Don’t Stand in the Way of Making Dentistry Fun
From a simple tool like a digital camera to more complex technologies, such as intraoral scanners and 3D imaging, nothing has influenced and guided my career more than digital technologies. In fact, over the past 2 decades, technology has made practicing dentistry more fun and rewarding than I could have ever imagined. So, I've often wondered why more dentists don't embrace it. Asking that question of my colleagues has revealed the key reasons why dentists hesitate to invest.
Here, I'll share those obstacles and why letting any of them stand in your way of embracing digital technologies is doing yourself, as well as your patients, a major disservice.
Money.
It’s the easiest and most frequently used excuse—but it’s also reasonable. While technology still isn’t cheap, it also is no longer expensive. Thanks to increased competition and wider adoption, costs are now half of what they were when I started my digital journey back in 2003. Additionally, borrowing money is now easier, cheaper, and more flexible than ever. Money really shouldn’t stand in the way of growing your practice and creating an environment that makes dentistry fun.
Overwhelm.
There is often a push to immediately transform your practice and use technology for everything right away. This can be overwhelming for both the doctor and the dental team. Instead, have an expectation and a plan to predictably and logically implement the digital capabilities over time. For example, if you aren’t comfortable taking full-arch digital impressions, just take traditional impressions until you become more comfortable using an intraoral scanner. No one says you have to do it all at once.
Vision.
When I first considered CAD/CAM, it was all about single-visit crowns. Today, that is the least-valuable benefit of taking digital impressions. Digital technology has democratized advanced dentistry, making a service like dental implants more achievable than ever. Orthodontic treatment is more predictable and patient friendly, too, while sleep apnea is an untapped market with a pool of literally hundreds of potential patients in your practice already. Sleep, ortho, and implant (SOI) procedures—I call it “SOI for real ROI”—are all made easier thanks to digital technologies.
In the September issue of Dental Product Shopper, take a deeper dive into an area of technology that has been disrupting the indirect restorative procedure for over 3 decades—CAD/CAM dentistry. Whether you start with intraoral scanning or jump fully into a sameday restorative workflow, the benefits are likely to extend well beyond simply providing fast and accurate restorations for your patients.
As dentists, we owe it to ourselves and to our patients to take a more thoughtful view of digital technologies. If you keep an open mind, I promise it will positively change your career in more ways than you can imagine. At the very least, I guarantee you’ll have more fun.
Tarun Agarwal, DDS
Dental Product Shopper Editorial Advisory Board