I never thought teledentistry could work.
But I see where it now has merits. I feel like it was made especially for patients exhibiting kung fu kicking perio breath.
All kidding aside, Zoom meetings has its place. I’ve used it for my initial interviews with prospective staff candidates. Saving me so much time, saving the prospect time just to physically come in and lowering barriers of entry.
My change in teledentistry isn’t about doing exams or even treatment plans via a digital link. Creating videos individualized would take up just as much time as you would have seen the patient face to face.
What digital anything, gives us a tool to scale our abilities. It’s like a magical power to let us see an infinite number of patients in a single minute. Superhuman dentisting.
The problem dentistry will always have is the possible amount of dentistry that can ever be produced is capped by the numbers of dentists multiplied by the number of productive hours. There is a limiting capacity any dentist and office will always bump up to.
If you had a way to open up your office to every prospect that walked in at any given minute, see them, and address their problem right there and then, you’d have a practice as busy as you’d ever want it to be.
Where teledentistry will work today is when we leverage it to create a personalized touch point. An introduction to yourself, a personalized message. When you show your caring abilities, you befriend them and let them know who you are before you’ve ever met them.
I remember when I used to be involved with posting every other day on Instagram, my followers would message me telling me to do more, their appetite insatiable to see me more. They had gotten to know me through a digital portal interface. Watch your favorite YouTuber, and you may just think they specifically talk to you. Yet they are just pixels on a screen with coherent audio attached.
It sounds so sci-fi if you talked like this just 20 years ago. But we interface with a digital world where we blur the lines between artificial and real.
Just as we see current chatbots being insufficient and inhuman on the surface today, I swear they are getting smarter and seamless as if you were talking to a real person. GPT-3, it’s not a race car, but a new AI chat bot has shown conversations that would wow you as if it had self awareness. Chat with GPT-3 yourself https://www.quickchat.ai/emerson
Our conversations can be distilled into an algorithm and decision tree that can be parsed with answers. Humans are inconsistently consistent.
It’s so powerful that I want to build a simple video algorithm, in which I help walk a patient through a mini exam online, where they respond and send me a photo and narrative. My automated system replies with a video that invites them to the office. Getting the details of x-rays and history.
Very surface level for now, but I see the potential that its an added layer of value for patients to have with you that otherwise wouldn’t have been there. Thriving in the next digital age.
Lam