Lindsay Quinn
Hi, I'm Lindsay Quinn with Heartwise Collective. In today's episode of Ortho Marketing with Dean Steinman, you are going to learn all about how AI can actually work for your practice beyond ChatGPT.
Dean Steinman
Well hello everybody out there in podcast land! This is Dean Steinman with Ortho Marketing and guess what? We are back.
Yes, we’re back and we have another podcast for you. We took a little hiatus, but we’re ready to rock and roll again.
Today I’ve got an excellent, interesting, charismatic guest that you’re going to love. If you’ve heard these two letters in the last two years — AI — you’re going to learn what’s going on. If you haven’t, what rock are you under?
Let’s talk about AI. Woohoo! AI!
Today I have Lindsay Quinn here. She’s the founder of Heartwise Collective — an orthodontic consultant specializing in operational systems, financial optimization, and AI.
Lindsay, welcome. Who is Lindsay Quinn?
Lindsay Quinn
Yeah, Well, where do we even start with that question, right? Dean, thank you so much for having me on your podcast.
A little bit about my background — I always jokingly say I’ve been born and raised in dental and orthodontics. My mom was a dental assistant, and I started in a general dentistry practice when I was 16, helping out with sterilization and helping that practice go digital from paper charts.
When I was 21, I moved to San Diego and started working with Dr. Richard McLaughlin. He is a world-renowned orthodontist — the most humble guy I’ve ever met. He’s the “M” in the MBT bracket system, if you don’t know that. That’s where I learned all about orthodontics, systems, and operations.
I then consulted for 10 years with Hummingbird Associates before starting Heartwise a couple of years ago.
Dean Steinman
Heartwise. What's that all about? What's that name mean?
Lindsay Quinn
yeah, Heartwise .
So you know, when I was creating the name I and founding my company, I just really wanted to blend the pieces of work and my style together, which is really all about creating meaningful impact and helping Orthodonis create meaning in their lives, while also bridging it with why systems. Right. So I think that what makes a powerful, high performing practice is Heart systems, operations, and leadership, right, which. Creates our culture.
And so that's that's how we came up with heartwise.
Dean Steinman
Awesome. So you've been doing this for ten years now, right, you're most not the consulting world, so obviously you know as a mission earlier AI and you're an expert in it. You focus on it, you teach it. So let's talk a little bit about that.
You know, what made you pivot to this crazy AI lob we're in now, and you know, and then from there, you know, where's where's the biggest home in practice from an AI perspective that you see?
Lindsay Quinn
Yeah, I mean the AI piece has been really interesting. I think, much like a lot of the paths I've taken in my life, things are kind of uh just happen organically. So with AI, I originally started learning and diving deep into AI to create efficiency in my business. I was really learning it for Heartwise and for me so that we could keep a lean team and also empower our team to to work more efficiently. And in doing so, I've spent the last twelve months now in weekly AI masterminds and learning and have really discovered the power of AI for all businesses.
And because I am passionate about orthodonics and that is what I work inside of, it's also been creating AI systems for orthodontic practices.
So if you were to look at what are practice, they've got so many different components of it there, from from marketing to operations, to building, to scanning, to communications to this and that.
So where does your your AI expertise fit in? Is it putting? Is it putting all the pieces together? And you know, because there's so many different moving parts to a practice, so you know, we're you know what, what's the more thing that practice is need? How you put us all together?
Lindsay Quinn
Yeah? Yeah, I mean that's such a great question. And you know, I think where where I'm at with AI and my firm belief around AI is there there really is so much like you said, right, there's this like vast source resources of information about AI, and I think the stats show that there's about forty six new AI tools being released every day. And you know, I think the real the real power in AI is I mean, the tools are cool, but I think people will drown in tools if they just start stacking them on each other.
