In this podcast, sponsored by DentalMonitoring, Orthodontic Products Chief Editor Alison Werner is joined by Blake Davis, DDS, an orthodontist in private practice at Kirkland Redmond Orthodontics in Washington to talk about remote monitoring, the role it plays in practice growth, and how it fits into the digital workflow of today’s orthodontic practice.

When Davis started his private practice 6 years ago, he was limited on space; the only spaces available were under 1,200 feet. But within this space, Davis built out four chairs and relied on technology and a digital workflow to make that small space as useful and productive as possible. 

Three year’s later, Davis’ practice went a step further and went fully digital—adopting customized treatment for both aligners and brackets, and with that remote monitoring—all in an effort to grow the practice.

As Davis describes it, the decision to go fully digital was a big one, but it was also purposeful and intentional. And a key component of that was choosing the right technologies. On the bracket front, that was LightForce’s custom 3D-printed bracket system. And for remote monitoring, it was DentalMonitoring. That platform, he says, allowed him to “exponentially grow and change” his practice’s capacity. 

In the 2+ years since implementing DentalMonitoring, Davis says his practice has seen increased production, starts, and volume, all while not growing the team—and having more time to spend with family. 

Davis, who didn’t implement DentalMonitoring until the latter half of 2020, talks about he relied on a self-created app in the early days of the pandemic to monitor patients virtually. But he and his staff could only manage 50 to 60 patients at a time. Knowing he needed a more robust system to expand, he turned to DentalMonitoring and with its AI tools now monitors close to 1,000 patients in his practice. DentalMonitoring, he says, has allowed him to increase his practice’s capacity without adding additional salaries or infrastructure costs. 

In this episode, Davis not only shares the advice he was given when implementing DentalMonitoring—to go all in and use it with both his bracket and aligner patients—but also how DentalMonitoring has been key to growing his practice while keeping his fixed costs in check. He also talks about the data he looks at to know that this platform is helping him grow and giving him the ROI he needs to know this is a worthwhile investment. What’s more, he talks about how his practice manages patients using DentalMonitoring, including the staffing and scheduling considerations. OP

Podcast Transcript

Alison Werner:
Hello, this is the Orthodontic Products podcast on the MEDQOR Podcast Network. I’m Alison Werner, chief editor of Orthodontic Products. In this podcast sponsored by DentalMonitoring, I’m talking with Dr. Blake Davis, an orthodontist in private practice in Washington State where he has two offices. We’re going to talk about remote monitoring and the role it plays in practice growth and how it fits into the digital workflow of today’s orthodontic practice. Dr. Davis, thanks for joining me.

Dr. Blake Davis:
Thanks for having me. I appreciate it.

Alison Werner:
Yeah. Well, so let’s get started. Can you tell me a bit about your practice and how long have you been practicing now?

Dr. Blake Davis:
Sure. So about three years ago, I became a fully digital practice. That was obviously a big decision, a purposeful decision, intentional decision that was made and something that really changed the way that patients experience treatment now in my practice and the way my team experiences taking care of them. I started the practice in 2014, so we’re getting close to 10 years here as an orthodontist, but I started my own practice right around five, six years ago. That was really, again, something that I felt like was necessary for me. I had a vision of how I wanted patients to experience care, and a big part of that was technology. I’m lucky I’m in an area, frankly, where there’s all these tech giants and people love technology, so I have the right audience. There was not much pushback in terms of pushing forward and pushing the envelope and trailblazing with what we were doing.

But when I made the decision to both do aligners and braces in a customized fashion with digital design and a digital workflow, that really felt like a big leap. So it was then leveraging all that with DentalMonitoring, with remote monitoring, that allowed me to create what I’ve now created today, which is a practice where we don’t see nearly as many patients in the day. Our team has not grown in over four years in terms of numbers, but our practice has seen huge growth in terms of production and starts as well as volume. So it’s been a really fun ride. I love this conversation because it’s changed my life and my family’s life forever and something I’m really happy to share and talk about.

Alison Werner:
Okay. So when you were starting that digital practice five years ago, and we’re going to talk about when you implemented DentalMonitoring, which is only about three years ago. So when you started out five years ago, what did being a digital practice actually mean in practice? What were those steps?

Dr. Blake Davis:
Yeah. As you know, at that time we didn’t have all the options with treatment that we do today. So at that time, that meant that rather than taking the goopey mold impressions, alginates, we were scanning. That meant that all records had to be digital. That meant that as I was digitally designing their care and creating digital blueprints, we then had to execute that in the chair in a different way that was based on efficiency and reducing the number of visits. And so I came to this conclusion when I was looking for spaces in my area and all the spaces that I could find were under 2,000 square feet. So the space that I started in was actually under 1,200 square feet, if you can believe that. So I came out with lasers. I designed the space myself and turned this four chair practice into something that had to be modeled for a digital workflow.

