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Lately, my mind has been drifting towards 10 and 15 years from now.

Let's say around the time I get to 65 to 70, what I will be doing and what the world will be like.

With this in mind, and with our business thoughts at the forefront, we're trying to imagine what the world will look like at that stage or at least have some idea of that so we can start to plan for the longer term.

In conversations recently, though (and we have the most extraordinary network), it's clear that people who know a lot about dentistry and think big about dentistry understand that it's all about the intraoral scanner.

One of the big barriers to providing solutions to people in the industry is having an accurate representation of their mouth, and what those solutions would be for that mouth.

The joy and the beauty of our job is that it is different in every single case, and therefore understanding the problems and what the possible solutions are will be the way forward.

I wrote recently about the robots, and this will definitely be a large part of what happens, but we can't diagnose without the data, without the survey, and that centres around the intraoral scanner.

We've been at the forefront of intra-oral scanning technology since it really ever existed commercially.

It’s my memory (I might have made this up) that we had the first ever iTero scanner in the United Kingdom through Straumann. At that stage in 2010/2011 or somewhere around then, Straumann had the agency for the iTero scanner before it ever went to a line.

We ended up with one of the first, I think it may have been the first, and we used it on 3 or 4 patients in the practice before we realised that it simply did not work.

Our commercial situation just did not have the stamina to be able to live with that, and the upset for patients and the disadvantage that they would receive, and therefore we gave it back.

We actually didn't give it back; we hadn't paid for it, and Straumann said they wouldn't take it back, and so we told them that we'd leave it in the car park.

They took it back quite quickly then.

The first generation of scanners through the Straumann estate and some of the really big hitters that I was friends with became no better than expensive coffee tables.

People didn't use them, but they had them in surgery as pieces of dental jewellery.

It caused a lot of bad feeling and a loss of trust that these things were sold and then didn't work (there's a lesson in that), but at that stage, the technology was not good enough to be implemented quickly enough by the vast majority of people.

That has changed and is changing dramatically.

We've had a range of different iOS scanners, including Sirona, 3Shape, iTero, and I've now settled on the Straumann SIRIOS X3 scanner.

We have 5 of these in the clinic (together with our previous four 3Shapes), and we use them daily and multiply daily.

But this is normal now, completely normal.

What is a step forward is the full and complete utilisation of the scanner in every aspect of dentistry.

What needs to happen now in dental practices is they need to make sure that their nurses are extraordinary scanner technicians, and we need to be scanning patients at almost every appointment.

What will happen next is the scanner will suggest a treatment plan for the patient.

This is very close to being here, and anyone who is used to using aligner orthodontic technology will understand how fast this has come on in the last 5 years. What will happen, though, is that the patient will attend, a scan will be taken, and the full possibility of treatment will be presented. It will be possible to upload X-rays and CBCT scans together with extra-oral photography, and to provide a holistic approach, and then the computer, the AI, the assistant, will propose the plan.

Of course, all of this technology already exists; it just doesn't exist in one place.

The race now is to be the provider who pulls it into one place.

At the moment, the people that appear to be furthest along the track with this are Align and Straumann (with Sirona some way behind). Everybody else has tiny little pieces of the puzzle, but no real full view of the overall solution.

It's beginning to feel a bit like VHS vs Betamax for those of you old enough to remember, think Netflix versus Blockbuster.

Someone will win, and someone will lose, and the person who loses will have the most expensive version of TiVo that ever existed, but they will have lost.

As independent practitioners, we get to watch from the sidelines while the battle continues.

Careful not to jump too far, too fast, cos you really want to pick a winner in this one.

 “Remember that four billion people got the phone before they got the library or the bank. The phone became both.” - Seth Godin

Blog Post Number - 4601