The real power in AI is learning how to actually use it yourself, because AI is at a place that you if you know how to work inside of these lllms like plot which is my personal favorite, or Gemini or chat GPT, if you know how to use them powerfully, you can create so much for your practice by yourself without having to take on all of these different extra tools. Right. So I think that that for me is my firm belief, is my goal is that each Orthodonic practice have at least one person on their team that is AI empowered, so that they can create efficiency that they can say, oh, we can use AI to do that, right, And it's not just a prompt, but it's building projects inside of Claude or gems in Gemini.
I mean, if the sky's the limit, I think from you know, based on a lot of the conversations that I have with orthodonic practices and doctors. They're either not using AI at all or they've only heard of chat GPT only use it to generate females. And that's not impressive, right, and it's it's usually like mediocre quality. But if once people actually understand the power and what's possible, it's really exciting.
Dean Steinman
It really is. Let's take a back. I just mentioned LLM, and you mentioned Claude and a few others, and you know, when you said this, forty someone every day coming out. So there is a lot more guys than just chat GPT out there a lot more, you know, So what would how would you help somebody just dive in a little bit further than just stop to realize there's a lot bit more than that.
Then on page one you got page two four fifty seven thousand in this a landbark of of AI. So what would you sell tell somebody to be the first step for them to just embrace it, you know, and to learn you know, obviously taking of course, we'll talk about that in a bit, But how does somebody just get out of their's comfort zone and just learn something new?
Lindsay Quinn
You know, It's it's actually an interesting question so yes, there's there's courses and things that you can take, but AI is the first tool tech tool that can actually train you how to use itself. Right, so you can go into your favorite LLM & chat GPT.
Dean Steinman
And what's that And for those who don't know, LLM means large language model.
Okay, right, all right, so that's that's that's just a different type of AI program.
Lindsay Quinn
Yeah, exactly. And like you said, there's there's there's so many, but the kind of the core ones are Gemini, which is attached to Google, Claude, which is anthropic Chat GPT, and then I mean there's there's a few underneath that too, but those are kind of the main three that we're hearing about about now. I mean, if you watch the Super Bowl, you saw probably Gothic and Claude, and you know they're they're high road now is that they are ad free whereas Chat GPT is kind of sold out and they're having ads on chat.
Dean Steinman
Yeah, they well, they're they're smart like Facebook. That adds up front at the beginning. If you have watched the movie, you know they didn't want to do that, but that how are you gonna make money? And there's so many more out there, too. You know, Grock is a great one that's run and that's run by Elon Musk exactly.
That's that's Twitter's or X's programming, and then all and it's just so many more coming out all the all the time.
Lindsay Quinn
You know, they all have. Their strengths, right, So it depends on how you want to use it. One of the things that I've been hearing a lot lately is Chat GPT is really becoming the consumers large language model.
It's for people who just want to consume things. Claude is more the creator and developers LLM because it has you know, coding abilities, and we've got these agentic pieces, which I mean, if we've not if we're still using chat, if we've not heard of anything beyond chat, Jack put chat, GPT, I don't want to go to art in the weeds and over people's head. But yeah, so you know,
Dean Steinman
so let's talk about a typical practice. Uh A, what how do we get what the dentists to understand that they have to adapt and make change because because everybody is afraid of change.
It's the biggest fear that everybody has, you know, And when it comes to marketing, same thing. I have to help them understand you've got to change the way you promote yourself. This is not twenty twenty four anymore, or even somebody that's been around for you know, twenty five thirty years. This is not twenty eighteen or twenty ten.
Things have changed. A competition is fierce. You have to be more efficient, more effective. So you know, how do you help somebody understand or at least embrace that they have to change?
Lindsay Quinn
Yeah, I mean like change is a choice, right, But I think this is this is bigger than the era of going from paper charts to digital charts, right and now.
I mean there was a lot of resistance about that twenty years ago, but now that hopefully everybody is on digital charts, right, they could never imagine going back and the administrative people who went from typewriters to computers. I mean, could you imagine if we were still living in a world where people on typewriters because that is just what are used to and that's what they're comfortable with. So I think I think the way that you should be viewing this is this right now is the practices that are adapting AI have an advantage rights. It's closing, right, because eventually everyone's going to be using AI.
