Interview with CaviSense CEO Jordan Rubinson

What if your dentist could spot cavities long before they became a problem? Join us as we chat with Jordan Rubinson, CEO of CaviSense, about his interesting journey from pharma to medtech  We start by discussing Jordan's early influences, from his father's career at Block Drug Company to his own academic adventures at Columbia and MIT's Sloan School. Despite an initial interest in accounting, Jordan's passion for pharma led him down a path less traveled, avoiding the conventional business routes of consulting and investment banking.

Next, we take a closer look at Jordan's dynamic career in the pharmaceutical industry. Learn how his family's frequent relocations led to professional opportunities across the globe. Jordan shares  anecdotes from his time in big pharma, including his experiences within a management development program at Sanofi Pasteur  and the challenges of managing diverse roles in different markets. His shift from big pharma to the innovative medtech startup scene in Israel provides a compelling narrative about the contrasts between structured environments and the fast-paced, resource-tight nature of startups.

Finally, we explore the evolving role of dentists as both medical professionals and entrepreneurs. Discover how new technologies  are revolutionizing dental care, especially in pediatric dentistry. Jordan introduces us to CaviSense, a groundbreaking tool for early cavity detection, and discusses its journey from early development to FDA registration. We also touch on the exciting future of consumer-friendly dental monitoring tools that could transform how we manage oral health at home. 

Don't miss this episode to hear about the future of interactive dental care and the potential for improved patient outcomes.

Host David E. Williams is president of healthcare strategy consulting firm Health Business Group. Produced by Dafna Williams.

Transcript

0:00:01 - David Williams
A lot of people hate going to the dentist, especially when they find out they have cavities that need to be drilled and filled. But did you know that dental cavities can be reversed if they're detected early? I had no idea until I met today's guest. Hi everyone, I'm David Williams, president of Strategy Consulting Firm Health Business Group and host of the Health Biz Podcast, a weekly show where I interview top healthcare leaders about their lives and careers. My guest today is Jordan Rubinson, ceo of Cavisense, which focuses on detection of early stage cavities. If you like this show, please subscribe and leave a review. Jordan, welcome to the Health Biz Podcast. 

0:00:46 - Jordan Rubinson
Thank you for having me on David. A pleasure to be here. 

0:00:53 - David Williams
Well, we're going to talk about a lot of things related to what you're doing now, but I want to wind back the clock and ask you about your childhood. What was your childhood like? Any influences from childhood that have stuck with you in your career? 

0:01:00 - Jordan Rubinson
Yeah, absolutely so. Yeah, well, I guess, as we'll talk. I mean, I've had a wild and very diverse career, you know, in the sort of medical technology and pharmaceutical industry. I think what really got me interested to it was my father actually, who sadly just passed away but was 30 years in the same company, one of those sort of classic guys who had the same job in the same company for 30 years. It used to be called Block Drug Company and then they got bought out. They make the Sensadyne toothpaste and they eventually got bought up by GSK and he ultimately retired. It was there that I got my first taste of the pharmaceutical industry. It was more on the accounting side, you know, less on the business side. 

But yeah, I guess you know you can't help but be influenced by by by your parents and their career choices. 

0:01:56 - David Williams
Makes sense. So I saw you went to Columbia as an undergrad and then the Sloan School. What was that? What was that like? 

0:02:03 - Jordan Rubinson
So I went to. 

0:02:02 - David Williams
Columbia. 

0:02:03 - Jordan Rubinson
What was that like? So I went to Columbia. I have to say I did a little too much partying, considering it was an Ivy League school. I was in the engineering school, so it was kind of like burning the candle at both ends. You've got a very tough technical curriculum on the one hand and then you've got fraternities. I was on the basketball team, rugby team, and so I kind of wanted to experience both ends of undergrad. But I was able to make up for it and, you know, had a really you know sort of more sort of traditional, sort of academic education at MIT. You know it wasn't the party school like Harvard down the river, you know it was. It was get in, get out, do your, you know, down the river, you know it was. It was get in, get out, do your, you know, do your bit and learn as much as you can. And more classic sort of academic experience. 

0:02:51 - David Williams
I heard about people who you know are partying in high school and then they straightened out in college. But you, you took it an extra, an extra level, and yeah, well, you got your degree and you got you know, good enough to you know, to get into the next place. 

