Hey, I'm building ProviderSignal: a dental market intelligence app for dental suppliers, brokers, and DSO business development teams. We have a live MCP server and REST API with x402 agent payments, on government dental data.
Check it out here: https://t.co/ymfAVdQbjq
@DanielSmidstrup Change in the dental market before anyone's talking about it. New practices, new associates, owners retiring, DSO acquisitions, all pulled from government records the morning they happen.
Spent a week on why my system kept finding 230 dental acquisitions a quarter.
It was comparing my classifier's current guess to its own past guess. 97% were just the model changing its mind.
Rebuilt it to watch for a real-world event. Now around 9 a quarter, all real.
Telehealth is not the problem. Incentives might be. A Senate investigation into PfizerForAll and LillyDirect found that 74% to 85% of patients routed through some pharma-linked telehealth platforms received prescriptions. One partner reportedly prescribed medication to 100% of patients who completed a visit.
That does not prove wrongdoing. Pfizer, Eli Lilly, and their telehealth partners maintain that clinicians make independent medical decisions and that these platforms improve access to care.
But it raises an important question: when the same ecosystem advertises the drug, routes the patient, connects the prescriber, collects data, and profits from the prescription, who is really driving the decision?
Dentists face a version of this every day. Patients arrive wanting antibiotics, mail-order aligners, implants, opioids, or whitening because an ad, influencer, or website told them they were a candidate.
The clinical skill is not simply providing treatment. It is slowing down long enough to ask the uncomfortable questions, identify contraindications, and sometimes say no.
The lesson is not to fear telehealth, AI, or technology. The lesson is to protect the doctor-patient relationship.
Diagnosis must come before the product. Treatment must serve the patient, not the funnel. When a patient tells you they got a medication online, do not judge. Ask who prescribed it, whether labs were reviewed, whether there was follow-up care, and how the decision was made.
Then ask the question that cuts through all the marketing: Who gets paid if the answer is yes?
@naval Rebuilt my data product around exactly this. Agent-first flips the stack: the API becomes the product and the dashboard is just one more client of it. Once an agent can call it and pay per query, the UI stops being the center of gravity.
@vaaselene This week at https://t.co/ymfAVdQbjq I was focused on surfacing Medicaid dental reimbursement for all 50 states plus DC. That was the boring part, the sexy part was building an API endpoint that can be reached via the MCP server by agents.