Celebrating the 2026 Dental Innovator Award Winners
DentistryIQ celebrates the winners of the 2026 Dental Innovator Awards!
These forward-thinking companies are meeting today’s dental and hygiene challenges with fresh ideas and solutions. An anonymous panel of professionals scored submissions on their impact—everything from improving clinical care and ergonomics to boosting efficiency and best practices. Innovation is thriving in dentistry—watch for next year’s call for entries!
GOLD WINNERS—
Cloud Dentistry
Cloud Dentistry is a 24/7 self-serve, digital workforce platform that streamlines how dental professionals and dental offices connect, hire, and work together. By replacing traditional staffing agencies and outdated recruitment channels with a direct marketplace model, Cloud Dentistry enables offices to eliminate buyout fees, reduce overtime labor costs, increase productivity, and maintain patient care continuity through same-day staffing.
Elevate Oral Care
Papacarie Duo is a papain-based enzymatic gel used for minimally invasive, chemomechanical caries removal, meaning it helps soften and remove decayed tooth tissue without traditional drilling or anesthesia. It is a biocompatible and nontoxic gel, clinically tested and proven safe for patients of all ages, including young children. Its chemomechanical process selectively targets decayed tissue using the papain enzyme (from papaya) to selectively break down decayed collagen in infected dentin.
Henry Schein One
Eligibility Pro by Henry Schein One is a next-generation insurance eligibility solution that transforms one of dentistry’s most inefficient workflows into a streamlined, automated, and revenue-driving process. Built natively into Dentrix and Dentrix Ascend, Eligibility Pro eliminates the need for staff to jump between payor portals, external dashboards, or manual phone calls. Instead, it delivers real-time, enhanced eligibility data directly within the practice management system, exactly where front-office and clinical teams already work.
Wisdom Dental Billing
Wisdom is delivering the industry's first AI-assisted Revenue Cycle Management platform that transforms dental practices from reactive billing to proactive financial operations. Its comprehensive solution empowers dentists to focus on patient care while Wisdom handles the complexities of insurance verification, claims processing, payment posting, and collections. By combining real-time AI automation with expert human oversight, Wisdom ensures accuracy, efficiency, and transparency across the entire revenue cycle.
SILVER WINNERS—
AirPay
AirPay Warnings help dental organizations proactively reduce billing risk, accelerate collections, and protect the patient experience by automatically scanning eligibility data to surface issues that commonly lead to claim denials or delays. Front desk teams no longer have to search across multiple systems or interpret raw data. Instead, a centralized dashboard presents a filtered list of appointments requiring attention, organized by issue type, with comprehensive patient and coverage details in one place, so teams can take action before treatment or claim submission.
Clerri
Clerri is the leading care membership platform transforming how dental practices grow. By simplifying access to care through smart, sustainable membership plans, Clerri empowers providers to increase patient loyalty, reduce insurance dependence, and build recurring revenue. As the #1 Dental Membership Platform trusted by over 25,000 dentists, including more than 5,000 independent offices and 200-plus group practices, Clerri delivers a clear path to practice success powered by automation, expert support, and nationwide compliance.
CordEze LLC
ACE–Advanced Cord Ergonomics by CordEze is a patented cord-management system engineered to reduce the biomechanical strain created by tethered clinical devices such as ultrasonic scalers, slow-/high-speed handpieces, and evacuation hoses. ACE redistributes the mass of the cord through a wearable stabilization interface, minimizing torque and pullback forces without requiring modification to existing equipment or workflow.
Dental Supply Guy
The Dental Supply Guy is your new procurement specialist—the world’s best price shopper for dental supplies. Wouldn’t you like the tasks involved in inventory, ordering, price comparison, and timing the market to be done for you? Dental Supply Guy does everything involving dental supplies on your behalf, making life easier on your front office or whoever does the dental supplies ordering in your practice.