0:03:02 - Jordan Rubinson
So True, true, true, I didn't. I didn't suffer too badly. But you're right, At a certain point, you know, I did grow up and take a life a lot more seriously. 

0:03:12 - David Williams
Yeah, fair enough. I guess that it's not for everyone, but it's good that you took a serious path at one at one point. So a lot of your early career, I saw, was in big pharma, and you answered one of my questions a little bit when you talked about your dad and having some at least some sort of knowledge about pharma. But you know, how did you get into that space in the first place in the pharma market? 

0:03:35 - Jordan Rubinson
You know, when I was in business school, right, you look around you at everybody else and everybody's trying to decide what do they want to do after business school and of course there's this influx of you know, opportunities with consulting firms and investment banks and so forth, and that's like you just hear the sucking sound. You know that everybody's sort of moving in that direction and for some reason I understood that that wasn't, that wasn't the path that I wanted. I was more of a sort of blue collar guy. I wanted to be in companies, you know, doing the work myself. 

I had an internship actually at Owens Corning in Toledo, Ohio, and you know we're making fiberglass insulation in factories. I thought I was going to be a manufacturing guy and then I, you know, kind of got to think I was like, you know, look, if you have a choice of industries which thankfully, thankfully, I did right you might as well pick something where you could do some good, where your life has more meaning. Obviously it was a very simplistic, you know, sort of view of the healthcare industry, but that's sort of what drove me into it. 

And I haven't regretted it, to be honest. 

0:04:33 - David Williams
You know, in my experience working with Big Pharma, people travel around a lot, but you seem to you know, move countries a lot, just not just like you got off the plane and you stayed there for a while early on. Was that an explicit desire at the start of your career to go and shift around from location to location? 

0:04:53 - Jordan Rubinson
So you know, it was actually a desire for me. It's actually stemmed from my, my wife, who grew up in a in a variety of different countries. Her father was the head of a, one of these student exchange programs, so so they kind of were moved around in that way and I think she kind of either wanted to replicate it or like something about moving countries. But I joined originally with, I guess pharmaceutical companies get gobbled up all the time. So the group that I joined was called Pasteur. It was a section of A. Now what is a event is um, essentially in their vaccine division, and they had, like that was in the period of like the management development programs, you know, uh, where they would get people around sort of systematically to give them a bird's eye view of a variety of different sort of functional areas in the company. 

and so they had that twist where they they had just merged companies from France, Canada and the united states and they wanted to educate some of their new leaders and give them experiences in a variety of cultures and countries to be able to knit the company, the newly formed company, better together. So that's what they did, is they structured a program. It was like every nine months I moved not only function but country. And that just continued, not only with Aventis, but when I went to GSK afterwards, I was about five years in Philly, and then they decided that they liked what I was doing and wanted to promote me and give me some exceptional opportunities and really asked me where in the world I wanted to go. And so, you know, we got moved again, you know, to France and then ultimately to Israel. So I feel like, you know, we kind of got in that cycle, partly voluntarily but partly because of, you know, just the opportunities that presented themselves. 

0:06:32 - David Williams
I remember doing work on the post-merger integration of Glaxo Wellcome and SmithKline Beecham and you looked at these sort of like the big countries and then the medium countries and the small countries and then all these you know working groups. One I remember is they were trying to assign the sales force and they said who's going to take the stands? You know, like Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Pakistan. They were all sort of like grouped together and I was like, okay, that was all not. There was not necessarily small countries actually, but small economies. But what, what's your observation about? You know big pharma in in big countries, medium countries, small countries. What did you feel? What did you learn? What did you feel about that? 

0:07:11 - Jordan Rubinson
So I think, you know, I mean there's a couple of elements to this, you know. One is, you know, look at big countries, you know, I think the US is fairly unique, right, because it's, you know, it's just so dominant, you know, in the global geography and just financially powers the pharmaceutical industry. So there are just so many more people and so many more jobs and that means that every job obviously has an additional significance to it in terms of the value that it provides to the overall company. But I think also they tend to be more narrow. So you could be, I don't know, on a team of people, in a single sort of product management team where you're doing only, you know, sort of professional medical education or you know, some sort of, you know, or market research for a product team. You know, I think there's a depth to the job, but then, and also you know the impact that you have, because each of these brands are potentially billion dollar brands, you know which which obviously are really important for the overall company, you know. And then you drop down to a medium sized country and so again it's like almost like a factor of 10 in terms of the overall revenue generation, likewise the number of people they have, but what you get instead is a broader, you know job, because they simply have, you know, a tent of the people who are supposed to do the same promotional efforts. 

