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The Paubox Table is our invite-only dinner series for healthcare leaders. This month it stopped at St. Cecilia in Atlanta. Kenzie Mills and Cory Herald hosted orthodontic and endodontic practice leaders from around the metro area.
Most of the conversation ended up being about AI, and where these practices have decided to draw the line.
AI is welcome in the back office
Every practice at the table said their ownership actively encourages AI use.
Doctors use ChatGPT to help with clinical notes. Staff use it to work through explanation of benefits (EOB) documents and other administrative work that used to eat an afternoon.
What stood out was how deliberate they are about it. Patient names come out before anything goes into a general-purpose AI tool, and protected health information (PHI) is stripped from an EOB before anyone pastes it anywhere. They described these as habits they built themselves, because they understood what was at stake.
The line is at the phone
The same practices that encourage AI for documentation said they will never put an AI voice agent on their main line.
The reason is simple: patients hate it. The group pointed to other practices in their market that added AI phone answering and started collecting negative reviews for it.
Human contact is part of what these practices sell, and they are not willing to automate it away to save a few hours of front desk time.
Where AI is earning its place in marketing
On the marketing side, the use that came up was imagery: before-and-after visuals for Invisalign cases.
It follows the same pattern as the back office. AI handles the production work, and a person signs off on what a patient sees.
What we took away
The through-line of the night was that these practices sort every AI tool by one question: does a patient touch it.
Behind the scenes, AI gets used, as long as PHI stays out of it. Anywhere a patient can feel it, they keep a person in the seat.
See related: The Paubox Table: Dinner in NYC
Deep in conversation at St. Cecilia
Orthodontic and endodontic practice leaders from around metro Atlanta
