472: The Truth About Transition from Analog to Digital - Dr. Brandon James - a podcast by ACT Dental

The Truth About Transition from Analog to Digital

Episode #472 with Dr. Brandon James

Digital is the future. If you embrace the change now, your dentistry will be more accurate, more efficient, and have more predictable results. And to help you transition from analog to digital, Kirk Behrendt brings in Dr. Brandon James to share his transition journey, advice for handling technology phobia, and ways to adjust to the learning curve. Digital dentistry is advancing — don't be left behind! To learn how going digital will benefit your patients and your practice, listen to Episode 472 of The Best Practices Show!

Main Takeaways:

Without the right people to use it, expensive equipment is just décor.

Transitioning to digital will help you empower your team.

It will help you be better, faster, and more efficient.  

Digital can empower patients’ decision-making.

Don't be last to go digital — it’s the future.

Quotes:

“If you're purchasing all this equipment and your “why” is so that you can have a better picture for your Instagram post or your Facebook post, that's the wrong why.” (4:04—4:11)

“In the world of digital dentistry in full arch, it’s not necessarily that what you're doing in the analog world is not working — it is working. But the digital world allows you some more efficiencies and some more ease in what we’re doing.” (8:15—8:32)

“You've got to have the right people in place to institute this. Because you can buy $150,000 of equipment, and then it just comes and sits on a shelf. And we’ve all done that, in some regard. But when the stakes are that high, when the dollar figures are that high, you really need to have people in place to implement it.” (10:25—10:46)

“I love dentistry. I truly do. But I don't want to be doing clinical dentistry till 3:00 or 4:00 in the afternoon, and then turn on my digital designer hat and sit there and design cases for three, four, five hours into the night, and then see my family and kids at 9:00 at night. That's not what I signed up for.” (11:44—12:02)

“I absolutely believe that all of those rules and regulations that we all abide by of prosthodontics in the analog world, those still apply. Just because you buy a piece of machinery doesn't take out the rules of the game. It’s intended to enable you to do it a little bit better, maybe do it a little bit faster, do it a little bit more efficiently so that it then becomes a little bit more affordable for the patients, and you can control that cost. Because treating these patients is hard work.” (12:36—13:03)

“For us, it wasn't that anything was not working in the analog world. It was just that we started seeing that maybe we can do things a little bit quicker, a little bit faster, a little bit more efficient, have a little bit more predictability in the process. And that's where we’re going with things.” (13:13—13:31)

“My favorite part [of the transition process], at this stage of the game that we’re in, is seeing [the team] take ownership of the process itself and empowering them to feel like they have a real say in the process.” (14:30—14:48)

“[Digital] also, I think, really empowers the patients’ decision-making from a standpoint of, they can see. A lot of things that we talk about and makes sense to us, it doesn't make a hill of beans to the patient. We might as well be talking Greek to them. But when they can tangibly see something on the screen instead of having all that goopy impression in their mouth, or we can do a facial scan and all of a sudden it pops up on the screen and, ‘Oh my gosh, that looks a lot like me,’ it’s not just this pixelated avatar-looking thing, it’s a powerful motivational — I mean, we never like to say it, and it causes my toes to curl a little bit, but it is a good sales thing for people to see that, and it’s an empowering...

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