You know that the that the us teams do, so you may have multiple products, you know, and you don't. You can't afford yourself. You know such a large, a large team, and so everybody on the team has to wear, you know, many more hats. And then you take it, you know, the further extreme, and you go to a small country like Israel, which, like, does a tiny fraction of the sales. And so there I was. 

I was actually the marketing director for all of Israel. So I had, I don't know, maybe eight or nine product managers under me, each of which had a therapeutic area, but I was responsible for the entire portfolio at the time of Pfizer, you know. And so I was responsible for the entire portfolio at the time of Pfizer, you know. And so I was deep, digging, deeper, diving deep into every product. And so you, you know, you have to think it's such a fast pace and a diverse level, you know, whereas in, you know, in the US, I was a product manager for one single vaccine, you know. And then suddenly I was, you know, at Pfizer and I had every therapeutic area and every product that Pfizer was promoting under my direction. 

0:09:28 - David Williams
Yeah, so you mentioned ending up in Israel with big pharma, but then what they have in Israel is a lot of medtech players. So you have some pharma, but more of the startups are more on the device technology software side of things. So what was the transition like for you going from pharma dealing with with molecules to these startups, of which you work for multiple ones in Israel? 

0:09:58 - Jordan Rubinson
Yeah, I mean it's, you know, it's a huge you know study. In contrast, you know when you're in big pharma, you know and a lot of people. 

I think you know because I've watched people try to make the transition from big pharma to. You know a startup and you know you just get used to this big organization with all kinds of you know. You know emails and and and meetings all day long. And also you know the resources everybody's got their. You know sort of admin. You know you can fly almost anywhere anytime you want. You know if you have the proper justification I mean, the resources are, you know, seemingly endless. You know if you have the proper justification, I mean the resources are, you know, seemingly endless. You know. 

And then you go to a startup company, you know, and everything is like an existential crisis, you know, especially the ones in Israel. Right, I mean you could go to a nice startup in the United States that's well capitalized and you know, and find again a fair amount of resources. But you know in Israel they tend not to have the same amount of funding that you get in the United States with startups. And so you know everything is on a tight budget, your investors keep you on a short leash and you know it's a huge, you know, transformation that not everybody is either willing to or wanting to make. But having said that. 

You know we talked about the scope earlier, about some of the jobs and the sizes. You know, when you're in a startup I mean everybody is wearing, you know, multiple hats and you're no longer just sort of the marketing guy, but you're you know, you're the chief commercial officer that's responsible for sales. You're not just responsible for sales in one country, you're responsible for sales all over the world. You know, I've been the CEO on several occasions and so you know again, you've got this massive sort of weight in your shoulders and so it's you know. It's a very different sort of you know atmosphere and, like I said, a lot of people have a lot of difficulty in making that transition. 

0:11:51 - David Williams
So, Jordan, you know you move around from you know one company to the next in different therapeutic areas and technologies. So, Jordan, you move around from one company to the next in different therapeutic areas and technologies. And again, maybe that's just indicative of what the scene is like there. You don't have a hundred companies all doing something, that's different flavors of those like you might have in the US. But say a little bit about your own journey and maybe mention some of the specific companies that you helped to lead there. 

0:12:12 - Jordan Rubinson
Yeah, I mean it was interesting, you know, because I again in pharma. I mean you do make a nice salary and the compensation and the benefits you know, but there's really no upside at the end of the day, and so you know when I was in. 

