Dentaltown July 2020 - 29

Dentaltown founder Dr. Howard Farran has known Rick
Henriksen, Jazz Imaging's vice president of sales and marketing
(pictured left), for more than 20 years, and has followed his
leadership as the decades passed. In the 1990s, Henriksen
joined Dexis and established its model as a new standard in
best practices; in 2005, he led the team through the sale of the
company to Danaher, then took on leadership of Gendex and
Imaging Sciences (iCat), building the No. 1 imaging business in
the world.
In 2017, Henriksen joined Jazz Imaging, a dental disruptor that
offers its Solo sensor not just for sale but also via an innovative
"Jazz Club" subscription service that eliminates high upfront
costs and offers its members the sensor with all-inclusive
lifetime, no-deductible warranty support and software upgrades.
"We make this kind of a no-brainer," says Henriksen, who
joined a recent Dentistry Uncensored with Howard Farran
podcast. "Why would you spend $10,000 when you could spend
$2,000, and if you've got to pay for a warranty anyway, why not
just have it on a subscription and not worry about it?"
An edited excerpt of their conversation follows.

Rick Henriksen: We launched [Jazz Imaging] about 2½ years ago. The sensor market
had been pretty stale for a long time-digital X-ray technology has been around since the
late 1980s, and the price point has hovered in that $8,000-$10,000 range for 20, 25 years
even as the technology itself has been largely homogenized. The market's changed, but the
digital X-ray space has all but stayed the same.
I left Danaher in 2010 to try some other startup opportunities. Fairchild Imaging was
actually the founder of digital radiography technology-it invented the first Trophy sensor
back in the late '80s, it made the Sirona sensor, the Dexis Classic and Dexis Platinum and
Gendex sensors. [Fairchild] had been around a long time, making sensors for dentistry as
well as imaging devices for deep-space impact, like the Hubble telescope. That business
sold in 2012 and we had some unique patents on the Dexis sensor at the time, which
began to expire in 2014. Todd Miller, who was the project manager at Fairchild at the
time, was tracking these patents and had a great idea about a subscription option for sensor
replacement or additional sensors.
Over the next several years, they began to develop a next-generation Dexis, with things
like single-size rounded corners, angled cable-all things that made the product great-and
did a few things to improve on it, such as about 10% more active area. But the big deal
was a subscription model, so instead of paying $10,000 for a sensor, plus warranties every
year, it's $1,999 and a subscription [with no minimum contract limits]-we send you the
sensor and everything you need to get going. We've changed the economic model with the
return back to an operating expense, versus that big capital expense.

Hear the entire
podcast online!
This article includes just some of
the highlights of Rick Henriksen's
conversation with Dr. Howard Farran.
To download the podcast, watch the
video or read a full transcript, go to
dentaltown.com/howard-henriksen.

dentaltown.com \\ JULY 2020

DT0720_JazzImaging-Podcast_AG.indd 29

6/22/20 12:19 PM

http://www.dentaltown.com/howard-henriksen http://www.dentaltown.com

Dentaltown July 2020

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of Dentaltown July 2020