Because that was the only way we were going to survive and grow. And so some of it was intentional, some of it was because I was forced to in terms of the space that I had. And so I really kept pushing and talking to friends in terms of finding a better way with fixed appliances like brackets as well. And it wasn’t until I used a system like LightForce that I really was freed up to have the exact same digital workflow, whether it was braces or Invisalign. And then leveraging DentalMonitoring was really that next big step, like you said, about three years ago that allowed me to just grow and exponentially grow and change my capacity for my practice.

Alison Werner:
And so when you implemented DentalMonitoring and you actually implemented it in the later part of 2020, so just a reminder in case our listeners forgot, the pandemic started around March and we had closures for orthodontic offices for about a month and a half there. You actually didn’t implement it till later that year. So I’m curious, how were you managing patients before you had implemented DentalMonitoring, and how did you know that that was the moment that you really needed to make that step and implement it?

Dr. Blake Davis:
I got to a point where I just needed the AI. I was using a remote monitoring system. We had created an app for our practice for patients to scan in. That really helped us as our clinic was shut down during the pandemic, but it wasn’t good enough. When I had the free time during the pandemic to see my virtual patients go through the virtual scans, it worked, but I had the time. Once we came out of the pandemic, people were eager to get back into care and continue the care that they had already started. And so really that meant I had to rely on something other than just myself reviewing all these photos and reviewing these scans. And the only way I could do that was with using the AI that had been created with DentalMonitoring. And so for me that threshold number was about 50 patients, 60 patients that we were remotely monitoring. Today, we’re close to a thousand patients that we’re monitoring in terms of the volume.

And so I just realized I couldn’t do it without having these systems set up in a way in which I didn’t have to be present or micromanaging the system all the time. And so that was really the point that I just realized I had to, I had no choice. We were growing at a rate in which it wasn’t possible for me to continue just looking in on all the checks, even after hiring somebody, I still couldn’t do it or assigning somebody as an assistant to do that. So we just got too busy and that was a good thing. That’s a good problem to have and something that just forced us to keep pushing in the direction of monitoring both aligners and braces in our practice.

Alison Werner:
Okay. And so when you started with DentalMonitoring, were you using it for both modalities, aligners and brackets? And did you start with a small group and then expand out or did you go all in?

Dr. Blake Davis:
So I was given some sage advice from a few people who are already using DentalMonitoring. And so we went all in. And I would recommend to everyone who’s thinking about it that that’s the only way you can really use it. Because when you look at practices, it’s all about your model and you have to understand your model. So my model might be different from someone else’s model in some other part of the country, my space is different, my rent is different, my fixed cost. And that’s a big issue is you have to understand the real big fixed costs in your practice, in your model overhead is your staff wages and benefits and then the rent that you pay.

And so that structure looks different in different areas. And so we have very inflated costs here where I live, we’re outside of Seattle in Kirkland and Redmond, and these are some of the most affluent areas of our entire country. And so I’m not in a situation where I can have 20 employees in my practice, and that doesn’t really make sense. So it was really critical that in order to continue to grow but maintain a fixed cost structure, that made sense for me that we just continue to do everything with remote monitoring.

Alison Werner:
Okay. So when you’ve talked about how you needed this to grow, what data are you points are you looking at to tell if a product like that or actually what data points are you looking at to make to know that DentalMonitoring is helping you grow or facilitating that growth?

Dr. Blake Davis:
Sure. So I think there’s a few ways to look at this. And the three that I would bring up are number one, your value per visit. Because I think once you start to look at practice, look at your practice model in terms of the value that each visit brings, you’re going to totally change the way you think about taking care of your patients and redesign all your systems or processes for care essentially. The second one, which is a common one that we talk about, is the amount of revenue that you generate per employee, for full-time employee. I think that’s important because as you look at that, you understand that you need to keep increasing that number, especially right now. And to do that, you need to keep empowering your team in a way in which you turn the people who are the stars and the superstars.

And then the average players into stars are really quality teammates. And that’s what things like DentalMonitoring do or digital design do because it takes away a lot of the guesswork or some of these almost now antiquated skills that a lot of our clinicians had for years and years in which they were so well-trained and they probably could have diagnosed and treated like a lot of us docs, but now we don’t have people or employees coming in where they’re going to stay for 25, 30 years routinely. I feel like the long-term employee in our practice these days is a three to five years. And so we have to be looking at what revenue we’re generating per employee and it has to increase. And then lastly, and the obvious one is starts, right? That’s your production. And I think that’s just an easy consumable and digestible metric because it allows you to look at, okay, how many starts am I generating per month, per location, per doctor?