Israel, you know, one of the large sort of VC companies in the medical area approached me and asked me if I wanted to, you know, to be the CEO of one of their you know, their daughter companies, you know. And they made me a proposal where the compensation you know, annual compensation was virtually the same of what I was making over at Pharma. And then they said, look, we'll also give you, you know, five or 10% of the company. And and I was like you know, okay, you know, I hadn't really thought about this, you know, as a career path. But, you know, if you just sort of do the math, you know, it makes a lot of sense, or at least it did at the time, and so I quickly became a CEO of a company. Thankfully, I had a lot of, you know guidance at the time, but I've, you know, I'm a sort of a commercial CEO. So I mean, there's some of the you know people in the scientific world who come in early stage at these companies and will stay with the company, you know, five or 10 years. 

Israel doesn't have a lot of sort of like pharmaceutical or biotech. Those are really few and far between because of the sustained, you know effort and the financing required to bring a drug to market. But they really do well in the device area, the diagnostics, the digital health and things like that, where you know the path is a lot shorter. The money requirements you know investment requirements are a lot are a lot smaller. So that so, so so I tend to get involved as the company is sort of approaching. You know the commercialization. You know to do the product market fit, to bring it to market. You know if I'm the CEO, obviously to raise capital and and ultimately, you know what Israeli companies do is do very well is exit. So they don't tend to really invest in the company, you know, to maturation and to make it a large company. Rather, they look for, you know, the first opportunity to sort of sell out. Some of them, you know, at high valuations, some of them at lower valuations, but that seemed to be like this cyclical. Or you know serial entrepreneurs that just start up and sell off companies rather than building. You know real infrastructure and and and larger companies and so I cycled through every two or three years. 

You know different therapeutic areas and, as you mentioned, you know you don't have the luxury in Israel. It's a growing, developed ecosystem with a lot of great technologies but not enough that you can focus on a field of oncology or cardiology and other technologies such as ultrasound or whatnot. So I ended up traveling through a number of these. My first was in wound healing, which lasted about two or three years and was sold over to Teva Pharmaceuticals. They had an interest in wound healing at the time. 

And then I got involved with some American colleagues of mine in oncology which had both applications for both clinical and research, and a company called Champions Oncology which is and continues to be listed on the NASDAQ and doing very well. It continues to be listed on the NASDAQ and doing very well, and you kind of skip you know skip around and get pulled into things. Once one chapter ends, you know it's a lot about, you know the network that you build up and the people that you know and have worked with who pull you into their next venture, and that's kind of how things went. And so I was then the CEO of a drug development company in the field of CNS, which is probably my only failure, and I swore off drug development afterwards because of the risks associated with it. 

But then I got pulled in by an investor into what I think is the gem of what I've done is a company called Pulsamore and they have an at-home ultrasound. They started for pregnant women to be able to see, you know, babies heartbeats and movements and so forth, you know, while at home and getting advice online from physicians. It's really a remarkable story. And, you know, my first opportunity in digital health, which is obviously very well suited to sort of Israel, which is sort of the nexus of medical and IT, which they're both very good at. And then, finally, you know, I got into another company called Extrodes, which does, you know, these dry printed electrodes that you can paste all over your body and get all kinds of various different signals. So it has applications in sleep and cardiology, which was interesting. And then, as you can see, the stark contrast, you know, like it's no great surprise that I, you know, kind of found myself in the world of dentistry and dental technology. 

0:16:38 - David Williams
Exactly so I was going to say this. You know in some ways back to your roots, both back to the US, and then you know your dad, having worked on Sensodyne, I guess the dental side of things as well. So you know there's obviously I think your story here is like a study in contrast. You know big and small different countries and so on. Well, let's do one more contrast, which is medical versus dental. It always makes sense that on the one hand, you know dental is part of the body, it's right, you know it's right there and at the same time, like dental system is different from a reimbursement standpoint and everything is different. Dentistry is not a specialty of medicine per se, although you still call your dentist a doctor. So what are some of the key differences between the medical and dental environments from your standpoint? 

0:17:26 - Jordan Rubinson
Yeah, and it's really fascinating actually with some of these changes and each time you take a fresh look and you're learning a new area. So I guess I can see it differently than someone who's been a dental their whole lives and make some of those contrasts. But you know, look, you know you've got the medical world which is so formulaic, you know, and not that the dentistry doesn't have its sort of, you know, standards and guidelines and so forth. But I feel like, you know, dentists are sort of part, you know, physician, part entrepreneur, part capitalist, you know, because they're, they're running their own business, you know, and they're not, you know reimbursement is a piece of what they do. But you know, reimbursement is, you know, a sparse, incomplete and certainly, you know, not available to the entire, you know subset of their population. So they're, you know, and certainly, you know, not available to the entire, you know, subset of their population. So they're, you know they're tied to it but they're not constrained by it and I think they make, you know, clinical decisions, they incorporate, you know, sort of technologies. 

