Standard Dental X-Rays Don’t Give the Full Picture
Northstar Dental Partners is an innovative dental group based in Florida, and led by Dr. Jordan Tomalty. With roots as a father–son dental practice, today NDP is a fast-growing family of dental professionals, who provide world-class care to thousands of patients across 17 affiliated practices.
The organization is guided by a simple but powerful mantra: “Do the right thing.” This principle guides every decision it makes, from management to technology. With a 97% employee retention rate and a strong Net Promoter Score of 91, NDP’s commitment to doing the right thing has fueled its rapid growth and success.
However, Dr. Tomalty recognized that standard dental imaging software simply didn’t meet NDP’s standard of excellence. For one, the quality of X-rays that most imaging software captures is inconsistent — some X-rays come out blurry, while others are low-resolution. This inconsistency makes it difficult for dentists to make precise diagnoses. Most importantly, NDP’s patients simply couldn’t understand their dentists’ recommendations by looking at these standard, grayscale X-rays:
“The big limitation with standard imaging is patient education,” Dr. Tomalty said. “Before we started using Overjet, it was very difficult — if not impossible — to educate our patients on decay, perio disease, and everything else they need to understand, so they feel confident in our recommendations.”
IRIS Brings X-Rays to Life for Patients
To bring its imaging to the next level, Northstar Dental Partners introduced IRIS: the world’s first smart imaging software. IRIS doesn’t just capture images. It truly understands them — using the most advanced dental artificial intelligence (AI).
NDP had already deployed Overjet’s Clinical Intelligence Platform before launching IRIS, which gave Dr. Tomalty confidence that “the imaging software would just be just as impressive.” And when implementation began, Overjet made it simple to combine imaging and AI analysis into a single workflow, via IRIS:
“The process of implementing IRIS was seamless,” said Dr. Brian Waldau, a dentist in the NDP family. “The team at Overjet has been extremely responsive and thorough in accommodating our needs and integrations. They made it easy.”
Under the hood, IRIS relies on AI technology that is FDA-cleared to enhance the quality of dental radiographs, as well as to add precise, color-coded annotations that highlight oral disease. Now, Northstar Dental Partners can transform blurry, black-and-white X-rays into clear, colorful visualizations of each patient’s mouth.
“IRIS turns our images into colorful, powerful guides, which are ideal for educating patients,” Dr. Tomalty said. “It makes the whole process much more objective, from the initial diagnosis to the final recommendation. Once you see the difference that the color-coding makes, there’s no going back.”
The Ultimate Tool for Case Acceptance
Already, IRIS has proved to be a “game-changer” for diagnosing, educating, and ultimately treating patients, across Northstar Dental Partners’ family of practices. In particular, these practices love that IRIS ensures every patient sees high-resolution images, which builds trust in their expertise.
Looking ahead, NDP plans to continue expanding its use of IRIS — as the organization rapidly expands to new clinics. Because, for Dr. Tomalty, it has become an essential part of what makes NDP exceptional.
“Practicing without dental AI now seems almost impossible to me, and to the providers we work with,” he said. “Everything has improved: Our quality of care, our precision in diagnosis, our case acceptance, our revenue. Overjet is the future of dental care, and every office should be leveraging its AI technology.”
