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 · Wake Forest University · Conferral expected January 2027
Areas of interest
Request CV →Three domains where clinical depth, informatics training, and market-structure thinking work together. My work spans health systems, research institutions, and health technology companies, 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.
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.
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.
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.
Selected work
Pilot · In progress
Piloting an API integration between a practice management system and an industry partner to identify sleep apnea screening candidates and share records through structured exchange.
Clinical decision support
Built an MVP decision-support tool for a specific clinical use case, with deliberate PHI protection during the pilot stage: kept outside the EHR, with results documented in the clinical note.
Practice analytics
Evaluated business intelligence platforms for a multi-provider practice, weighting EHR integration and how practice data could serve patients and staff.
Volunteer · Community partner
Mentor to UTSA student teams applying value stream mapping to real organizational processes, from current-state mapping to improvement recommendations.
Where I add value
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.
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.
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.
Prior to health informatics, she co-founded and operated a bootstrapped consumer venture from inception through wind-down — an experience that sharpened her perspective on what it takes to build, validate, and sustain something from the ground up, and one she brings directly to clinical product and advisory work.
Interested in working together, or just want to connect?
Open to roles and collaborations in clinical informatics, clinical AI, and health research, as well as advisory work.
hello@sarahmcmahan.comRequest my CV
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