DDS · MHI Candidate
Clinician building connections
out of the dental silo.
Dentistry has a substantial body of evidence linking oral health to cardiovascular disease, diabetes, and adverse pregnancy outcomes — and almost no information infrastructure to act on it. Sarah works at that gap: with 11 years of clinical practice, graduate training in health informatics, and an economics-grounded view of why markets fail to deliver what the science already supports.
Master of Health Informatics Candidate · Wake Forest University · Conferral January 2027
Open to
Available for advisory, consulting, and fractional engagement across three domains where clinical depth, informatics training, and market-structure thinking operate together. Particularly well-suited to startups, health systems, and enterprise contexts where a practicing clinician's perspective is the missing variable.
The infrastructure connecting oral and systemic care is underdeveloped relative to the evidence. Focus on care coordination models, cross-disciplinary referral pathways, provider adoption, and the organizational conditions that make integration viable in practice — not just in theory.
AI and software products in healthcare succeed or fail at the workflow layer. Clinical advisory for teams building in this space: will this be used, will it be trusted, does it map to how care is actually delivered? Particular depth in AI applications within dentistry.
Interoperability between dental and medical systems remains a structural gap with real clinical consequences. Focus on data standards, health information exchange, and the adoption and workflow considerations that determine whether interoperable systems translate into clinical practice.
Services
Evaluating whether a product addresses a real clinical problem, will be adopted by practitioners, and maps to how care is actually delivered — before significant resources are committed.
Health information exchange, interoperability architecture, and data standards in medical-dental contexts. From strategy through adoption, with particular focus on the workflow layer where integration efforts most often stall.
Real-world clinical workflow, purchasing decision dynamics, and implementation feasibility — drawn from 11 years of evaluating, procuring, and operationalizing devices and software in active clinical practice.
The bidirectional relationship between periodontal disease and type 2 diabetes is among the most well-documented examples of oral-systemic connection in medicine. Each condition worsens the other, and co-management improves outcomes for both. In practice, medical and dental providers rarely coordinate care for shared patients. The barrier is not clinical knowledge. It is infrastructure, workflow, and adoption.
A pilot study design assessing the impact of an interoperable referral pathway on provider adoption and clinical outcomes for adults with comorbid periodontal disease and type 2 diabetes. Built on a live dental EHR and QHIN integration, the study focuses on the adoption and workflow layer — the point at which interoperability infrastructure either becomes clinical practice or stalls. Independent private practices, which represent the majority of dental providers, serve as the primary study context.
Subject matter expert, primary researcher, and proposal architect. Eleven years of clinical experience managing patients with comorbid periodontal disease and T2DM provided direct operational insight into the workflow gaps this infrastructure addresses.
Presented to faculty and Program Advisory Board, 2026. Structured for real-world proposal use and under consideration for co-authored publication.
Sarah McMahan is a general dentist and partner in a San Antonio clinical practice, completing her Master of Health Informatics at Wake Forest University. Her work sits at the intersection of clinical care, information systems, and a healthcare market that has yet to act on what its own research supports.
Eleven years in clinical practice — spanning clinical, operational, and technology decisions at the practice level — provided a direct view of the oral-systemic gap: patients with diabetes, cardiovascular disease, and other chronic conditions whose dental and medical care existed in parallel, with no infrastructure connecting them. That observation is the organizing premise of her informatics work, most recently a completed capstone study designing a pilot for interoperable referral pathways in the co-management of periodontal disease and type 2 diabetes.
An undergraduate background in economics shapes how she thinks about structural barriers to integrated care. The question is rarely technical capacity alone; it is the incentive misalignments that keep the medical and dental worlds apart despite a clear evidence base for integration.
Before health informatics, she co-founded and operated Way Out Kombucha, a bootstrapped CPG venture built and wound down over three years. That experience sharpened her perspective on what it takes to build, validate, and sustain something from the ground up — a perspective she brings directly to clinical product and advisory work.
Interested in working together, or just want to connect?
Open to advisory roles, consulting engagements, fractional positions, and research collaboration.
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