Much of the time, this blog is not about dentistry, but today it is.
It's funny to reflect back on our journey through the development of digital aspects of dentistry, because I've always (and continue to think) that we are way behind the front of the curve.
When I first became a business owner in 2009, one of the first things I did and convinced my partner to do was to buy a CBCT machine.
We paid £60,000 at that time, and I was prepared to pay all of that myself, although I managed to convince my partner with a business plan that it would work. At that stage, we bought Carestream CBCT. I think that was one of the biggest statement moves we ever made as a business. We were about the third person in the country to have the Carestream machine, and no one within 50 miles of us had a machine at that time. It was absolutely revolutionary.
So on we went, usually you would keep a machine like this for about 10 years, but we swapped it after 4, moved to a Sirona machine with a full SEREC setup and then a full Sirona lab set up and a garage at the back of the bungalow (looking back on that, it was utter madness), but what we did then is we researched and developed full arch zirconia restorations using discs milled in a five-axis milling machine, and all sorts of other innovative stuff including milling surgical guides and providing guided surgery at a high level, more than 10 years ago.
We had one of the first ITERO scanners in the United Kingdom in around 2010/11, which was supplied at that stage by Straumann!!
We were CBCT scanning impressions and inverting them to change them into STL files back in 2010/11, in order to facilitate digital dentistry planning, which was so clunky and difficult that you would never have taken it forward.
All of this stuff is more than 15 years ago, where the direction of travel was, will people have CBCT machines, and can they be affordable, and will people have intraoral scanners, and can they be affordable?
It was obvious the answer to both of those questions was yes.
That was why we went forward and created a CBCT reporting course so that people could be really highly skilled at utilising the CBCTs that were going to hit the market, as all these things go, that course was commoditized by other people, and so that it's now cheap and easy to train in CBCT ( but it's not cheap and easy to train well, which is always the case).
But the world is changing now, there are so many scanners coming onto the market, CBCT, iOS. Very soon, there will be an extraordinary scanner available from China for approximately a third of the price of anything else. CBCT's the same, microscopes are the same, it's all being commoditised greatly.
There is an area of digital dentistry which is still like the wild west frontier, this is the area of practice management, practice management systems, customer relationship management, and dashboards. This is the world that will change private dentistry for the future, your ability to harness real-time analytics and understand with insight the direction of your business.
The ability to inform your decisions, the ability to have an extraordinary practice management system set up, which allows you to ‘do the work while you do the work’.
With changes that are coming in the regulation of note taking, where about 90% of note taking is likely to be cut back in conjunction with the GDC and the CQC and with the with the expansion of technological products and in particular the use of AI and other aspects of care, including X-ray reporting, CBCT reporting, financial analytics, rota planning, and all of these things.
This is the next forefront of digital dentistry.
Gone are the days when the big-hitting guys will be standing up, showing everybody what a CBCT and an iOS looks like. Here are the days where people will be saying, " This is how you use the technology to have a better business, to treat your patients better, to generate more income, to look after your team in a better way and to build your brand".
Long live digital dentistry.
Blog Post Number - 4495