was or how it worked, and now everybody kind of knows AI to some extent. But before we dive into what it is you do and how you help orthodontists, can you give a little bit of background about how did you end up doing what you're doing right now? Yeah. Thanks, Glenn. So I've been in orthodontics for 20 years. I worked in a practice, Dr. Richard McLaughlin, for nearly 10 years. And then I've been consulting for the last 10 years, eight years with Karen Moad over at Hummingbird. And then the last two years I've been with HeartWise. Always been a systems person, always an efficiency person. And as things have evolved, those systems and efficiencies have just naturally leaned into AI. So I originally stoked deep into AI for my own business. We've been able to double over the last two years. We've doubled the first year and the second year without adding team members. And that is all because we leaned heavily into AI. As I learned AI for my own business, I realized that there's so much transferable to AI. And I've been able to do a lot of things. I've been able to do a lot of things. And I've been able to do a lot of orthodontic practices and clients that it just, I couldn't not share it with them. Yeah. And again, we'll get in, well, let's start here if it's okay. Can you give people a summary of what it is that you do at HeartWise Collective? Like, I know you used to be really big on helping people develop policies and systems for better operations in their practice. And again, anybody who knows Hummingbird knows the pedigree from which you come. But what is it exactly that you're doing nowadays? And we'll dive into the details of how you do it. Yeah. So specifically with AI, we, you know, we started last year doing one-on-one AI systems builds with practices and we had really great feedback about it. But for me, what the missing link was is that they've got these systems built for them, but they have no idea how to continue to build their own systems. And they're, they're, they're really limited by what I've given them. And so about six months ago, we decided to teach everything we know about AI to practices. So we're now running an AI group coaching program where we actually teach practices how to build their own systems. We build systems with them live each week so that by the end of our program, they've got their systems built. But more than that, they've got the AI skillset and fluency that they can continue to build to their imagination and their needs. So the, the end goal, if you're doing your job right with them is for them not only to have the systems, but also to be able to develop new ones as needed and to modify the ones they currently have. But just so that we're talking the same language or speaking the same language for everybody listening, can you give me just name off three or four systems when you talk about building systems? Yeah, absolutely. So we like to build systems by departments. So really thinking about like your practice or chart, we're plugging AI into every department of your org chart. For example, your marketing department, we're building an AI marketing department that is owned by your marketing person. That marketing department can, uh, is trained on who you are, who you're talking to, who your ideal clients are. It knows your brand voice. It knows your brand visuals so that every piece of marketing you create does not sound like AI slop. It sounds like you, and it knows who you're talking to. And it's visually branded with your branding. Nice. Um, and so it's marketing would be one example. Um, financials would probably be another. Yeah, exactly. So financials, we're building a financial department and it essentially becomes your CFO, right? So it can do everything from over, um, overhead analysis to itemize your receipts, um, give you the action items that you should take based on what it's seeing in your spending. You can have conversations about your, um, your ability to hire and whether it's cost effective based on the growth path that you're on. That really, yeah, like you said, it becomes your financial department that, um, does the things that you probably have a hard time getting from your bookkeeper. So right now, um, the people listening, I would be willing to wager the overwhelming majority of them utilize AI at some point in their day, right? Either knowingly or not. Um, but you know, I think, um, a lot of are excited by it, but I'm sure there's a fair number that are a bit overwhelmed as well. Like, you know, uh, you and I talked before we started recording about the shiny object syndrome, right? Um, do you want to touch on that just a little bit so people know what we were talking about? Yeah. So, you know, no doubt there is AI overwhelm and it is, it's, it's so hard to know where to start or even what's possible. And I think the people can be doing is just start with their highest pain points. That's what I always tell people. Don't be in search of a problem because there's an answer for it, right? So as we're seeing all of these new AI tools becoming available or these use cases, if it's not a problem for you, don't try to implement it. Don't try to learn it. Always start with, do I have a problem? How can I partner with AI to help solve this, bring efficiencies and, um, and do this for me? So, you know, are there any sort of first or second or third use