It was almost exactly 12 months ago that I was in Cape Town, South Africa, speaking at the South African Dental Conference on Dental Business.
The subject of the lectures that I gave there on the main stage was the tech stack, which many people in attendance probably thought was ludicrous futuristic nonsense. What was a dentist doing talking about a technology stack like the one they have in IT businesses, programming businesses, or start-up tech businesses?
Most of the thing I was trying to talk to them about then was about setting your foundations solidly for what comes next, because it seems that what comes next is coming faster and faster.
It's fine if we don't want to adopt anything that's coming next and stay the way we are, but ultimately, we will be swallowed up, and the guy down the road will almost definitely adopt some of the things that we talk about, giving them a competitive advantage and undermining your competitive position.
Again, that's fine if you can't be arsed, but if you can be arsed, it's worth paying attention.
And so, now I look back 12 months and wonder where the time has gone and how much has happened since then.
Just over 12 months ago, I stood atop Lion's Head, one of the other mountains in Cape Town, apart from Table Mountain. The locals tell you to climb it, and Dominic, my colleague here, had climbed it and told me to do it.
Table Mountain is the tourist mountain, and the Lion's Head is the edgy one, with ropes and ladders and all that stuff. Both are quite frightening, but when you get to the top, you get a completely different view.
It was a beautiful day when I did that 12 months ago; it's snowing there today. Weird. Global warming is a thing.
But now, 12 months on, I'm already this week looking at a couple of different AIs that we could use as a team in the Clinic to make things a little bit better, a little bit sharper, and a little bit slicker.
The first one is Numerous.ai.
This was introduced by Seth just a little while ago, but it's been around for a little while.
If you're a practice that's in any way involved in marketing or counting your money (I understand that many practices are not), Numerous will interrogate any spreadsheet you have, give you patterns, insights, ideas, and suggestions for what you might do with the data and how it may move forward.
In our Clinic, we have GDPR marketing permission to speak to over 5,000 historical patients and a spreadsheet with all their names on it.
We don't have the time to interrogate that spreadsheet line by line, but Numerous does, and for $8 a month, it's probably worth it.
Imagine we said, "Numerous, where are the clusters of these patients in our locality?" and Numerous showed us where they were. We would then hold a little promotional event in that area because we knew that many of the patients who had seen us before were there.
It's just a small example of AI's power for $8 a month.
Imagine we did that on our financial spreadsheet and asked it to give us patterns in our finances over the past three years, patterns in our staff costs, or patterns in our annual leave. Then, we could plan for the next year and be more effective and efficient.
We'd almost certainly save money in one direction and make money in another.
This is the power of AI.
This is $8 a month with Numerous.
The second AI was introduced by Andy just a few weeks ago and then by Dom. I succumbed to it for £149 and received it today.
It's a little device called Plaud.
You can check it out here. Everything about it is here, and it will show you what it is.
It's magnetic and sticks to the back of your iPhone; it's a recorder.
Considering I've used voice recording in one form or another for about the past 30 years in my practice, this is just the next step forward.
In one part of my life, I'm stuck on an old Olympus SD voice recorder, which was revolutionary 10 years ago. In another part, I'm recording this blog on the AI as part of Slack.
The Plaud is a little bit different.
It's an advanced voice recognition AI and a voice recorder.
You turn it on when you have a meeting, and it summarises the meeting, the action points, and the people who have spoken into a set of minutes and notes.
For the reassurance of Marie, my PA, it's certainly not a substitute for Marie because I will still be asking her to pick these notes up and make them look beautiful and understandable, put them in Arial 14 (my absolute chosen font) with logos on them and insights, and remember where we put them, but it will make our lives enormously easier.
It will also allow me to make notes at the end of each of my consultations, not on the clinical aspect of the patient, but on the social element: what their name is, where they went on holiday, what their job is, all the things we talked about, which I can then just cut paste and drop into the case notes so before their next appointment, I can remember what we talked about, and I can be as human as possible 'using technology to make me more human'.
It will have another 100 other options.
I will have two meetings when I go to Mallorca in the next few weeks, one with someone I've never met and one who is one of my oldest friends, and we'll be scheming on plans for the future.
I'll just ask them if it's okay to drop Plaud on the table in front of us as we talk. It will pick everything up and do those minutes that I never get back to doing.
The tech stack is real. The foundations of a tech stack are one of the most important things in any technological business moving forward, and dentistry is, at its heart now, a technological business.
Blog Post Number - 3915