They look not only at the you know, the medical, clinical side of things but they're also looking at the monetary side. You know, how am I going to make money on this, you know, is this going to bring in more patients to my practice? Am I going to be able to bill more? You know for this. You know what efficiencies do I gain? You know, from it. So they, they have that sort of, you know, business person's eye, but also the medical person's eye. I think there's a lot of other, you know. You know similarities, you know they. There's a, you know they, the classic sort of dentist world was. I mean, they almost call them like drill and fill. 

0:18:56 - David Williams
Yeah. 

0:18:57 - Jordan Rubinson
You know, because they just make a lot of money on filling cavities and that's sort of the basic business of it. I think you know now they're taking a little bit more of an introspective view of it. You know there's technologies that are coming out, there's trends emerging around more of a preventive you know mindset. You know if I can see cavities earlier, I you know and there's also sort of new treatments that are coming out that allow you to treat it and reverse it, like you mentioned at the outset, and so I think they're becoming, you know, more, more minded to this. I'm particularly focusing in on a sub-segment of dentistry and pediatric dentistry that I think for sure appreciates. You know this, and so it is. It is, you know, different but very similar, and you know you've got to pay attention to all the, all the nuances and all the history you know of, of of the dentistry world and go to school on it pretty quickly. 

0:19:51 - David Williams
So you're talking about. You know early detection, which is a feature across other areas of healthcare, including oncology. You know which you have been involved with before. But how are things, let's say, different for a child going to the dentist in the mid-2020s now compared to, let's say, when I was going in the early 70s? Or maybe it's not that different, but how is it possible for it to be different? 

0:20:16 - Jordan Rubinson
Yeah, I mean, you know. Again, I could take sort of two views of it and say you know, on a macro view it's really not all that different, you know, from let's call it when you and I were growing up, so to speak. You know, I mean it's still, you know, the basics of it are cavity detection, you know, and again, filling cavities. A lot of the techniques you know and mechanisms and structures are still in place. I do think that slowly some technologies are emerging. I do think that slowly some technologies are emerging. You know, obviously, x-rays, you know. 

You remember when we were x-rays, you know it was a lot more sort of cumbersome to take x-rays. Now it's a lot easier to take x-rays, and kids are, you know, notorious. So one of the areas that we're working on are places where it's still difficult to get x-rays. So you have these kids, you know, who are under six years old. You know they have a strong gag reflex and they can't get the x-rays. You have a lot of special needs kids. You have kids with braces, where x-rays aren't particularly useful because you have the bars extending across the teeth, and so there are still areas where x-rays are. And also the reimbursement right, you know you and also the concerns about radiation. So, even though x-rays are incredibly informative, the standard of care, you know they're not always available, either because of some of the constraints we earlier talked about or because of the radiation concerns or reimbursement concerns if you're doing them more frequently. 

And then there's technologies. You know that kind of assist and aid in it, you know. So you have AI which is being implemented now when you do have x-rays right. So the you know, I would say. You know interpretation of those images, you know is employing sort of new technologies. And there are other technologies using sort of dyes and luminescence. And you know other ways to be able to sort of diagnose cavities. You know when and if you can't, you know, get access to it. But we still have an archaic system, you know. So, for example, you have mobile dentists and or hygienists going to schools and still just using visual inspection to be able to apply, you know, high fluoride, high density fluoride treatments or remineralization agents, but it does seem relatively old-fashioned. So new technology is emerging, but in pockets. 

0:22:33 - David Williams
So looking at your website, CaddySense, it seems to have some sort of a toothpick or something like that. What is that form factor? 

0:22:41 - Jordan Rubinson
Yes, the core of this technology again you know you mentioned it earlier is around early cavity detection. Essentially, actually, what we're doing is an intermediate step. So it's you have, you know, and this is everybody knows this because we all have had cavities sadly it's actually the largest, you know, preventive disease, most prevalent disease. That's preventable. And so it starts with plaque right Bacteria that adheres to your teeth. 

