Today's topic: something called a skill (crucial in AI). If after reading you want to apply it in your practice, I've put together a complete PDF with templates, worked examples and the exact wording to use. Reply SKILL to this email and I'll send it to you, free.
Why this topic?
Because in my conversations with dentists, this keeps coming up as the step where AI stops feeling like a toy. Plenty of you use ChatGPT to clean up an email or answer a question, and that's genuinely useful. But several dentists have described a moment where it starts feeling like the AI works the way they do, and more often than not, that moment came from this one feature. It costs nothing, takes about fifteen minutes to set up, no code, and since December it's an official standard adopted across the AI industry. Claude, ChatGPT, and about 40 other tools all read the same format.
Most dentists have never heard of it. That's what today is about.
Note: One thing before we start: done carelessly, this can create problems instead of solving them, and some dentists have already learned that the hard way. We'll get to that too.
Today in Brief
Last week I spent an afternoon with an orthodontist in Geneva. Great clinician, busy practice, and one very familiar complaint: the software he works with every day feels ten years old.
I know this problem well, because I live in this market. Switzerland is small. The companies building the modern tools you see at trade shows often never launch here, so practices end up running on dated systems, and the admin side eats their evenings. Maybe your version of this is different: a vendor that ignores your specialty, a workflow nobody built for, a tool that exists but not for your language or your insurance system.
My answer to him was simple. Stop waiting for the vendors. There is one thing you can build yourself, this week, and it travels with you no matter which AI you use.
(TL;DR at the end.)
What he was already doing, and what was missing
When I asked how he uses AI today, he gave me the answer I hear most often from dentists: "I paste my emails into ChatGPT to clean them up."
A fine start. But watch what actually happens each time:
He re-explains his tone.
He re-pastes his letter structure.
He re-lists the details a referring GP expects.
He re-types the disclaimers his letters always need.
Same instructions, typed again, every single time. The AI does good work and then forgets everything.
That gap, between an AI that helps and an AI that knows your way of working, is exactly what skills close.
What a skill actually is
A skill is a small folder of written instructions that your AI reads automatically whenever a matching task comes up.
Think of it like a clinical protocol for your admin work. You write down your process once. How you structure a referral letter, which details it must include, what tone you use. From then on, the AI follows it without being reminded.
Technically it's a text file called SKILL.md, sitting in a folder, sometimes with a template next to it. You don't code anything. In Claude, you create one by describing your process in a normal conversation, and the AI writes and structures the file for you.
Anthropic, the company behind Claude, introduced skills in October 2025. What happened next is the part that should interest you as a buyer.
Why this isn't locked to one AI
In December 2025, the skill format was published as an open standard. Since then, adoption has spread across the industry. ChatGPT supports it. So do around 40 other tools, including GitHub Copilot, Gemini CLI and Cursor.
One way to read this: the AI companies compete fiercely on models, yet they agreed on how your instructions travel between them. A skill you write today is not a bet on one vendor. Switch AIs next year and your skill comes with you, unchanged.
For a profession that has been burned by vendor lock-in more than once, that detail is worth a lot.
One honest caveat on availability. Claude supports skills on every plan, including the free one. On the ChatGPT side, skills currently sit on the Business and Enterprise plans rather than the standard consumer plan. Worth checking when you read this, because it moves fast.
Now let's build one.
Let's build one: the referral letter
Take the letter you write most often. For most of you that's a referral, to an orthodontist, an oral surgeon, a periodontist.
Step 1. Describe your process in plain language. Open your AI and say: "I want to create a skill for writing my referral letters. Here's how I write them." Then explain it the way you'd explain it to a new associate. Structure, required clinical details, tone, sign-off.
Step 2. Give it one or two real examples, anonymized. Paste a past letter with the patient's name, date of birth and any identifiers removed. Examples teach the AI your style faster than any description. And one rule is non-negotiable here: your skill contains your templates and your standards, never your patients' identities. Keep names out of the AI entirely. You add them yourself at the end, in your own document.
Step 3. Let the AI package it. It produces the skill file for you. Save it. You won't touch it again unless your process changes.
Step 4. Test it on a real case. Next referral, just say: "Referral letter, 34-year-old, impacted 38, refer to Dr. X for evaluation." It comes back in your structure, your tone, with your standard elements. No re-explaining.
Done? Good. You've just built your first piece of practice software, in about fifteen minutes, for free.
Where skills help, and where they don't
Let's be precise about the boundaries.
A skill won't schedule patients, bill insurance, or replace whatever dated system my Geneva orthodontist is stuck with. It doesn't connect to your charts. If you were hoping to fire your practice management software, this is not that.
What it covers is the layer above: the repetitive writing and formatting work that no vendor will ever automate for your specific practice. Good first candidates:
Referral letters
Post-op instructions, in your voice
Insurance narratives and pre-auth justifications
Patient recall and follow-up messages
The other angle worth naming: a skill is only as good as the process you put in it. If your referral letters are inconsistent today, the skill will faithfully reproduce that inconsistency. Writing one forces you to decide, once, what good looks like. Several dentists have told me that decision was the most useful part of the whole exercise.
Where this goes wrong
Now the part I promised at the start.
The most common failure mode is already visible in billing circles: dentists pasting generic AI output into insurance narratives, and getting denied. Reviewers can tell when a justification could apply to any tooth in any mouth. There's a documented example of exactly this: a narrative reading "large decay on molar, filled with composite" got denied, and the same claim was approved once the narrative named the surfaces, the radiographic evidence and the patient's symptoms. And keep in mind the reviewer is increasingly an algorithm too, scanning your documentation in seconds.
A skill doesn't make the AI smarter. It makes it consistent. If you write a lazy skill, you get generic output faster.
The second failure mode is simpler and worse: putting patient information into the skill or the conversation. Templates and standards go in. Patient identities never do.
Your homework this week
Pick the one document you rewrite most often in the same format. If you're in the US, I'd nominate the insurance narrative. The crown justification, the SRP pre-auth.
Then spend fifteen minutes turning it into a skill, using the four steps above.
One task, one skill, this week.
TL;DR
A skill is a small file of written instructions your AI follows automatically. A clinical protocol, but for your admin work.
Open standard since December 2025: works in Claude, ChatGPT and about 40 other tools. Not locked to one vendor.
You build one by describing your process in plain language. No code. About fifteen minutes.
Good first candidates: referral letters, insurance narratives, post-op instructions, recall messages.
Golden rule: templates and standards go in the skill. Patient identities never do.
Reply SKILL for the free step-by-step PDF.
Help This Reach More Dentists. If this issue was useful, forward it to a colleague who's still re-typing the same instructions into ChatGPT every week.
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Your wish is our command. Is there a topic you want us to dig into? Hit reply and tell us.
— Salim and the team at DentAI
P.S. The full tutorial exists as a PDF: exact wording to use, a complete example skill for referral letters AND insurance narratives, plus an anonymization checklist. Reply SKILL and it's yours, free.
