When Dr. Abdulwaheed Abdul started the platform Dental Cupid, others in his practice thought it was a dating website for dentists.
In reality, Dental Cupid is a platform meant to connect those experiencing dental emergencies to nearby providers during the coronavirus pandemic. Abdul hopes his solution will keep dental patients out of the emergency room as hospitals prepare for another influx of Covid-19 patients.
“What I realized is with Covid, with most of the dental offices in the United States and globally closed, we would run into a situation—patients with dental emergencies [in the emergency room],” Abdul said. “If they're going to rush the hospitals, and the hospitals are not equipped to deal with dental patients, we’re going to have a severe bottleneck.”
Early this spring, imagining a worst-case scenario, Abdul reached out to his contacts at Brigham and Women’s Hospital (BWH), where he had completed his residency before opening his own dental practice in Quincy. Abdul spoke with the chief of emergency medicine, then was given a referral list of dentists — the same one BWH doctors were giving emergency room patients with dental problems.
Just one problem: The referral list was hopelessly outdated.
“[Imagine] you go to the Brigham, you wait there for six hours, they send you somewhere else, and you go to that somewhere else, and that somewhere else is either not open or not taking patients,” Abdul said.
Abdul imagined another solution. The dentist, who had run Lux Dental Care for 14 years, turned to technology.
Abdul recruited Northeastern graduate and software engineer Mingxuan Zhu to build a platform that provides patients with up-to-date lists of dental providers. The platform also lists the providers’ schedules, their specialties, whether they offer teledentristy and what types of insurance they accept, including Medicaid. Each patient can access those lists simply by entering their location; the platform returns a list of dentists that are open and nearby.
Thus, Dental Cupid was born.
Abdul and Zhu, who is now Dental Cupid’s chief technology officer, launched the site in early April and quickly went about spreading the word. Dental Cupid is now being used in Canada, Australia, Hong Kong, parts of Central American and some African countries.
“About a week into starting Dental Cupid, a dentist from Australia called me and said, ‘Hey, how come you guys don't have a platform for the Australian dentists,’” Abdul said. “I said, ‘Sir, give me three days and I’ll make it happen.’”
Abdul was also able to promote the platform with contacts he has as a member of the American Dental Association and the Massachusetts Dental Society.
Dental Cupid brought on more than 13,000 dentists in its first four months. Today, the platform sees somewhere between 150 and 200 visitors each day. Overall, Dental Cupid has connected 16,000 patients to dentists, Abdul said.
Abdul does not charge dentists to join the platform or patients to use it. He may explore advertising in the future to sustain Dental Cupid, but for the time being, he is using an Amazon freemium service.
“I am a true believer that companies that are successful are those that conform with social responsibility and truly deliver value to potential clients,” Abdul said.
Abdul wants Dental Cupid to support dentists and orthodontists, on whom Covid-19 has taken a “heavy toll,” he said. But he also sees a purpose for his platform beyond the pandemic.
Patients, he said, have long had trouble finding dentists that suit their needs. Dental Cupid’s concept and website may not be particularly sophisticated, but even a simple online directory for dental providers is fulfilling a crucial need.
“Dental Cupid is simply the platform that has closed the gap in terms of fulfilling the health needs of patients,” Abdul said. “There are a lot of exciting things going on in the background to further accelerate and improve the process.”
Jordan Frias is a contributing writer for BostInno.
Correction: This article originally misspelled Abdulwaheed Abdul's first name. It has since been updated. We regret the error.
