Dental schools have spent decades refining how they teach clinical skills. Dr. Muhalab Al Sammarraie, a dentist with a background in human resources leadership, thinks that's no longer the harder question. The harder question, he says, is what artificial intelligence requires of dentists as professionals, not just what dentists can do with it.
In this episode of The DrBicuspid.com Podcast, produced in partnership with the California Dental Association, host Kevin Henry talks with Drs. Al Sammarraie and Lindsey Robinson, senior editor of The Journal of the California Dental Association, about "Blue Sky Thinking," a new eight-article collection exploring what dental education needs to become. Guest edited by Dr. Hiroko Oyama of the Harvard School of Dental Medicine, the collection asks contributors to think without the usual constraints: no incremental fixes, just a genuine rethink of how dental training can be optimized for the decades ahead.
Robinson lays out the trends driving the urgency: AI adoption, the growth of dental service organizations and private equity in dental practice, federal changes to student loan borrowing and repayment, dental benefits that haven't kept pace with inflation, and ongoing workforce shortages among hygienists and assistants.
She also highlights a new dental school model at the Pacific Northwest University of Health Sciences in Yakima, WA, that front-loads one intensive didactic year before moving students into three years of clinical training embedded directly in community health centers.
Al Sammarraie makes the case that skills like communication, leadership, critical thinking, and emotional intelligence shouldn't be treated as soft personality traits anymore. As AI takes over more technical tasks, he argues, these skills become clinical competencies in their own right, because the clinician, not the technology, remains accountable for the judgment and the outcome.
The conversation also introduces a new critical thinking study companion the CDA Journal has developed: a self-guided tool with a set of questions designed to help readers evaluate a study's quality, its strengths and limitations, and how to apply research to real-world decisions. It's currently being tested with student members at all seven dental schools in California before a wider rollout.
Both guests close with a shared concern: ensuring that dental students are prepared for the profession as it will exist in five to 10 years, not the one that exists today.
The full "Blue Sky Thinking" collection is available on the Taylor & Francis website, along with contact information for CDA Journal Editor Dr. Lindsey Robinson for anyone interested in guest editing a future collection.
Listen to the full conversation below.