I firmly believe that. But the people that are using a I definitely have an advantage right now.
Dean Steinman
And so now the next question is the doctor gets it. But now having you know, Mary who answers his phone has been doing that for forty years and they're afraid they may change and in that, how does he get her to buy in? Because it's it's a necessity, you know.
And from my perspective, I come across all the time somebody all the practices and their you know, staffs have been there forever, don't like to make change and want to embrace you know, different different technologies, and this is a big game changer for practices. So how would you suggest that to have a doctor learn about it and then make sure staff would actually do it because he can say I'm more and more in. But if they're not going to buy in them right
Lindsay Quinn
Right? Right? Yeah, I mean it's a great question. And you know, I think, like you said, anytime we're making changes, I think we should just anticipate that there is going to be resistance.
Right even the doctor and the leadership team, they will feel the resistance. But what's important from the doctor and leadership team is to recognize that they're they're feeling some resistance and they're also the leaders of the team that need to pull the team through this to get to the other side of it. So I think. Acknowledging the resistance, but then also just holding people accountable, checking and having systems in place to say if you do this, are we doing this, how is this working? Where are you struggling, and really just sitting with people to help them realize the power of it.
And you know, just because we're talking about AI AI in particular, I think a couple of things, Right. I think that because I heard this, there's there's some team members who feel that are the very anti AI because they think AI is going to take their jobs. And you know, my response to that is, there's there's a lot that AI can do that team members might currently be doing. But the intention is to never not replace our current team members that are a significant piece of the heart of the practice.
We want to enable them to create more human connection. Right, So that's that's the goal with AI. What can we have AI do the repetitive task that nobody wants to do anyways, or the things. We're not doing that.
We could use AI for to get better so that our team members can actually provide more human connection and nurture our patients, because that's really what we want.
Dean Steinman
So of all the systems that a practice has, what would you say are the two or three most important ones? To take the baby steps to integrate AI into.
Lindsay Quinn
Yeah, I mean baby steps. Do something even as simple as taking a report from your practice management software. Most practice management softwares have a report of Dolphin calls it light bar analysis. Other people it's just your procedure list.
But it's a report that shows all of your scheduled appointments for whatever time period. You're looking at, the scheduled time and the actual time. You can take that report, go into Claude, ask it to tell it what the report is, ask it to analyze it, and provide you with a dashboard view of the stats. If you do.
Something like that, you don't need a ton of AI knowledge to do that. You do that, and you have this dashboard that now you can be looking at on a weekly or monthly basis and saying, hey, my schedule is not working. Here's exactly why all of these appointments are fifty percent over time, unscheduled or undertime. We should change the length of these appointment types in order to have a more efficient day.
Because that is an easy thing that every practice could do tomorrow.
Dean Steinman
Now, Do you offer like a you know, help with there's like a library of prompts because you have to teach ai to think like you and to learn how you want things done, because it's really not out of the box kind of thing. You know, it's a smart technology. You know, you know, I'm I use it, you know, non stop, because and I trained it to be, you know, being on steroids.
You know, So how would it so how would you teach somebody to just know what questions to even ask or say? But do you offer that to to them in your help?
Lindsay Quinn
Yeah? I do. So there's there's a couple of there's a few things that we do. But if it's going to be a repeated if it's something that you're going to be doing repeatedly becomes a system. Then what I do with practices is we actually build out what are called projects in claude or you can do it in CHAT GPT, but CHAT GPT is just not my favorite.
But we build out projects. And the difference with that is you can load it with a knowledge base of information you wanted to pull from. So if you've got scripts or protocol or procedures or ideals, you put that into your knowledge base, and then you build basically like a master prompt for that project, so you can go into that project and use it every time and get very consistent output, and it's going to know exactly what you need from it in whatever style that you need. So that's a lot of what I do help practices understand how to do and you know, I think one of the biggest hacks for AI is if you don't know how to do something and you want to see AI can do it, ask AI talk to it like a human and don't use type mode.