cases that you would suggest people go chasing or is it really specific to what they're facing? I think a lot of us right now are facing a lot of the same problems and we can talk about 500 things out there. You know, what draws orthodontists to anything is more money, uh, the ability to make a better, because they'll tell you, I want better clinical care. I want a better team. I want this. I want that. You can offer them solutions for that all day long. And they look, look at me, you know, stare me in the eye and don't do a thing. Talk about more profitability or making more money, even though they don't want to admit it. That's the first place everybody's looking. Yeah. So, you know, we do build a TC department and in that TC department is a conversion coach. And so, you know, the conversion coach was really built out of me being one person and not wanting to travel all the time. I have a family and I have a four-year-old. So for me to be onsite observing exams all the time, or even watching an exam, that's an hour long was exhausting. And so for me, that was a pain point. That's where I built this conversion coach. So essentially the way the conversion coach works is we can take transcripts from an exam. The conversion version coach has been trained high level to be able to dissect what we could have done better, what the top three conversion killers were. It role plays it back for you. It gives you the follow-up roadmap based on exactly, um, what the objection was or what happened. So our TCs now can just generate that follow-up roadmap and apply that and also continue to learn every single day how they can improve conversion. So I can tell you right now, orthodontics, I've said it many times on my podcast, orthodontists are very smart people, generally speaking. Um, I, I will tell you, they often conflate the concept that orthodontics as a profession, let's be upfront and honest about it is a pretty, easy field to go into and make a decent living right off the bat. You could screw up most of your leadership skills and still make a decent living in orthodontics despite yourself. And I think a lot of orthodontists confuse or conflate the idea, Oh, I'm making a lot of money. I'm a great business leader where in fact, you're not, you're not a great business leader. You don't know how to run a business. You are not a C-suite executive. Even if you think of yourself as a CEO and, and they don't realize how much they're leaving on the table, so to speak, right? I mean, I'm sure in hummingbird, you've seen that a thousand times and there's this sort of self-confirming bias that they have. Oh, I'm making extra money. amount of dollars. So I'm really good at what I do from a leadership perspective when nothing could be further from the truth. You mentioned org chart. There's a fair number of people don't even know what that is. And I'm willing to wager that 90% of the people listening right now, if not more, don't have a written org chart. I have a written org chart, but I did business school at University of Washington. So again, when we talk about these sorts of things that are out there, there's a fair number of orthodontists right now listening to you who are saying, why can't I just take a transcript of my TC talking to a patient and I'll plug it into Claude, kind of like the E-Myth Revisited concept, you know, by Michael Gerber, you know, I'll just do it myself. What do I need to pay somebody else to do this for? So can you explain to those folks what makes what you're doing different than me just taking a transcript of my TC, throwing it into Claude, writing up some prompt or having Claude write the prompt? Um, what makes it? Because you're going to hear right now, they're not going to admit it. You can't hear them. But if you listen really carefully, if you listen just really carefully, you can hear them. They're saying it. Yeah. It's, oh, I love that you've got this lens for orthodontics, right? Because you're absolutely right. They hate me. They hate me. I mean, they don't hate me, obviously, but there are people out there saying Glenn has no idea what he's talking about, but they've never spent time with real C-suite executives. Like they've never sat with a real CEO of a big company and seen how. Differently they think than people running even $10 million worth of three practices. Yeah. Oh, there, there's so many things that I want to say to that. Like one, just relating to orthodontists in general, not really treating their businesses as businesses. Like I love that you guys are running, running the, um, the funnel course, right? It's 5M, right? Um, because 4M. Technically it's 4M, but we can make it 5M. If 5M is 25, better than 4M, I'll take it all day long. It's the make more money meeting. And oddly, sometimes I call it the 4M meeting, which then makes it a 5M. So you see. Okay. So let's go with 4M because that's really what it's called, but I love that you guys are doing that. I think it's brilliant because as a business owner who does run funnels, I just, I am always questioning why are orthodontists not putting these same practices in place, right? They're not actually capturing. At least 25% of the potential, probably more like 40% of the potential in their practice by just simply nurturing the, the leads and the patients already in their system, right? We see it all the time. And by