The Campbell Academy Blog (71)

This summers IT fun…

So, if you have been keeping up with the blog and the inane drivel that I seem to write day upon day, you'll be aware that earlier this year, I managed to secure three new jobs to go alongside the jobs I already have.

One of those positions involves being the 'ITI Global Ambassador for Business Education'.

That is a lofty title, but I think again, one of those jobs I got because I was 'cheap and available'.

I am now, though, the champion for business education for the ITI in 100 countries, although that job has not quite developed into the scale that it might sound so far.

It might, though.

I had the most extraordinary conversation with a colleague from New Zealand on Monday night at nine o'clock, another one of those which is going to take it a lot further.

What the job does, though, is it gives me the opportunity to speak to people about things that I've learned and something that I've failed at in dental business and the education of dental business.

So today, I'm speaking in London at Queen Mary University at a dental innovation conference.

Just 35 minutes to discuss the tech stack in dentistry, which is effectively your technological spine in your dental practice, which underpins everything else you do.

It's become absolutely clear to us that people do not understand the concept of the tech stack (something we really identified about 3.5 years ago) and how much you need to invest in this in your clinic, both in terms of hardware and in terms of software and in terms of training.

We all know that we are being bombarded, left, right and centre by the dental supply companies to integrate more and more fancy technology into our practices, but if our IT infrastructure does not support or sustain this, then we are creating a hellish workload for ourselves and hellish problems with the lack of systematisation and integration.

Let me tell you a little tale from this week, which might frame this narrative.

I was working at home on Monday morning in my little shed at the back when my wife, Alison, came out to me carrying her laptop.

This is always a bad sign because my wife is not renowned for her IT skills, and she also works for an NHS trust, which has some of the worst IT infrastructure that I have ever seen in any place anywhere.

I first saw any sort of Windows programme in 1993 on a computer at Glasgow Dental Hospital in school, and the operating system run by Queen's Medical Centre in Nottingham seems to be the same operating system as that!

Alison had an email on her screen, which was 'reply all' to 11 people.

They were trying to ascertain some dates when everyone was available to do various different things, and they had embedded a table into the email (not an attachment) but something which was sat in the email, which was unedited.

And so, what had to happen was that you had to copy the entire table, paste it into a new 'reply all' email, fill out another column in the table and send it to 11 other people.

That's 121 emails coming into your inbox just to sort out some days.

In our practice, we would work with that on Slack, and it would take one message and be done in about 17 seconds.

Remember, Queen's Medical Centre has 5000 staff running a system like that the whole time.

Extrapolate that to your practice and how much wasted time and how many repetitive tasks are carried out.

If you can develop your tech stack in your practice in a systematic and strategic way over the next 2 to 3 years, it will save you an extraordinary amount of time and make you an extraordinary amount of money.

We teach people how to do this, but it's interesting that many dentists and principals in practice can't see the wood for the trees and would never invest £5000 to make £500,000 over the next five years.

I'm going to be chatting to the good people at QMU about this on Saturday, and if you want details to come along, then just hit reply here, and I'll send you the details of what's going on.

Innovation in dentistry is wired into our DNA, at least for the clinical aspects of our work.

Time to bring it home to the rest of our work.