So here is another little bit of writing about AI, another blog.
Are you sick of it yet? Are you fed up that everything you read is about the integration of AI into your business, or you're dead?
Well, that's simply not true for dentistry, is it?
In an interesting aside, we recently moved house, and I was looking at some things and objects that I hadn't looked at for a while, including my golf clubs. I haven't been able to play golf for a while because of my bad knee, and I am hoping that I can get back to doing a little bit of that later this year.
I picked out the driver that I paid an extraordinary amount of money for about 20 years ago, made by the famous company Ping. It's black and beautiful, 8.5 degrees, though I could never hit it. The interesting thing is that it had titanium in it. At that time, all drivers had titanium in them; if you didn't have a driver with titanium, you were never going to be able to hit it. Everybody else had it; they would go further, faster, harder, straighter, and better.
It's a bit like AI, isn't it now? Everything has AI in it; if you don't have AI, you're dead.
The thing is, though, in business, and as these things are concerned, you have to go back to strategy.
If you were to adopt the stance of looking at the business clock that we have developed, you would first understand that you would need to know why you were here and what you were for before then looking at the financial elements of your business and, therefore what you could afford and what you were trying to do. Then you could look at marketing, and then you could look at HR, and then you could look at sales.
Around all of this would be the product that you were providing, and in the middle would be whom you seek to serve. And so with all of that together, you'll be able to say, "What do we need AI for?" as opposed to, "We have to have AI, or we'll fall behind".
And so this falls back into what we call the tech stack, and there is a range of blogs on the tech stack in dentistry that you could explore in more depth if you're interested.
Part 1 - Part 2 - Part 3 - Part 4 - Part 5 - Part 6
So deciding upon your tech stack (the technology that you invest in for the longer term) is a fundamental strategic decision in your business, but not before you've done everything else because if you decide to move into your tech stack and to change it, there are various things what AI could help you with if you were set up to do it or had the manpower.
First and foremost, though, you would look at the cost and then the benefit. The cost might be the time spent by the team or the disruption to learn how to use it, and the benefit might be to increase profit or free up time for the team to focus on other tasks that you feel are more important for a human.
Understanding the time, though, time to learn, and the actual benefits and the barriers and the cost is fundamental before you jump in and just buy some AI note-taking or any other type of tool that you would have in the practice.
Some of the things that you could have, which would help you, would be the following.
1. Some sort of AI note-taking tool integrated into your practice management system, which allows you to dictate your notes or even record your consultation and provide them as an AI template. It's possible that this might reduce your time spent in the evening sitting in front of the TV writing treatment plans or notes for patients like so many dentists do.
2. Financial AI. The ability to use AI through your cloud-based financial portfolio not only to cut the time for tasks down, which you definitely can do, but also to begin to give you insights.
Imagine you could take your profit and loss spreadsheet for the last 5 years, plug it into the cloud, and ask it to do a financial analysis for effectively nothing to see how things were doing.
3. The next thing you do is use it for the marketing tools that you have. It will provide you with marketing material but also insights into your marketing and how your marketing is being affected by different things.
4. This is my real big idea; this would be a game changer. I would like an AI recording camera in every treatment room in the practice. I'd like it to record constantly; I'd also like it to be able to link to individual appointments and populate both the practice management system and the appointment system. I would, therefore, never take any case notes again because all I would do is talk to the patients I normally do, record it, transcribe it, organise it and put it into the notes.
The reason this would be a game changer is that if you weren't being honest or ethical, you would be caught. If, on the other hand, you were being honest and ethical, and someone suggested you weren't, you would be unable to be caught because it would be a lie.
All the technology for this is already available, and I probably should have done it already, patented it and started to roll it out with a sales team across the United Kingdom and Europe, and then onwards, but really, I won't do that because it's not my business model, it's not part of my why or my strategy ao I'll give it to you or someone else, but it will be here in a minute.
It's a demonstration, though, of understanding that you need to have the infrastructure for this stuff, the power, the internet, the modification and accessibility of your practice, and then you need to think about what you're going to do, how it interacts with everything else, and how it drives you forwards.
Is it eating you, or is it feeding you? I guess that's the essence of strategy.
Stay on the path.
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