However it breaks down in each person’s practice. So the way I really look at it with DentalMonitoring is I’ve basically added one employee to my practice, and that’s DentalMonitoring. It’s like my AI employee, and that’s about what I pay a year for. It is like amount I would pay for an employee, but it allows me to increase my practice capacity such that I get about three to four more digital chairs in a day. So that’s three to four less clinicians or assistants that I hire. And then on top of that, it allows us to manage the inflow or the influx of new patients in a way in which I don’t have to hire a second TC. So with my numbers, you would assume that we’d have to have two TCs. We actually just have one who is a full-time TC. So really when I break it down, we’re adding one AI employee as opposed to hiring about five or six physical employees.

Alison Werner:
Related to that staffing question, you mentioned before you were using DentalMonitoring to manage the patients that you did have, especially during that pandemic or you had a employee who was helping you, how do you manage DentalMonitoring and the data you’re getting from patients, how do you manage that amongst your staff? Do you have a dedicated person? How much time are you spending? How does that break down for you?

Dr. Blake Davis:
Yeah, that’s a really good question and a common one I hear when talking around the country is what did we have to do to reorganize because that was what we did. So I have a DentalMonitoring coordinator that was critical. As I said, I hit a threshold number and at that point I needed someone else. And so I was really lucky, someone who I was friends with who had 15, 20 years of assisting experience wanted to be part of this, but she wanted to work remotely. So this was the perfect opportunity for her to continue pursuing her passions outside of dentistry or orthodontics, but still be part of something she loves. So that’s really a nice balance. So she is a part-time employee, but she is able to monitor and manage, like I said, nearly a thousand patients that we’re monitoring through DentalMonitoring.

I also reorganized so that we have a digital workflow coordinator and she is a total superstar. Really both of these two people, my DentalMonitoring coordinator and digital workflow coordinator are just amazing, very, very smart people and have helped me build out all these systems because in order to see enough patients in the way that we’re seeing them, you have to have wonderful systems and things that allow people to flow through treatment properly. And so we built out all these workflows that really allow us to take my digital design, our customized appliances and execute. And so that was really, really critical for us was to turn these employees that were doing something else into something that we needed now as a digital practice.

Alison Werner:
And then in terms of the patient journey, what has been most significant to you or what has been most impactful to you in seeing how patients interact throughout treatment with DentalMonitoring?

Dr. Blake Davis:
I think it was seemed, or at least felt so obvious when we first started this because here we were coming out of the pandemic, we were already using some remote monitoring in our practice. So patients were used to it, but people accepted it so easily because they were like, yes, I don’t want to come in so many times or because of health reasons or safety concerns, they didn’t want to come physically into the office. So I think people accepted it very quickly, very readily. Here in the last year or so, people are feeling like they are back to normal for the most part. And so I think with that said, people are getting busier again and they understand that all these activities after school, after work or directly related to work, are allowing now more freedom in their treatment process if they’re using something like remote monitoring.

So I would say that we do have patients, and I wouldn’t lie to anyone about this, we do have patients usually either patients over 75 who decide to not use DentalMonitoring, but the majority of our patients consistently use it and use it well and rely on it because what they understand is because we have this great DentalMonitoring coordinator who gives them great feedback, does videos, encourages them along the way, we have this wonderful system in place that really allows them to see their progress. It actually has helped them to reduce the amount of time they’re in treatment, come in for fewer appointments and get outcomes now that they’re thrilled about. I have a number of friends who are dentist in the area who text me and they’re like, “I can’t believe you didn’t show me this.” And I’m like, “What are you talking about?”

And they’re like, “My patients showing me how their teeth are getting aligned and straightened on this app on their phone.” And I was like, “Oh, yeah, that’s still monitoring.” And they’re like, “This is amazing. I can’t stop watching this.” It almost creates this sense of obsession like, wow, I can’t believe this is happening for me the way I wanted it to and in a way in which I don’t have to come in every four weeks to see right orthodontist. So many of our patients are coming in between 12 to 24 weeks at a time, whether that’s braces or Invisalign.

And so we have many patients who aren’t easy, straightforward class one crowding care where they’re getting treated out and 13, 14 months and they came in five times total. And that for them is value because they’re busy people with very important jobs. In my area, most of the time both parents work and are employed the dual income houses. And so the parents are really, really busy whether that means for their own treatment or that means for their children. So they understand the value here. At least in my area, time is money and I would much prefer to optimize treatment in terms of time.

Alison Werner:
So going back to the business aspect of implementing this, how are you measuring your ROI or return on investment with DentalMonitoring?