the way, they don't even know what a funnel or a lead is, right? The word funnel. When I use the word funnel around orthodontist, it's the first time in their lives. They've ever heard the word funnel specifically related to orthodontic sales funnel. They don't, when you say a lead, you have to explain to many, what really is a lead, an inbound lead, an outbound lead. Like there's, so again, my point is, yes, it, you have to teach these people this because without understanding it, they're missing every, they're, they're spending tons of money on SEO, tons of money on marketing. And if you ask any of them, what's your ROI in any one of your leads, they have no idea. What's your average acquisition cost? They have no idea what that means. And the process and protocols, right? I would say the most common process I see with practices when a lead comes in is they make one, a phone call or apply one text message to this patient probably two or three days later. And then it's lost, right? There's, there's no nurturing, there's no touch points, there's nothing happening. So, I mean, I think that's a whole other conversation, but to your point, yeah, but to your point, this is, uh, some of this is foreign language to, to the audience, um, to speaking to the work. So the question was, why not dump it in the clod? Why not just do it myself and dump it in? Yeah. So, I'm going to say one other thing real quick here. If you do not have an org chart, because you mentioned most people don't even have org charts. If you don't have an org chart, you can go into clod and just start doing a full brain dump of your context, your team, and who you have and help it start creating your org chart for you. I think it's very critical for any business at any level to have your org chart of now and, and future. Um, okay. Back to the this went wrong? Well, a couple of things. We can't actually put PHI directly into CLOD. So there's a note there. We don't want to take anything with patient information and just drop it into CLOD. But secondly, the conversion coach, the way that we build things as systems and teach people how to do that is we're actually training CLOD via a project and or skills, which I know is a foreign language, but just plant that seed. We're building these projects and skills in a way that this conversion coach has been trained high level. So we give it all of the context of whoever your thought leaders are, whoever you follow, right? Any sales coaches, Chris Foss, Daniel Pink, those are two that I like. We actually train it in those styles, give it all the context of who your patient is, what their limiting beliefs are. We give it a brain that knows everything about your practice. And then we give it all the context of who your we tell it exactly what our output should look like based on certain triggers. So it has two components in the project. It has what's called custom instructions, which is here's how you operate. Then it has what I call a brain, which is the knowledge base. And that is everything it knows. And so it's only pulling from that context. It has very specific jobs. It knows very specific things. When you take the transcript de-identified or through a HIPAA compliant portal, you now have very specific feedback. The output's going to be very specific every time. So we can say we want to know the top three conversion killers. We want to know the follow-up roadmap. We want to know how this could have had a different outcome. We want to know the role play scenario. Yeah. And so what are you doing in terms of, so are they going into Claude proper in the co-working section? Are they going into Claude proper in the co-working section? Are they going into Claude on just a regular Claude section? Are they, is there an app or a product that you create that incorporates all the background information? If I decided I wanted to work with you, what am I getting in front? I'm going through the coaching program, right? So there's some sort of tool in front of me. What is that tool that I'm building on? So week by week, I would say 80% of the time we're building in Claude browser, but then we do spend a couple of our sessions going into Claude co-work and introducing Claude co-work skills can be applied either in co-work or in the browser. We talk about scheduled tasks, which is where we can start creating automations with our skills so that every month we have our overhead analysis delivered in our inbox without us having to do anything. So we're going to talk about scheduled tasks, which is where we can start creating automations with our skills so that every month we have our overhead analysis delivered in our inbox without us having to do anything. So the idea that they're diving into agentic stuff, you want to translate for them what that is so they better understand it and how, more importantly, how it will change their life. Yeah. So, I mean, like first thing to say about that is because these are all, this is a foreign, for the most part, this is a foreign skill set. These are foreign words that we're saying. It can feel very, again, overwhelming and you don't know where to start. It is actually so much easier than what you probably believe it to be. But it is, in my opinion, this is a skill set that everybody in 2026, any business owner, even anybody who wants to work for a business, really needs to start