Elevate Oral Care
PoviOne is economically packaged in a bottle to help reduce waste. The product was previously only offered in unit-doses that are intended to be sent home with the patient for applications between office visits, but this bottle now changes that. This powerful bacteria-reducing antiseptic is now offered in a multiuse bottle, making it easier and more convenient for dental professionals to integrate into patient care. PoviOne is particularly beneficial for moderate to high-risk patients.
Flaus
Flaus is an oral beauty brand with a patented electric flosser that uses sonic vibrations and high-performing dental floss to make flossing as quick, easy, and comfortable as brushing your teeth. Flaus creates an oral beauty platform that inspires self-acceptance and empowers self-expression for real people, real teeth, and real smiles. Using a Flaus Electric Flosser aids people in the prevention of oral health diseases such as gum and teeth infections (periodontal and caries).
Prosperident Inc.
FIRST LOOK is a quick and affordable assessment of a dental practice's practice management software to see whether indications of employee theft exist that would merit a full forensic audit. Forensic audits are expensive and take considerable time, and FIRST LOOK provides an inexpensive means for a practice owner to see if the cost of a full audit is needed. For a one-location practice, FIRST LOOK costs $1,500 and has a target turnaround of one week.
Slate Flosser
The Slate Mini Flosser addresses one of dentistry’s most persistent challenges: poor patient flossing compliance. Despite widespread awareness of the importance of interdental cleaning, many patients—especially children, orthodontic patients, seniors, and those with dexterity limitations—struggle to use traditional string floss or disposable floss picks effectively and consistently. This results in preventable plaque buildup, gingival inflammation, longer hygiene appointments, and increased need for intervention. The Slate Mini Flosser improves outcomes by delivering a dentist-designed, easy-to-use, reusable flossing tool that patients actually adopt into daily routines.
SprintRay
SprintRay Crown HT is a next-generation, ceramic-filled 3D-printable resin engineered for definitive same-day crowns, inlays, onlays, and veneers when used with the SprintRay Midas Digital Press 3D printer. The Midas printer is purpose-built to fabricate these restorations with exceptional speed, precision, and repeatability, enabling the full performance of Crown HT in a chairside environment. Designed specifically for chairside production, Crown HT enables clinicians to design, print, post-cure, and seat high-strength, esthetic restorations in as little as 10 minutes.
BRONZE WINNERS—
BISCO
Quantium is a universal dental composite engineered to provide consistent, nonsticky handling. Designed to perform optimally at room temperature, Quantium demonstrates minimal pull-back from instruments and supports smooth placement and sculpting during restorative procedures. This handling performance is achieved through intentional material design, including the use of a proprietary customized aggregate filler (PPF). The PPF technology allows for a balanced formulation that supports key physical properties such as polishability and low volumetric shrinkage while maintaining stable handling characteristics.
Essential Dental Systems
Turbo-CR is engineered to streamline the removal of calculus, making hygiene appointments quicker and easier. Turbo-CR efficiently softens calculus without compromising enamel integrity. Unlike traditional mechanical scaling methods, Turbo-CR ensures a gentle approach to enamel and dentin, prioritizing patient comfort and oral health while increasing productivity with ease.
Kwikly Dental Staffing
DSO Bridge is an enterprise workforce infrastructure platform that enables dental organizations to centrally govern how labor is deployed across all locations. DSO Bridge replaces the fragmentation with a unified labor governance system. The platform intelligently distributes open shifts across internal employees, approved vendors, and marketplace professionals to maximize coverage speed and fill rates. Rather than relying on static, manual routing, the system dynamically prioritizes distribution based on availability, urgency, and historical performance ensuring the highest likelihood of coverage.
MedAssent DDS
Every day in dentistry, clinicians make dozens of decisions that hinge on one fragile variable: a patient’s medical history. When something is missed, the consequences can be catastrophic. MedAssent DDS was built to prevent these moments, because we have lived them. The MedAssent DDS Digital Drug Handbook transforms medication safety from a fragmented lookup task into a whole-patient clinical safeguard. Instead of forcing providers to search drugs one by one, the platform generates consolidated Med Reports that synthesize a patient’s complete medication list into clear, dentistry-specific guidance.
