Dentaltown March 2018 - 78

D

Dentistry is moving at an insanely rapid
pace, with new techniques and technologies
being developed almost weekly that transform
the way we deliver care.
In addition to all of the dental innovation,
the rest of our lives is also experiencing the same
explosive change. The mobile environments
we're surrounded by, coupled with the ubiquity
of social media, alter the marketplace that we
work in, and quickly shift how our patients
select their dental care providers.
We can place guided implants in five
minutes within 500 microns of where they're
best suited to place the final restorations. Endo
will soon be similarly guided. In my office,
amazingly aesthetic CAD/CAM restorations
are placed within 40 minutes of the patient's
butt hitting the chair.
In my opinion, though, none of this really
matters to patients.
Patients aren't great at evaluating the
quality of their care, so it makes sense that the
amazing improvements in quality that today's
dentistry provides would fly over their heads. I,
like many of you, wish that I lived in a world
where patients would truly value the quality
of care we provide, but instead I'm in the same
reality, where that's just not the case. Quality
dentistry is incredibly difficult to provide to our
patients, who often seem to be doing their best
to make our job near impossible, grumbling
as they flop around in the chair.
So, from the patient's side of the chair,
it's truly the quality of care that is the most
undervalued service in dentistry. But I believe
that there is a subject just as significant as the
quality of our care that is as undervalued from
the dentist's side of the chair: communicating
with your team.
The irony is that many dentists go out of
their way to impress patients with things they
can see, like the latest and greatest technologies
or gadgets. Yet one of the most impressive
tools-and most inexpensive, too-is something patients never see: good intraoffice
communication.

78

MARCH 2018 // dentaltown.com

Communication conundrum
Here are two statistics that illustrate the
horrible state of communication in health care:
First, 50 percent of the time a patient is
in the chair in a medical office, the doctor is
looking at a computer screen. Keep in mind,
in dentistry we don't get much of a chance
to talk to people, because we're often "in
their mouth."
Secondly, one-third of all medical errors
are caused by miscommunication. Have you
seen the elaborate systems that most health
care practices use? I think we in dentistry are
probably even worse.
When you go to the physician, how many
times do you have to repeat your chief complaint? My guess is it is at least three times:
the receptionist, the nurse and the doctor all
ask you the same questions. It makes them
look less like a well-oiled machine and more
like they don't have their systems together.
We in dentistry do the same thing-and
we have fewer variables. There is no reason in
2018 that we should not have all the extremely
valuable information the hygienist had discussed
with a patient before we enter the room. In
my office we use a simple checklist through
our practice management software that's sent
to me as soon as possible and includes, in this
order every time:
*
Patient's name
*
Changes in medical history
*
Chief complaint
*
Perio status
*
Restorative needs
anticipated
*
Radiographs taken
*
General notes (got
divorced, just went to
Aruba,
etc.)
In t his
way, my team
is all on the same
page without having
to chase each other down,
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Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of Dentaltown March 2018
