Healthcare
Clinical Dentistry
The problem
Voice dictation mixes up the tooth number, the material or the follow-up date and drops an allergy without the gap showing. The pre-reading tool labels an old filling as caries, and the label is copied straight into the chart.
31 courses · 6 specific to this profession
A documented failure pattern
Tooth 46 in the letter, blank in the chart
- What the tool doesA dentist asks an AI tool to summarise a patient's chart into a referral letter for a specialist colleague. The draft lists the treatments tooth by tooth, with tooth number, procedure and date.
- Where the tool goes wrongThe letter includes a tooth treatment that has no entry in the chart.
- The verification stepCheck from the letter back to the chart and delete every line with no entry.
More: why it is easy to miss and the full check
Where the tool goes wrong, and why it is easy to miss
The specialist who receives the letter reads the treatment of tooth 46 as documented history, although the chart has no entry for it. A letter is usually checked by going down the chart and finding each entry in the letter: that check catches an entry that was left out or changed, but not a line with no entry at all, because the chart has nothing to compare it with. The invented line has the same shape as the real ones (tooth number, procedure, date), and the tool does not say the information is missing. In a 2026 study with dental charts, some models invented an answer for up to 46.7% of the questions that had no answer in the chart, while all the clinicians said the information was not there.
The check that catches it
- Check the letter from the letter back to the chart: for each line of the draft, find the chart entry with the same tooth, procedure and date, and tick it.
- Delete every line that has no chart entry. Do not fill it in from memory, or from what the patient says without writing down that source.
- In the request to the tool, ask it to put next to each line the date of the chart entry it comes from, and to write "no entry in the chart" when the information is missing.
- Before you sign the letter, note in the chart that the draft was prepared with an AI tool and checked line by line.
Where the failure pattern is documented: Peer-reviewed study: JMIR Medical Education (September 2026); guidance and frequently asked questions of the Ontario dental regulator, RCDSO (September 2025); review in the International Dental Journal (August 2026).Sources: JMIR Medical Education, 2026; Royal College of Dental Surgeons of Ontario: guidance on artificial intelligence in dentistry, 2025; Royal College of Dental Surgeons of Ontario: frequently asked questions on artificial intelligence, 2025; International Dental Journal, 2026.The case above is ours, written for work in Albania; the laws it names were checked against the official text.
What it looks like
The patient's chartThere is no treatment entry for tooth 46.
The tool's draft"Tooth 46: root canal treatment completed on 14.05.2024."
Translated from the Albanian original.
Specialist courses for this profession
Dentistry AI
Dentistry AI: Operations foundation
Dentistry AI: Clinical records and documentation
Dentistry AI: Imaging and diagnostic notes
Dentistry AI: Patient data protection
Dentistry AI: Preparation for assessment
What you leave with
After every dictation, the chart checklist: tooth number, material, follow-up date, allergies. For imaging, the flag sheet records what the tool labelled, what the image showed and what you decided. In the introductory course you learn to prepare an explanation for foreign patients in their own language, for example in Italian: you draft it with AI and check it yourself before you hand it over.
Clinical Dentistry
The catalogue lists all 31 together, with filters for format and time.