adapting to and learning because you're only going to be further ahead if you start now. Agentic. So agentic. So agentic AI is where we start moving into the department of AI that actually does things for you automatically without you having to prompt it. I think that's. the simplest explanation is that it runs on your computer as if it is a person sitting at your desk and doing something, moving through the steps, clicking on the things, creating the things, but it happens automatically without you having to prompt it. Can you give an example of something that you can think of that works that way? Yeah. So for me personally, I have a schedule task in Cloud that every morning at 6 a.m. runs through my Google Calendar, identifies who my calls are. It does research on the person, their website, their business, anywhere they've been cited on the Internet, gives me those links and does a full report of who I'm talking to, what they're all about, questions to ask, pain points they're probably dealing with, whether or not they're hiring. And that's delivered to my inbox every morning, which I could have an assistant do that for. For me, I used to. That would have taken them an hour per person. Now it just happens automatically. And they wouldn't have been as complete. They can't search the whole Internet the way AI does. There's just no way. Exactly. To explain to people, I'm going to use terms they may not know. It's like ITTT used to be, if that, then this. Do you remember ITTT? It was a website, if this, then that. It was if this happens, then do this. Zapier was kind of like. A little bit along those lines. Again, this is a foreign language to people I'm speaking to a lot. But the point here is this is not a program or an app that you downloaded that says, hey, Lindsay, what do you want me to do for you today? It doesn't quite work that way. It has to be programmed effectively. It's not difficult once you learn how. But I think people don't quite understand. There is a place for a virtual assistant. There's a very good place. There's a very good place for in-person assistants. And then there's a really good place for agentic AI. And I love the way you're using it. I love the idea of it. And again, if most orthodontists would embrace it, I think they'd find a lot more free time to do the things they want to do. And so we know what you do. We know what the product is. Are there different levels of how people can work with you? Or is it predominantly right now the coaching program? Yeah. So we still. I mean, we still offer the, like what I call now, general consulting, right? So we still do the systems because there's still. I mean, AI is amazing. And yes, use AI. But if you still don't have the foundational systems in your practice, if you don't know how to run the report, if you don't know what report to even look for, there's still going to be a gap. So we do work with clients one-on-one in our consulting. And then with AI specifically, the best way to work with us is the AI group coaching program. We've got our next cohort starts September 11th. We run it right now twice a year. So we won't be running it again until 2027. If people are wanting specific, like, hey, I've got a specific build that I want, we do do some of the one-on-one builds still too. But like I said, I firmly believe that the biggest takeaway with AI, the biggest advantage with AI is not us building the thing, but you learning the skillset. I agree 100%. I knew I had another question for you and it just flitted out of my head. I apologize. But it just, it sounds to me like, I remember what the question was. It sounds to me like, you know, this is something that can be a game changer for practices. Because a lot of people say, I'm running out of control. My team doesn't really know what to do, or they do, or they never get it right, right? They're always making mistakes. When in fact, it's a leadership issue, right? And leadership is solved very easily with great policies and systems and great communication. So, what would you tell anybody out there who's saying, I really don't need this. Like, let me rephrase that question. Yeah. What is a quick check-in that somebody can do to look and see if their policies and systems are working effectively? What's like, you know, if my engine is not running properly because I'm low on oil, the oil light comes on on my engine. What is like, I know this isn't necessarily a fair question to ask with no notice, but maybe you got this. If I'm running out of control, if I'm running a practice and my systems and policies and what I'm doing are just not running effectively, what am I seeing? What are the some warning signs that I would see in my practice? You know, because for the people who say, well, I've already got this. I would love your take on what that practice would be seeing. Yeah. I mean, I think honestly, like where I would start is by first identifying all of the KPIs that the practice should be monitoring and just even start here. By the way, folks, key performance indicator, just saying that out loud. Thank you. And if you don't know, as you should even be looking at help, like go into cloud and ask, I'm an orthodontic practice and I really want to dive into my KPIs. Please give me the top 10. That would be the highest impact for me to look at. Okay, start there, right? And always end