Either use an app like whisper flow or voice mode within clod or chatpt and just to speak to it like you were speaking to a consultant. What's going on, here's what I need. I have no idea where to start. Please help me.
You can even ask it for the prompt and it's going to help you create a prompt. So that's what I mean. Like, AI is the first tool that can actually teach you how to use it.
Dean Steinman
How hard is it for a practice to actually, you know, once they take the baby step to actually implement and integrated because they've got so many different softwares out there. You know that they use besides a practice manage software. You know, they have their marketing software or the or the phone system where this or that or the you know where their connection to you know, I terror or what have you? Or so how do you know how do everything working together?
Lindsay Quinn
Yeah? I mean that's uh, the the dream, right which I don't think is an unrealistic dream. We're just not there yet.
But the dream would be that we actually have these AI agents built in and connected to all of our software so that it can do it can be an agent, right, like essentially a team member that can do things inside of these different softwares, which I mean a lot of softwarees do already have these things. But I think you know AI. I mean to kind of come back to the original question is how do we integrate this? Well, I think it's actually just as simple as I mean, how do you integrate Google and Google Search and computers? Okay, you can if you're. Using Google inside of your day to day there's no reason why you shouldn't be using or could be using AI.
Right, And just to add on to that, it's I think a lot of practices. I know the mindset and I live with practices inside of what's actually happening. They're so busy that the thought of bringing on something else is so overwhelming, and I absolutely get that, but that's also the absolute reason why you should be implementing AI because things that are taking you three hours to do.
Dean Steinman
So let's talk about that.
It's like a case study. So you know, you've been doing this for a while now, and practices that do work with you and integrate it and embrace it. How what has it changed their life? Is? Is it made them more money? Has it made them more efficient? Is it may give them more time time to be with their family? You know what's the end result? You know what you want to be faster or better, But you know what, what is the main reason the practice would do it? And then from there what makes them happy?
Lindsay Quinn
Yeah, that's a great question. So you know, I'm just thinking of a specific practice that they were in the process of going from two locations to three, and they really did not have a lot of documented systems and quality control.
Pieces in place. And so what we did is we built out a suite of AI systems for them. AI projects. A couple of those, including an sop architect, so I showed them how they could just quickly record themselves walking through protocols and processes, and how we could use AI to create full SOPs in sixty seconds, so they were able to create documented SOPs, standard operating protocols right for every thing, so that as they scale to a third location, they've got systems across all locations.
And then we put in a place a call a new patient call performance coach where we can take transcripts from calls and run it through our call performance coach which has been trained at an elite consultant level to score these calls, so that now every new patient call is being scored and reviewed, and we've got documentation and an email that's auto generated to send to callers based on their performance. So, you know, just thinking about practices that are scaling and really need to have systems. In place, it's huge.
Dean Steinman
Is there an option or a way to do this in person as well? Because you know, getting people to show you know, to on the phone is not the problems once they get in the chair.
The tc's are not up to snuff on how to overcome jection. So many people, there's so many people on so many options now, so you know, so does AI help from that perspective as well while somebody's there, so they could have you record it, you know, and then analyze it there.
Lindsay Quinn
Yeah. So yes, we also have our conversion coach, which is the equivalent of the T rating the TC performance.
So I really built this project out of me being one person who has a three year old and does not desire to be on site every week. Right, So I can go on site and I can watch exams and I can give feedback, or I can say, hey, here's our conversion coach that's been trained like me along with some other top sales and communication relationship experts, and let's take your transcripts from your exam, run it through conversion coach and give them their top three conversion killers. Score the doctors, score the all that and give them role play for how they could do it better next time, and then a follow up roadmap to that personalized Right, So here's how you should be communicating with this patient, right, converted this exam.
Dean Steinman
Now, somebody who's listening to this, and we want them to take one step today to just put their toe in the water. What should they do have to listen after hearing this, watching this, listen to it. What should they do right now?
