Turning 100,000 Comments into Action: Heartland Dental Scales L&D Insights with Explorance MLY

About Heartland Dental

Heartland Dental is the largest dental support organization (DSO) in the United States, supporting more than 3,000 dentists across 1,800+ offices nationwide. With a focus on clinical excellence, professional development, and cutting-edge technology, Heartland provides non-clinical administrative support to help dental professionals focus on delivering exceptional patient care. The organization also offers robust continuing education through Heartland Dental University and is recognized for its strong culture, innovation, and commitment to community service

The Challenge: Managing Qualitative Feedback at Scale

As Heartland’s L&D operations matured, so did its volume of open-ended learner feedback. In 2025 alone, the team received over 100,000 written comments that rendered manual analysis virtually impossible. Processing that many comments would require over three weeks of nonstop work by a dedicated analyst, assuming eight-hour shifts with no breaks.

The risk wasn’t just about inefficiency, it was about missing valuable insight buried in feedback that no human could reasonably read, tag, or interpret in full. Without a scalable solution, meaningful comments on training quality, culture, equity, or professional development could easily be lost.

The Solution: Scalable Insights Through Strategic AI Adoption

Heartland Dental’s journey toward scalable feedback analysis began with foundational work. In 2017, the organization adopted Explorance Metrics That Matter (MTM) to capture quantitative and structured learning data across modalities including online, virtual, and in-person formats.

But by 2025, it became clear to Heartland Dental that unlocking the full value of learner sentiment would require a shift to a faster, more accurate analysis method. That’s when Heartland implemented Explorance MLY, an add-on to MTM that leverages machine learning to efficiently analyze large volumes of qualitative data. Rather than rolling out the tool as a complex analytics solution, Scott Esker led with simplicity and clarity.

He focused adoption around two core features:

• Recommendations: prioritized recommendations organized by key topics to focus attention on the most important issues and support effective action.
• Alerts: flags inappropriate content, identify emerging issues, and prioritize critical topics, allowing for timely, proactive responses to maintain a safe and responsive feedback culture.

The Outcome: From Comment Overload to Strategic Insight

With MLY in place, Heartland Dental has transformed qualitative feedback from a burden into a strategic advantage. What once felt like an overwhelming flood of open-ended comments is now a steady stream of insight that drives informed action across the organization. The L&D team no longer spends weeks combing through responses. Instead, they gain instant visibility into learner sentiment, instructional gaps, and areas of excellence.

MLY allows them to:

• Replace time-consuming manual analysis with rapid, scalable interpretation
• Detect instructional gaps and content issues before they impact learning outcomes
• Deliver clear, data-backed insights that resonate with business leaders and drive strategic decisions