One month in: the question 300 dentists actually asked
We opened DentalTechHub to dentists on 1 July, web and iOS the same day, with 500 vendors already classified by our editors.
One month later we have something more useful than a launch number: a record of what practice owners actually ask when nobody is selling to them.
It was not what we expected.
The finding
Month one brought more than 300 conversations with Mola, and 1,121 questions between them. That works out to three or four questions per conversation, which tells you something on its own: people did not ask one thing and leave.
What they asked about was their own practice. Not categories. Not what is new in dental AI.
“Will this work for a periodontal practice?”
“I am looking to grow this year. Where do I start?”
“I am not sure whether I should expand, and I do not know which tools would help me do it.”
We expected AI to dominate, because the industry is talking about little else. Dentists did ask about it. But the questions that carried real weight were situational: one practice, one setup, one goal, and the tools that would actually move it.
Nobody asked what the best software is. That is worth sitting with, because almost every tool built for this market answers the question nobody asked.
Why those questions are hard to answer
A category list cannot answer any of them. Neither can a comparison chart, because the thing being compared is not the thing being asked about.
Answering “should I expand, and what would I need” means knowing what a practice already runs, what it is trying to do, and which tools genuinely fit both. That is why the practice management system is the first thing Mola establishes: not because it is the interesting part of the question, but because it eliminates more wrong answers faster than anything else. It is the classifier underneath the answer, not the answer.
And it is where most vendor claims quietly fall apart. Ask a vendor “do you integrate with my system” and you will almost always get a yes. The yes is doing a lot of work it has not earned.
“Integrates with” can mean at least three different things, and the difference between them decides whether your front desk saves an hour a day or gains a second place to type the same information.
We wrote that up separately, because it is the single most useful thing a practice owner can understand before a demo: what “integrates with your system” can actually mean.
The short version: ask which direction the data flows, ask whether it writes back, and ask to see it happen on a live screen rather than in a slide. A vendor with real integration will reach for the screen. A vendor without one will reach for adjectives.
What this changed about how we work
Three things, concretely.
- Mola answers with a short list, not a category. The output people found useful was three or four vendors that fit their situation, not everything filed under a heading.
- Integration depth is a classification field, not a marketing claim. Our editors record what a vendor actually does, not the word “integrates” from its homepage.
- We are prioritising the sub-categories these questions land in most. Insurance verification and patient communications were the two heaviest, which tracks: both sit directly on top of the practice management system.
What the vendors did
We did not ask vendors to submit themselves. Our editors classified all 500 first, by the problem each one solves rather than the category it picked for itself.
Then vendors started coming to us. More than 30 reached out in the first month.
On 23 July we opened claiming, so a vendor can take over its own profile: description, integrations, pricing, Book-a-Demo. 13 claimed in the first week. Our editors still decide where a vendor sits in the taxonomy, because that placement is the only reason the classification is worth anything to the dentist reading it.
The numbers, in full
| Vendors classified at launch | 500 |
| Vendors classified today | 537 |
| Platform and iOS app live | 1 July 2026, same day |
| Conversations with Mola | 300+ |
| Questions across those conversations | 1,121 |
| Recurring theme | Situational, not category comparisons |
| Vendors who reached out | 30+ |
| Claiming opened | 23 July |
| Profiles claimed in week one | 13 |
What is next
More depth in the categories where the PMS question is heaviest, and more vendors claiming their profiles so the detail comes from the people who built the product, checked by editors before it goes live.
If you are choosing something right now, the most valuable ten minutes you can spend is not reading another comparison. It is writing down which system you run, what it currently cannot do, and what you would need to see on a live screen to believe a vendor’s yes.
Then ask Mola. It will start with your system, because that is where the real answer starts.
Ask Mola about your practice →
Bring it the problem, not the product name.
Khamir Patel
Dr. Khamir Patel, DMD, FAGD · Co-Founder & CEO, DentalTechHub