When that bacteria grows and gets to be either in a volume or harmful enough, so essentially when it's fed sugar, it emits lactic acid. That acid, when it gets again know again toxic enough, essentially will lower the pH on the surface of those teeth. And when it gets below a threshold of 5.5 on the pH scale, it starts to actively demineralize the teeth. And if that's left unchecked, right, all of that acid is ultimately going to erode the teeth and result in a cavity that'll have to be restored and treated. And so we're right at the middle step. 

There there's notion of active demineralization, and so what we really are is a glorified pH meter that essentially changes color in a binary fashion. 

So it starts purple when it hits a tooth surface that is less than 5.5, it turns bright yellow so that a clinician can understand just by touching tooth surfaces where there is not a cavity, because we can't tell you whether it's an early stage cavity or a late stage cavity, but we can tell you that it's moving towards a cavity and likewise you know if there's already a cavity in place. 

We can, we can tell you whether it's getting worse or whether it's that cavity has been arrested and stays purple instead of turning it, turning yellow. So that's, that's essentially the technology. The form factor as a toothpick is great, because the vast majority of cavities actually happens in between teeth and those are hard to visualize. And so you know this is a great compliment to sort of dentists and their efforts, because all you have to do is take a cavisense toothpick, put it in between either a suspicious area or use it more as a screening tool, and you'll be able to tell, you know, where the I wouldn't say specifically the cavities are, but where there are areas of active demineralization, you know that you need to intervene. 

0:25:06 - David Williams
So the technology sounds really cool and it sounds clinically useful. There are a lot of things in the medical and presumably dental environment as well that you could say that about, but the you know the business model is tough, so I think a lot of things that were with prevention and early detection in general. You said that dentists are making money on drill and fill. This sounds like it's a different approach. So is this going to be great for the patient but kill off the dentists? How does it all work together? 

0:25:41 - Jordan Rubinson
Yeah, it's a critical question. Work together. Yeah, it's a critical question. So there is movement afoot to submit a new what they call CDT code, not a CPT code, but within the ADA for early cavity detection, of which we fall into, although that process may take a couple of years to get specific reimbursement in place. 

But I think, as we talked about earlier, you know, dentists are a little bit less tied to sort of reimbursement classically than physicians are classic physicians, and so what we have is an argument here, essentially that if you're going to try the cabozin's toothpick on some suspicious lesions or areas, you know, let's say, maybe half of them will turn yellow, and once it turns yellow, you know you're going to do one of three things that are essentially money makers for a dentist. One is you're going to, you know, implore the mother, you know, to get an x-ray, and if they do get an x-ray, they make money on the x-ray. And if you can't get an x-ray, you're going to apply some form of an SDF they call it high density fluoride or remin agent to that area, because you now have reason to believe that it's going to head towards a cavity, and so that's also a money-making opportunity. And then the last thing is, even if you do apply the remin agents, you're going to call that patient back on a more frequent basis probably three months instead of every six months to be able to monitor the progression of those identified areas. 

And of course, each visit in itself has money-making opportunities. So it's that kind of a dynamic and thankfully, you know the technology that we're bringing to market is not only easy to use but also, you know, a consumable product. So it's you know it's roughly $3 a toothpick. If you use a couple of toothpicks during a visit, maybe you're talking about $10. You know it's our estimate that you know, on average you're probably going to make a 5x return. You know, on the basis of some of the things, the events are likely to happen after a toothpick turns yellow. So that's sort of the rationale and the way you've got to. 

0:27:39 - David Williams
You know, introduce this technology to clinicians. Well, it sounds more robust than your typical startup business model. So I guess you've been around the block a little bit. Let's talk about where the company stands now and kind of what the plans are and what's the potential of this. Is this currently deployed? If I go to a pediatric dentist, are they going to be using it? How do you see scaling? 

0:28:01 - Jordan Rubinson
Yeah. So it's really an interesting time. I've been at this company for about a year. We've stepped through a lot of milestones. We've fully developed the product. We've done some clinical testing, some usability testing, we've registered the product with the FDA and now we're at the end of the process of sort of scaling up the manufacturing to make it more widely available. We're actually going to the annual conference of pediatric dentists it's called the AAPD. It's in Toronto at the end of this week and there we're going to be really sort of launching this product, introducing it to the target physicians. In the advent of that we've been to smaller conferences and just through our own sort of mini launch efforts. 

