This year we relaunched our Study Clubs at the practice to keep us in touch with the dentists we work with locally and just because they’re a lot of fun too!
We renamed them ‘Peer Review with The Campbell Clinic’ and they’re open groups and easy to attend where people come and chat about stuff; sometimes cases, sometimes subjects, sometimes just dentistry.
Last week’s was a bit different though because we managed to put together three different intra oral scanners in the practice without any of the company representatives there, so removing the whole sales element, to have an open discussion about the different things available.
We had the Planmeca Emerald, the new 3-shape wireless and the CEREC Omnicam. We had them situated in different places in the practice with three different ‘demonstrators’ and everybody had the chance to get their hands on them. It was great fun and took the chat to lots of different places. Some people had a scanner already, some people were investigating and some thought they’d never have them.
One practitioner even brought her nurse along (very clever indeed)
The fascinating thing though was to watch people’s attitude to the new technology and it isn’t actually that new anymore.
Some people just can’t see it. They just can’t see why they would break out of the old habit into something different or something new. They can’t see where the advantage is.
Of course, for a while yet, these people will be fine and will still be able to exist using the same systems they were using, doing the things the same way they were doing.
There is no question however that this is the direction of travel. There are still shops that put prices on their products using a price gun and type the numbers in at the check out but there are a lot less of them now than those who have barcode scanners and automatic reordering.
Intra oral scanning is now better (in most cases) than conventional impression taking. The main reason for this is that it locks out any real chance of error in the impression itself once you take the scan.
When you do this in an analogue format the models break or get rubbed or affected when they’re cast, or the crown doesn’t fit because the model’s affected or a hundred other things that make it go wrong.
Once a digital impression is collected it’s locked.
It’s funny though how some dentists at the right hand side of the law of diffusion of innovation (laggards) need to see a black and white stone wall profit maker in this machine before they would ever buy it.
Intra oral scanning saves money, ultimately saves time, reinvigorates the practice and allows team members to become much more involved.
It impresses patients left, right and centre and is also a way to capture and track data and to review the quality of how you take impressions (scans)
That’s enough.
That’s enough to make it worth it and enough to make sense to buy a slightly less expensive car next year and invest in an intra oral scanner.
Blog Post Number: 1725