What You’ll Learn
- Why the gap between AI adopters and non-adopters is widening faster than most realize
- How predictive analytics could catch health problems before symptoms appear
- What wearable data and satellites have to do with the future of healthcare
- Why resistance to AI in healthcare often comes from team members rather than dentists
- The cultural shift required to keep your practice competitive
The Physician Building Healthcare Infrastructure in Space
Most conversations about AI in healthcare and dentistry focus on chatbots, scheduling software, and documentation tools. Dr. Harvey Castro operates at a completely different level.
He spent two decades as an emergency medicine physician. He built a healthcare company called Trusted ER with over 400 employees. He wrote the first book on using ChatGPT in healthcare back when the technology had just launched. He has delivered five TEDx talks on AI in medicine.
Now he serves as Chief AI Officer at Phantom Space Corporation, a company building rockets, satellites, and orbital data centers.
“I never thought in a million years I’d be working for a space company and that I’d be asked to go to space one day,” Harvey told Adrian Lefler on a recent episode of the Byte Sized Podcast. “It just blows my mind.”
The connection between rockets and dental practices is not immediately obvious, but Harvey sees something most healthcare providers miss entirely. The infrastructure being built right now, in orbit around Earth, will fundamentally change how medicine works. And the practices that understand this shift early will have an insurmountable advantage over those that do not.
Martec’s Law and the Growing Gap
There is a concept called Martec’s Law that explains why some businesses get left behind while others thrive during technological disruption.
Think of technology adoption as a hockey stick curve. It starts flat, then shoots upward at an accelerating rate. Now think of organizations, dental practices included, as a logarithmic line. They change slowly, incrementally, resistant to dramatic shifts.
When technology moves faster than organizations can adapt, a gap forms. And when that gap gets wide enough, disruption happens.
“If we don’t adapt, if we don’t change, someone else is going to change and they’re going to disrupt us,” Harvey explained. “We will lose our job. Not because of the AI, but indirectly they’re using the AI and they’re becoming more efficient and now we’re not.”
The dental practice down the street that embraces AI diagnostic tools, automated patient communication, and predictive scheduling are pulling ahead on that hockey stick curve. The gap between their productivity and yours widens every month.
Catching up gets harder the longer you wait.
| Early Adopters | Late Adopters |
| Small initial learning curve | Massive catch-up required |
| Incremental improvements compound | Competitors already miles ahead |
| Team adapts gradually | Team faces overwhelming change |
| Patients experience innovation first | Patients have already switched |
The Resistance Problem of AI in Healthcare
When Adrian speaks to dental practices about implementing AI, he encounters resistance. But it rarely comes from where you would expect.
“A lot of the resistance comes not always from the dentist, but it comes a lot from the team members,” Adrian noted during the conversation. “Because a lot of the stuff that I might be mentioning are tasks that those dental team members do every day as part of their job which can be automated.”
The fear is understandable. If software can handle appointment confirmations, insurance verification, or patient follow-ups, what happens to the person who used to do those tasks?
Harvey’s answer reframes the entire conversation. The threat is not AI taking jobs. The threat is competitors using AI while you do not.
“What I would introduce is we need to educate our dental team and say, ‘Hey, this is how we need to do dentistry now,'” Harvey said. “We were trained to do it this way, but if we keep doing it this way, we’re going to be disrupted. If we want to keep our jobs, we need to shift.”
He calls it the Great Shift. Today you practice one way. Because of AI, you will have to practice another way. The practices that help their teams navigate this shift will retain their people and their patients.
From Reactive to Proactive Medicine
The most exciting developments of AI in healthcare are not about doing things previously thought impossible.
Harvey shared an example that sounds like science fiction but is already being developed. Voice analysis that detects pre-diabetes.
“My voice, we could put it into an AI algorithm and it’ll tell you if I’m a pre-diabetic,” Harvey explained. “Just my voice. This feed that’s coming through. It’s doing a sine wave and then it’s catching the amplitude and it’s able to determine depending on your voice the amplitude changes and then extract what your sugar averages are.”
This is the shift from reactive to proactive healthcare. Instead of waiting for a patient to develop symptoms, show up with a problem, and receive treatment, AI analyzes continuous data streams to catch issues years before they become serious.
The implications for dentistry are significant. X-ray diagnostic tools like Pearl and Overjet already detect carries that human eyes miss. They see 500 shades of gray compared to the 30 that humans perceive. But this is just the beginning.
Imagine AI analyzing patterns across thousands of patient records to predict who will develop periodontal disease based on early indicators invisible to current diagnostic methods. Imagine wearable devices that monitor oral health markers and alert patients to schedule appointments before problems develop.