with, please ask me clarifying questions. That's one of the golden tickets in using any LLM is to always end with, please ask me clarifying questions or please ask me the top 10. Three highest impact questions, because then it's going to interview you and get so much more context. Other thing I'll say, I know it's a little sidetracked here, but full brain dumps, like giving it the context of what you're dealing with and what you need. The framework I always say is it's called ACRE. So assign it a role, give it your context, make your requests, ask your questions. Using that framework is going to automatically, like exponentially create efficiency in your output. Okay, back to the question here. I would start with the KPIs. 10 KPIs, are you tracking them? If not, have Claude create you a spreadsheet of those 10 KPIs and start tracking them so that you can see month over month what is actually happening in your practice and where the gaps are. I think you've got to start by looking at the data. Yeah, and I agree 100%. I think what you would hear from offices that are not running as effectively with policy and systems would be no predictability, right? Like we don't know what the customer experience is like from beginning to end routinely. Mistakes are being made on a regular basis, though many times doctors don't learn about those mistakes because the staff sort of goes one to the other and nobody ever knows, the doctor never finds out. You know, inefficiencies, high no-show rates, you know, all the stuff that, you know, I get messages from orthodontists all the time. Hey, Glenn, thanks for all your work. How do we do with orthopreneurs? I had a question for you. My no-show rate is really high. What should I do? A really well-run policy on your sales funnel will go a long way because it's not the no-show that's the failure. It happens way before that. And those are easy wins that you can use AI for. And like the questions, like what I tell people is go to cloud with the questions that you're coming to me with, right? I mean, I jokingly am also serious that AI is going to replace a lot of what consultants do because it has the capacity, it has the, it can. So if we go to cloud and give it the brain dump as if you're talking to Lindsay and tell it that you are an orthodontic consultant, right? Start with that and then tell it everything that you would tell me, just to see what you can come up with. Okay, let's go into cloud and build out the touch points and funnels that you need to lower that. It's just. And then, you know, I think too, what I find, and I'm sure you're very aware of this, is oftentimes when our systems are broken or things aren't working, we just haven't, we haven't assigned accountability to that KPI or that system. Or we've got three people in charge of that system. And so therefore no one is actually accountable to make sure that we're seeing things through from A to Z. Yeah, I love it. Before I let you go, question for you. What is the most exciting thing fun thing you see about AI coming down the turnpike? That excites you? Yeah, what excites me most is people realizing that they don't actually need to buy all of the tech and tools because they can build it themselves. I mean, like learning how to create your own apps for internal use and even pairing that up with like HIPAA compliant solutions that they can then, right, create their own, you know, proposal and payment site or in digital contract options, all housed internally. I think, I think that's really exciting. You're talking essentially, you're talking about coding, AI coding. Yes, but I don't know anything about coding, right? I don't know anything about coding, but I can use quad code to create me an app hosted in, this is going to be really foreign, but hosted in AWS Bedrock that then becomes HIPAA compliant. And now I can create an end-to-end solution. For whatever I need, that is totally HIPAA compliant. It sounded like a commercial for like AWS. Just now, you know, but that's what you're talking coding. You're talking about the fact that cloud code will code for you and can make you apps and programs and, you know, anything you. Anything. And, and the funny part about it is we're not like even scratching the surface. Like it's in the next year to two years, it's going to become, so much more robust and so much more accessible i i remember the day that um oh a mid journey came out you know for image creation and now like that it's so passe compared to what's available and that was like two three years ago i know that's what i keep saying is ai is the worst it's ever going to be right now and tomorrow right it's only going to get better and i think that the people who get ahead of learning the skill set now they're going to be a year ahead two years ahead of everyone else um and and and will be more valuable to the robots when they run the world yeah maybe they'll befriend us if we know this stuff really well they're likely to let us live so just everybody just really learn this stuff if for no other reason the survival of your family yeah i i hope this isn't true and i will never be on board with this at least i state that now i was listening to a tony robbins podcast um a couple of weeks ago and i can't remember the guy's name that was on but he basically predicted everything that's happening now 40 years ago and 40 years