CATEGORY 78 AUSTRALASIAN DENTIST Artificial intelligence as a clinical referee GDI Peer, now live at gdipeer.com, is a verified-practitioners-only social platform built exclusively for registered oral health professionals. Its point of difference is not just its community features or its verified CPD tracking – it is the AI engine that sits behind every piece of clinical content posted to the platform. Every post containing a clinical claim is automatically reviewed by a pipeline of AI models trained to identify, locate, and assess supporting peer-reviewed evidence. Posts are then assigned a transparent evidence badge – from Gold (systematic review or RCT support) through to Silver, Professional Advice, Discussion, and Community levels – giving every reader an immediate, visible signal of how wellevidenced the content they are reading actually is. “The AI doesn’t replace clinical judgement. It does something simpler but arguably more important – it makes the evidence base visible. When you scroll past a post on GDI Peer, you know immediately whether what you’re reading is backed by a Cochrane review or whether it’s one clinician’s opinion. That transparency changes everything.” The platform also logs CPD activity automatically, matches clinicians with mentors, and provides access to an evidence library – all within a verified professional environment where every member’s registration has been independently confirmed. A problem the profession already recognises Dr Calavassy is not alone in his frustration. Senior clinicians, educators, and professional associations globally have raised growing concerns about the quality of clinical information circulating on mainstream social media. The speed at which misinformation travels – amplified by algorithms that have no interest ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE When followers replaced evidence: one dentist’s journey to take the profession back Australian dental educator and clinician Dr Fred Calavassy has had enough of social media dentistry – and built an AI-powered platform to do something about it. There is a moment most clinicians recognise. A colleague posts a clinical technique on social media. Within hours, the post has hundreds of approving comments and thousands of likes. There is no cited evidence. No peer review. No clinical rationale. Just a compelling video and a large following – and that, apparently, is enough. For Dr Fred Calavassy, Founder of the Global Dental Institute and GDI Peer, that moment became a turning point. “I’ve spent my career building evidencebased educational pathways for dentists. What I started seeing on social media platforms was something completely at odds with that – practitioners shaping their clinical decisions based on who had the most followers, not who had the strongest evidence. Likes were replacing citations. Opinion was being mistaken for clinical fact. That’s genuinely dangerous for patients.” Social media has transformed how dental professionals share knowledge. Platforms like Instagram and Facebook have democratised communication across the profession, connecting clinicians globally in ways that were impossible a decade ago. But that democratisation has come at a cost. With no mechanism for verifying the accuracy of clinical claims, and with engagement algorithms that reward spectacle over substance, evidencebased practice has struggled to compete with confident opinion. A 2024 systematic review published in the Journal of Dental Research found that the majority of dental content reviewed on major social media platforms contained no citation to peer-reviewed literature. In a profession where clinical decisions directly affect patient outcomes, the implications are significant. Dr Calavassy’s response was not to abandon social media – but to rebuild it from first principles. By Dr Fred Calavassy, Founder & CEO, Global Dental Institute
RkJQdWJsaXNoZXIy MTc3NDk3Mw==