In dentistry, image quality determines whether a claim is paid or denied. Up to 20 percent insurance claims are initially denied, with missing or low-quality images among the leading causes. Yet quality assessment has traditionally been a manual, after-the-fact process. A clinician reviews an X-ray hours or days after capture, discovering problems only when a claim is rejected or a treatment plan can’t proceed. If the image is blurry, misaligned, or incomplete, the patient must return for a retake, adding cost, delay, and frustration for everyone involved. The fundamental gap is timing: quality feedback arrives long after the patient has left and the clinical moment has passed.

This post describes how Henry Schein One closed that gap by building Image Verify, an AI-powered quality verification system on Amazon SageMaker AI that evaluates dental X-ray quality at the point of capture, in real time, across thousands of locations. The system went from concept to over 10,000 active locations within months and has already processed over 11 million X-rays and growing at 1.5 million per week. Henry Schein One is now scaling toward 40,000 locations globally across four regions.

The challenge: Real-time image quality at scale