ago they said no way you're crazy that's never going to happen one of the things he said on that podcast is i think by 2036 humans won't know whether the information and thoughts they're having is actually ai or their own brain which is like like i said not not the future that i hope for well i mean look you can look at that as a negative but i could look at that as a positive right like like think about uh now we're going to go down a rabbit hole just because we're geeks and and i say that with love i say that in a very positive way but you know think about this for a second it's cyborg like in some respect but if i could there was a great black mirror episode for people who are black mirror fans on this concept um and nobody's heard of black mirror you have to go watch it's you know like twilight zone stuff but way better um if if i told you right now i could implant something in your brain that was safe proven effective and it would allow you to process information 10 times faster um be able to have access to the entire web instantly in your head be able to shut off any noise if you wanted to um and like you could speak a language in five minutes right like the ability to go to france and speak french i mean who would i mean i'm sure there are many who would turn it down from a xenophobic sort of kind of perspective but i would take that in a heartbeat if if and if and if in doing that i didn't know what was my thought versus the ai thought it wouldn't bother me at all as long as i could turn it off when i wanted to and here's the funny thing is when we get there you won't want to turn it off right you just won't it just it's one of those things just i i don't want to i don't it's like taking a medication if you're sick you you'll feel worse without and you can make the whole argument about the human experience and all those sorts of things but if you don't want to turn it off you don't want to but at the end of the day for me it comes down to is my soul changed and as long as my soul is still my own soul but then again the argument is if your thoughts are your thoughts your soul right it's a huge conversation it's a huge conversation i mean i like the idea if you can turn it off that creates some some control around that until it's so smart that it goes in your brain and says don't turn it off right your thoughts are i don't want to turn it off but you don't realize that's an ai thought right um and i do have a good friend who's a darpa scientist and for those out there who don't know what darpa is it's sort of the government program um for defense projects that are sort of the super sedelthy like you know all the stuff that you hear about now that's the coolest technology on the planet all came out of darpa this guy's phd hopkins super super smart guy he told me years ago um probably 10 years ago he told me that in our lifetime when we die the opportunity to upload your consciousness to a computer will exist the fact that you will continue you could have the opportunity to continue living on through a computer program where you don't realize you're on a computer it's so wild i mean the the thoughts that just popped in my head when you said that is is like a whole another hour here of a conversation but it's you know like on a spiritual level it's like what well does our consciousness ever really die anyways right is it accessible right now you're getting into theology right we're just we're transferring this is going to get very deep very fast i think this one is another podcast but most important people want to learn more or to work with you how do they get a hold of you yeah the best way is to to reach us over email send an email to hello at heartwise collective.com hello at heart wise collective.com yes that's easy enough so um i really really appreciate you being here today as you can tell i've got a lot of passion for this concept so do you of course and um i really think that um for those out there who embrace what it is you're offering i'm going to say a statement agree with it or disagree with it i appreciate it if you're out there listening to this and you feel your office could run more effectively could run more efficiently could run more predictably could run with lower stress could run with with better production better collections better marketing and you just aren't sure how to get there or you feel overwhelmed with the concept of how am i going to do this and i don't have five years to do this please send an email to hello at heartwise collective.com is that a fair statement that's a fair statement and thank you glenn we'd be happy to to help practices reach their potential that's really what we're all about yeah and that's my goal with entrepreneurs is to help help orthodontists lead happier more healthy practice lives i mean living their best practice lives that's what it's about and that's what you do thank you so much for being here today um and look forward to our next chat where we'll pick it up with the concept of of god religion and computers how's that start start nice and light nothing nothing too heavy we'll just theology in the existence of man we'll just start we'll start with ai and the meaning of life there you go i like that that's our next topic all right thank you so much lindsay and just wishing you a wonderful day you too appreciate it glenn all right thank you