The Culture That Wins
Harvey learned something important while running his 400-person healthcare company. Culture determines everything.
He would walk into one of his hospitals, notice the bathroom was not clean, and start cleaning it himself. Employees would see the CEO scrubbing toilets and understand immediately what kind of organization they were part of.
“My lesson was create a culture of what you want and what you believe in,” Harvey said. “And that’s what I did, and it took off.”
The same principle applies to AI adoption. If leadership treats technology as a threat, the team will resist it. If leadership treats technology as an opportunity for everyone to do more meaningful work, the team will embrace it.
Harvey reimagined emergency room workflows by asking why things were done in certain ways. When a child came in with a broken ankle, the standard process moved them through triage, waiting room, examination, X-ray, back to examination, then treatment. He collapsed the entire process.
“I said, you know what? Why are we doing this? No, we’re going to take that child, go straight to X-ray. We’re going to register the kid at X-ray. We’re going to have the doctor, the nurse, everybody see it. We’ll medicate the patient, get the X-ray, and I know it is broken. We’re going to go ahead and cast it and put a splint in the X-ray room.”
The parents left saying it was the most amazing healthcare experience they ever had. No repetitive questions to five different people. No shuffling between rooms. One streamlined process.
AI enables this same kind of rethinking for dental practices. But it requires a culture willing to question why things are done the way they are.
The Great Shift: AI in Healthcare
Harvey offered a simple thought experiment for anyone listening.
Think of the day you first heard of AI. Remember your thoughts about it. Remember how you used it, if at all.
Now think about how you use AI today. Has it changed? Are you accepting it differently?
The answer is almost certainly yes. And that evolution will continue accelerating.
The practices that thrive will be those that treat AI adoption as an ongoing process rather than a one-time decision. They will follow people who share what is coming, what is working, and how to think about new capabilities. They will create space for experimentation without fear of failure.
“I call it the Great Shift,” Harvey said. “Today I practice this way. Because of AI, I’m going to have to shift. And now I’m going to have to practice this way. And if we don’t learn how to shift, we’ll be out.”
In This Episode:
Dr. Harvey Castro, MD, MBA
Dr. Harvey Castro is an emergency medicine physician with more than two decades of frontline clinical experience and a track record as a serial entrepreneur. He founded Trusted ERs, a healthcare company he scaled to over 400 employees with its own billing, staffing, hospitals, and urgent care facilities. He was the first physician in the world to write a book on using ChatGPT in healthcare and has delivered five TEDx talks on artificial intelligence in medicine. Dr. Castro serves as an advisor to the Texas Medical Association and the Ministry of Health of Singapore. He currently holds the role of Chief AI Officer at Phantom Space Corporation, where he sits at the intersection of AI, space infrastructure, and global healthcare access. He will be speaking at the Dental and Medical AI Summit in London in June 2026.
Adrian Lefler, CEO and Co-founder of My Social Practice
Adrian Lefler, CEO of My Social Practice, is a seasoned expert in the dental marketing industry with 14 years of experience. He is widely recognized for his engaging and informative presentations. Based in Suncrest, Utah, Adrian shares his life with his wife, four children, and a lively mix of pets. My Social Practice is a leading dental marketing company, and Adrian is passionate about helping dental professionals succeed in this dynamic field.
Frequently Asked Questions
What is Martec's Law and why does it matter for dental practices?
Martec’s Law describes the gap between how fast technology changes and how slowly organizations adapt. Technology follows a hockey stick curve with exponential growth, while organizations change incrementally along a logarithmic line. When this gap grows too wide, disruption occurs. For dental practices, this means competitors who adopt AI tools early will pull ahead at an accelerating rate, making it increasingly difficult for late adopters to catch up.
Why do dental team members often resist AI adoption more than dentists?
Team members frequently resist AI in healthcare because many AI applications automate tasks they currently perform manually. Appointment confirmations, insurance verification, and patient follow-ups can all be handled by software. This creates fear about job security. The solution is reframing AI as protection against disruption rather than a threat. Practices that do not adopt AI will lose patients to competitors who do, which threatens everyone’s employment more than the technology itself.
How should a dental practice begin shifting toward AI adoption?
Start by creating a culture that questions existing workflows rather than defending them. Identify tasks that consume staff time without adding patient value. Experiment with AI tools in low-risk areas like content creation or patient communication before moving to clinical applications. Most importantly, educate the entire team about why the shift is necessary. Frame AI as protection against competitive disruption rather than a threat to individual jobs.
