Artificial Intelligence‐Facilitated Chairside Integration of Curriculum Knowledge for Enhanced Patient Care

Dental and dental hygiene students are required to integrate foundational knowledge from biomedical, preclinical, and behavioral sciences into clinical decision-making and patient care [1, 2]. This comprehensive application of curricular content is critical during chairside interactions, where students must recall information and navigate complex diagnostic scenarios, especially when managing patients with multiple co-morbidities. In addition, the traditional linear teaching of courses by instructors, fragmented organization of content within learning management systems, and separation between basic and clinical science instruction impede students' ability to integrate relevant, curriculum-aligned information at the point of care [3, 4]. These challenges underscore the need for a more integrated and responsive approach to knowledge management in dental education—one that bridges the divide between didactic and clinical instruction, facilitates just-in-time learning, and directly supports clinical decision-making and patient care. In response, our institution has developed an innovative solution that enables students and faculty to interact with the curriculum in a dynamic, contextually relevant, and clinically accessible manner. A 'Point of Care' Academic Assistant (POCAA) was developed in collaboration with and built on Amazon Web Services. POCAA employs a Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) framework to deliver integrated, curriculum-aligned responses that support real-time clinical decision-making and learning (Figure 1). This approach enables students and faculty to query the curriculum seamlessly—across settings and at any time—facilitating immediate access to relevant educational content at the point of care and when needed. A core element of our approach is the exclusive training of POCAA on the college's predoctoral and dental hygiene curriculum. This ensures that all content is institutionally vetted, contextually appropriate, and aligned with established educational objectives and foundational knowledge. An unanticipated advantage of POCAA is its emerging role in supporting curriculum review processes, which are often time- and labor-intensive for faculty. By capturing and analyzing user queries, the system can surface latent curricular redundancies, gaps, and inconsistencies. These insights provide faculty with actionable data to inform continuous quality improvement in curriculum design, alignment, and delivery. The application has been developed as a strategic prototype, designed to demonstrate scalable integration of institutional curriculum into the AI-powered knowledge system. Content from 119 predoctoral and dental hygiene courses was ingested into the database, along with transcripts from over 442 lectures. The resulting knowledge base comprises 9189 unique artifacts. To enhance clinical relevance, the curriculum was supplemented with clinical procedure manuals, ensuring alignment with institutional policies and workflows. Efforts are now focused on fine-tuning the system's output and automating the ingestion of curricular content from platforms such as Canvas and other institutional repositories. A pilot group of students and faculty is actively testing the platform and providing iterative feedback. Upon completion of these development phases, the platform will be fully deployed across the College of Dentistry, enabling broad access for both faculty and students.