ChairGap
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Portrait of Jimenez Julien

The person behind the product

Jimenez Julien, publisher and product lead of ChairGap

I build small, sharp software for owner operated businesses. ChairGap is the tool I wanted to hand to every dental office manager who told me the recall list was the first thing to fall off the desk on a busy Monday.

Why I built a recall tool instead of another marketing dashboard

The first dental practice I worked with was a two chair office where the owner also did the ordering, the payroll and half of the hygiene checks. She showed me a printed report from her practice management software that listed 1,417 patients whose continuing care date had passed. It had been printed eleven weeks earlier. Nobody had worked it, not because the team was lazy, but because working it meant an hour of unanswered phone calls at a desk that was already handling check ins, claims and a fax machine that would not die.

That afternoon I watched a hygienist sit for fifty minutes because a patient called in sick. The practice had an entire list of people who wanted that appointment. The list and the empty chair were forty feet apart and nothing connected them. That is the whole problem I set out to solve, and it is why ChairGap does one narrow job rather than trying to be a marketing suite. There is no social media scheduler in here. There is no review widget. There is a gap, a ranked list of people who should be sitting in it, and a text message.

I spent the following year in operatories, at front desks and on the phone with office managers in eleven states. I learned that the industry vocabulary matters: a coordinator who hears the word lead instead of patient stops trusting you inside of thirty seconds. I learned that the reason recall software gets abandoned is almost always the same, which is that it asks the front desk to work in a second system instead of the one they already have open. So ChairGap reads from Dentrix, Eaglesoft, Open Dental, Curve Dental and Denticon, and it hands back a list you can act on in under three minutes before the morning huddle.

I also learned where the line is on texting. Patients do not mind a message that offers them something real and specific. They mind being chased. Every product decision about message frequency, quiet hours and opt out handling came out of conversations with coordinators who had been burned by a bulk texting tool that treated their patient list like a mailing list. I would rather send four hundred fewer messages a month and keep the practice's reputation in its own town intact.

ChairGap is published by MLJ, SASU, a company I own and run. It is not venture funded and it does not need to triple every year. That means I can price it against one refilled hygiene hour instead of against what a practice can be pushed to pay, and it means the roadmap answers to the practices that use it rather than to a board deck.

Experience and expertise

  • Fourteen years building operational software for small businesses, the last five focused entirely on owner operated healthcare and service practices.
  • Worked on site with 31 independent dental practices across the United States between 2023 and 2026, shadowing office managers through a full open to close day in each one.
  • Hands on knowledge of continuing care structures in Dentrix, Eaglesoft, Open Dental, Curve Dental and Denticon, including how each one stores recall intervals and how differently each one treats a broken appointment.
  • Practical familiarity with HIPAA obligations for a business associate, TCPA rules on informational text messaging, and carrier level requirements for application to person messaging in the United States.
  • Founder of MLJ, SASU, registered in Paris and operating a portfolio of narrowly scoped tools for trades and practices that a general purpose platform tends to ignore.

How this product is built and maintained

ChairGap ships small changes often rather than big changes rarely. Every release note is written in plain language and sent to account owners the morning it goes out, including the ones that only fix something dull. When a practice reports a problem with a sync, I want it reproduced against a copy of that practice's own data structure before anyone writes a line of code, because dental schedules are full of local conventions that a generic test suite will never catch.

The editorial standard on this site is simple: every number published here comes from measured account data or from a practice that agreed to be quoted by name. The medians in the results section are recalculated each quarter and the date range is stated next to them. If a figure moves in a direction we do not like, it still gets updated. Testimonials are collected in writing, quoted with the speaker's approval and trimmed only for length, never reworded to sound more enthusiastic.

I am accountable for what happens to your patient data. That means the business associate agreement is signed before the first sync, the hosting stays in United States data centers, support access is logged, and any incident affecting practice data is reported to affected accounts within 72 hours with what happened and what we changed. If ChairGap ever shuts down, every account gets 90 days of notice and a full export in a format your team can open.

Published articles

These nine pieces make up the first issue of The Open Chair, the ChairGap magazine on hygiene recall, scheduling and the money side of a small dental practice.

Contact the author

Write to me directly at jimenezjulien42@gmail.com. I read every message that comes through this site and I answer product questions myself. If you want to talk through your hygiene schedule before deciding anything, use the demo request form and say which weekday runs light, and I will bring something useful to the call. Feature requests from paying practices go straight into the roadmap review that happens on the first Monday of every month.

Jimenez Julien Publication director of ChairGap and founder of MLJ, SASU. Also reachable through the site map or the product FAQ.