Lindsay Quinn
Yeah, I mean I'm going to come back to what I said, right, take a report of your your appointments and Reddit through Claude and see what you get back, because your mind will be blown. I mean, like that is.
Enough to say, Okay, this is worth taking some extra steps. On and learning.
Dean Steinman
It's really night and day.
Lindsay Quinn
Huh, it really night and day.
Dean Steinman
Wow. Wow. Great, Great, So now we're going to do a little self plug here for you. And so you have told us a little bit about the program that you have that is helping practices learn more and to become experts in it.
Lindsay Quinn
Yeah. So, like I said, I am passionate about creating what I call AI practice some ambassadors having at least one team member in every Orthonic practice who is AI empowered so they can say, hey, there's a better way we can do this with AI. So what I'm doing is I have a sixth week AI program starting March thirteenth, and that's what we're doing. So we're going to build out the systems that I've been building with one on one implementation as a group so that people so that team members understand how to actually build these projects, what the steps are, because once they start seeing that.
I know, creativity is going to be unleashed and they'll have the knowledge, power and wisdom to just run with it. They'll be able so much more beyond that.
Dean Steinman
So, if somebody was to learn a little bit more about this program, how would they go about doing so?
Lindsay Quinn
Yeah? Thanks Dean. So I do have a free masterclass coming up next.
Friday 20th. Not sure when this is going to be released, but the free master class is February 20th, and they'll also be a replay available up until March ten . They can go to my website heartwisecollective.com. There's a pop up there for the free webinar and also the replay.
Dean Steinman
Okay, and what somebody, because my podcasts are recorded and saved and people watch them months and months later. So say somebody is watching this in July or June, you know, you know what would be another way for them to learn more or sign up, you know down the road.
Lindsay Quinn
Yeah, so just visit my website. We will if the if the program is not open for registration, we will have a wait list for the next cohort which will probably be in quarter three.
Dean Steinman
All right, And one more shameless plug the website is!
The website is heartwisecollective.com
Dean Steinman
Heartwisecollective.com, Perfect great, Thank you so much.
This was an incredible you know, eye opener, eo opener, mind opener, because I loved this world and you just gave me some great things that I need to do for our clients here owth of marketing, just to help them learn more. So this is great. That whole thing about putting on the port in and every thought of that. So you know that's something that I'm going to be telling three people today to do.
All right. That's that's great. I really really appreciate it. So I have two more questions for you.
All right, So I'm going to give you a gift. I'm going to give you lunch with anybody in history. Who are you meeting for lunch?
Lindsay Quinn
Oh my gosh, is it wild to say Buddha.
Dean Steinman
I've heard people have said Jesus, people have Oh, you know, reader is great.
I don't know who eats. All right, that's that's cool. I love that. And then one more things people, A little bit more about people.
I'm a big foodie, so I don't know if you on your feed, but I just was an asteroid coming hitting earth tonight you have you getting rent to the market now and get your last meal. What are you eating?
I'm going for Thai food. I don't know. I'm on a there here.
Dean Steinman
Right, all right, good for good for you, excellent, appreciate it, all right, so Buddha And Th ai food. That's that's Lindsay's. Thank you so much, Linda, really appreciate it. Everybody out there on podcast land, thank you so much for always being so interactive with us, for being loyal.
You know, the thousand people that follow us and watch us, thank you and love you here. Everybody, just keep smiling. Embrace AI, Embrace technology, Embrace change. I keep saying this over and over again.
You know, I mentioned the Great Billy Bean that thousand times before adapt or Die and this is once again in so many different programs. But you have to do it this, guys, all right, you will be left behind, your practice will be antiquated if you are not using technologies, especially embracing AI. There so this is the expert reach out to her, follow her on social media reach out and of course always just follow us as well. So Lindy, thank you so much.
I appreciate it. Everybody, thank you so much out there and everybody, please be safe and smile.
