The continuing education (CE) tracking problem is one that nearly every dental professional has encountered: You attend a course, wait for the certificate email, realize it came from an unfamiliar sender, and find it three weeks later sitting in your spam folder. Multiply that across multiple platforms, multiple state board requirements, and a license renewal deadline, and the frustration compounds quickly.
Shayda Cullen, a dental hygienist with 23 years of clinical experience and 12 dental patents to her name, moved from Florida to Massachusetts and hit the wall. Different state board. Different requirements. No good way to track any of it in one place. That was the moment she stopped putting the idea off.
Dr. Vanessa Newton (left) and Shayda Cullen, RDH, (right) of Dental CE Manager.
In this episode of the DrBicuspid.com Cellerant CEO podcast series, Editor-in-Chief Kevin Henry sits down with Cullen and her business partner, Dr. Vanessa Newton, a Tufts-trained general dentist and practice owner in Marlborough, MA, to introduce Dental CE Manager and explain why the problem it solves is impactful to dental professionals.
The concept Cullen kept returning to was a wallet. Not a filing cabinet, not a spreadsheet -- a wallet. Cullen envisioned something that travels with you, holds what you need, and does not require constant management.
A screenshot of the Dental CE Manager dashboard.Dental CE Manager.
Dental CE Manager is built around that idea. The app has all 50 state board requirements embedded for dentists, hygienists, and dental assistants, including distinctions between live and online CE hours. On the main screen, users can see at a glance what they have completed, what remains, and what is upcoming.
The feature that removes the biggest friction point is AI-powered certificate capture. Rather than manually entering course details, users take a photograph of their certificate. The app's embedded AI extracts the data and populates the record automatically. No typing required. For someone like Cullen, who describes herself as a slow typist, that capability was nonnegotiable when she began fleshing out the app.
Two additional features are in development. The first is a webinar component that will allow users to take CE directly inside the app without needing a laptop or a secured Wi-Fi connection. The second is a team management feature, aimed at practice owners, that will let an administrator view the CE status of every team member without exposing individual records to the broader staff.
Dental CE Manager is available at dentalcemanager.com and through the App Store and Google Play.
Listen to the full conversation in the player below.