You know we've put this product into the hands of 50 first users. You know who are actively working with it and making purchases. You know of it and you know it's learning every day. You know in terms of how do they see it, how do they view it, how are they using it. You know what are the what's sort of the reorder? You know percentages. Are the what's sort of the reorder? You know percentages and so forth. So we're right in the in the midst of the story. 

You know, I think, generally speaking, the. You know, the feedback that we've gotten has been has been excellent and there will be uptake. I can't tell you if it's going to be, you know, sort of huge and immediate or or it'll take some time, but but I, I think, but I think we're really encouraged. We also have a second product that's in development, leveraging the same technology. This is going to be more of a screening tool. So, instead of a very sort of highly specific toothpick version for a single tooth surface, you're going to take a tray with a gel that you're going to bite down on and pull it out of your mouth and you'll be able to see all the yellow spots. More of a screening tool. And if we can get the frictionless, you know, use case properly, we're thinking about targeting this to consumers and doing more of a DTC approach, you know, and selling this through pharmacies and things like that and directly to users. 

And I think this touches on a really important point I'd like to make, which is not only because we've talked largely about the dentist, but I think the real opportunity is to get these technologies out of the dental office. You know we talk about home monitoring and so many other areas of medicine. There's really very little dental monitoring going on and consumers are just desperate for feedback in terms of their oral health practices and whether what's working or not and what's happening in between visits. You know you could leave the dentist perfectly healthy and then six months later they tell you you have five cavities and you sit there in shock, whereas if you had some way to test yourself, you know you would have an idea about where things are heading. Or if you knew you had some watch and wait sort of cavities, you could test them yourselves in the intervening period and I think this would really move the field forward, you know, with greater interactivity between the dentist and their users. 

0:30:52 - David Williams
You know, outside of the dental office, Well, that sounds like a great vision, jordan, and the way you painted it makes it seem like it's coming true, so I wish you the very best with that. I want to conclude with a question I ask all my guests about, which is whether you've had a chance to read any good books lately, if there's anything that you might recommend to our listeners. 

0:31:15 - Jordan Rubinson
Yeah. So I really enjoy reading quite a bit and you know I don't read, you know, sort of nonfiction I, you know I feel like, I feel like life is so full of it and so I try to use it as a bit of an escape. I've read a number of really good books, one of which is called the Book of Goose. It actually takes place in France, about a burgeoning writer, france, about a burgeoning, you know, writer. But you know it's, you know, and I tend to, you know, kind of, just take the surefire ones off the shelf. You know the ones that have been well reviewed, have won all the prizes. You know it tends to de-risk, you know, reading for me, because there's nothing worse than picking up a book and not enjoying it and then having to sort of put it down and get another one. So that's my approach, but I tend to go through three or four a month and really enjoy it. 

0:32:09 - David Williams
That's good. It is always hard to find a good book. I will say that. So if you give a tried and true methodology for it, that sounds good. Maybe a little toothpick you could put on to see if you're going to like it or not. In any case, my guest today has been Jordan Rubinson, CEO of Cavisense, focusing on early detection of cavities, jordan, thanks so much for joining me today on the Health Biz Podcast. 

Thank you, David. You've been listening to the Health Biz Podcast with me, David Williams, President of Health Business Group. I conduct in-depth interviews with leaders in healthcare, business and policy. If you like what you hear, go ahead and subscribe on your favorite service. While you're at it, go ahead and subscribe on your second and third favorite services as well. There's more good stuff to come and you won't want to miss an episode. If your organization is seeking strategy consulting services in healthcare, check out our website, healthbusinessgroupcom. You've been listening to the Health Biz Podcast with me, David Williams, President of Health Business Group. I conduct in-depth interviews with leaders in healthcare, business and policy. If you like what you hear, go ahead and subscribe on your favorite service. While you're at it, go ahead and subscribe on your second and third favorite services as well. There's more good stuff to come and you won't want to miss an episode. If your organization is seeking strategy consulting services in healthcare, check out our website, healthbusinessgroup.com.