Alex Frommeyer: CEO of Beam Dental (Raise the Line)

Hi, I'm Shivani. Thanks for checking out our raise the line interview series.

In which me and my cohost osmosis chief Medical Officer Dr Rishi Desai explore how to strengthen our healthcare system with some amazing leaders in medicine, technology, education and government and they have some great advice for people starting careers in healthcare as well.

I hope you'll watch these highlights and then go listen to the full podcast interview wherever you get your podcasts. Hi, I'm sure in today on Ray Line, I'm really happy to be joined by Alex Fyre, who goes by fro fro is the CEO and co-founder of Beam Dental.

One of the country's fastest growing dental benefits providers that offers employers unique approach to coverage by incorporating dental hygiene behavior into policy pricing.

The behavior is determined using artificial intelligence to interpret data gathered from the smart toothbrushes used by members.

B also has a national network of dentists and is bringing other innovations to the employee benefits market. Can you tell us a bit more about how you got into uh how you got into this business to begin with?

My co-founders and I actually met in engineering schools. So we're all engineers by background, but we have a ton of family members in the dental field.

My sister is a dentist. She ended up marrying a dentist who comes from a family of dentists himself.

One of my co-founders, his mom's a dental hygienist has been around her whole career. So he grew up in the dental office with her every day.

And so we had some reasons, some influences early in our lives to actually kind of peek under the covers and look at what the dental industry was and what we saw was a gigantic market.

It's very fragmented and lacked a lot of innovation. The joke in the dental industry is that it's 10 years behind healthcare and the joke in healthcare I think is that it's 10 by 10 years behind everything else.

And so we saw strategically that there was an opportunity to bring technology and software and data into the dental industry, which we do through dental insurance specifically today.

Uh in order to build an industry that's more equitable, that's um easier to use, that focuses on smart underwriting and an understanding of risk and a fundamental focus on preventative care as well.

What advice would you give to our audience? Which is current and future healthcare professionals.

We work with a lot of dental schools like University of the Pacific Dental School. What advice would you give to them about meeting challenges of COVID and then moving forward um the healthcare system as a whole thinking long term and caring about innovation and advancement and the interoperability of, of healthcare.

Full stop. And what I mean by that is, you know, I remember spending actually a lot of time when I was uh first getting started, I was just finishing university in the engineering school um and was going to my local university dental school.

I felt like such an oddball. I was an engineer that was trying to innovate in the dental industry.

And here were a bunch of people working on being career dentists that didn't have any notion whatsoever of how they might innovate or change the industry, they wanted to fit into the industry, not change it completely.

There is no going back on the idea that we just aren't there yet on distribution access to care, how we pay for care and the quality of that care.

I hope there are. And I think there are actually a lot more people that are uh that are going into these fields trying to change them from day one.

And then the key is to think long term, right? You can't become jaded by the inertia of, you know, today's fire and the pandemic in front of us, et cetera.

Um If you use that 2025 year lens, you can actually get a lot done. Thanks for watching this preview of raised line to hear the full interview, check out all of our podcasts and subscribe to the series, please go to osmosis.org/raised Line podcast or listen wherever you get your podcasts.