Dr. Blake Davis:
In terms of at least my best metric, as I said before, I’m really looking at the value per visit. So I have a number, and this was not from any consultant or from anyone else. And for those that have heard me talk about this before, it’s the same number. It’s $500 per visit is what I use as a benchmark in my practice. So the reason that matters is because if we ever get close to that number or drop below that, I have to reverse engineer how we’re going through the process of taking care of patients. For instance, more recently, we recognized that based on the model that we’ve created in which I really only want to see about 60 patients in a day, we want to get a certain number of starts in a day and in a week and in a month, it meant that we had to modify our schedule again.

And that meant that we had to start eliminating some more check appointments. So when I first started DentalMonitoring, I took out almost all check appointments. So think of an elastic check or a bite check or an aligner check, wipe those out. That took my schedule from 80 plus down to 60 right away. And in terms of what we’re seeing now, I’ve had to go back and eliminate a few more checks. And that has meant that we are now designing everything in a customized fashion and using product that allows us to eliminate about two appointments for some of our appliances. And that has helped us get back down to the number that we want and also the value per visit that I want, because the way I run that number is I wipe out all the exams and then I count every other visit. And that includes all observation, all recall, retainer checks, everything, because we want to be incentivized to do things as efficiently as possible, whether that’s in a recall program or in retention.

And then I take my production, what we’re doing, and I divide out the number of visits. And so that’s where we get that 500 plus. And that’s really critical. And I think if people really started to look at this number and started to say, “Okay, if I’m below that, how do I create a situation in my practice or design a model that actually allows me to achieve that?” It would change everything that they do. They would work fewer days, they would see fewer patients, they would earn more in terms of their revenue and bottom line, and I think they’d actually have happier patients and happier team members because these are all things that are not just based on money. They’re based on quality of life too.

And that’s really critical. I know a lot of people that want to, it’s about spending more time with your family. That is one great way you can use that time. A lot of people are saying, “Hey, I now have the capacity to see double the number of patients because of this.” So those are the different ways you can look at this and what’s right for one person might not be right for another.

Alison Werner:
Well, my next question was going to be, I was curious, do you believe your greatest ROI is quantitative or qualitative? And you talked about that there.

Dr. Blake Davis:
For me, it’s absolutely qualitative. My kids are at an age where I want to be part of their day-to-day, their lives. I want to be present with my wife and she owns her own business too. And we couldn’t do any of these things if we weren’t a team. So me staying late all the time or seeing a hundred plus patients in a day and being so exhausted that I don’t even want to talk to my kids isn’t an option. And I know and I’ve talked to a lot of orthodontists who feel that way, they’re just so burnt out, so exhausted. There was this initial high coming back from the pandemic and people were excited to get back in. And we saw this unprecedented growth in 2021 in a lot of practices. And that was because people were so liquid, right? They hadn’t gone on four or five vacations like they normally do.

So they had the money to spend. So that parent had been thinking about it now is ready to do Invisalign or do a clear aligner treatment plan. And I think what’s happened though is you’re seeing a lot of people now all of a sudden we’re back to more of a normal reality in terms of our day-to-day and people are just total burnout. And that can mean many things for many different orthodontists. That might mean that they are going to retire earlier, that might mean they want to now join a group. That might mean they just are feeling done or they want to work fewer days, but if we don’t change, we’re not going to improve our lives. So yeah, for me it’s definitely qualitative because it’s improving my life and my family’s life.

Alison Werner:
Okay. You talked a little bit about this already about how DentalMonitoring has impacted patient access to care, but I’m curious how has it impacted your organic referrals and your acceptance of treatment?

Dr. Blake Davis:
I don’t know if I have any kind of metrics that would allow me to objectively give you an answer to that. My feeling is that the best way to market in any community is word of mouth. And the best way to market is to have that stamp of approval from those around you. And not just one parent on the team, but two parents or three or four say, “Hey, this is where you should take your child,” or, “This is where you should go.” I think that is what builds the value. And so from that standpoint, we do get a lot of feedback that the way we’re doing it is different and for that reason people want to come see us.

And so again, I don’t have an objective way to give you an answer to that, but I will say that subjectively speaking, it’s really about just building value in the community. And I think people really believe that, hey, if you’re valuing our time, you’re prioritizing the patient over just metrics in your practice and decisions are being made that way. I think they understand and they see it and they see the passion that we have to help them to achieve their goals as well. So yeah, I think it’s that plus everything else that we do that has really allowed us to grow that way.

Alison Werner:
So you talked about that $500 threshold, but I’m curious, was there a specific threshold after you started using DentalMonitoring, where you started seeing and realizing the ROI that you really wanted to see? Was there a moment or was a point in time where you realized that?

Dr. Blake Davis:
I would say it was probably about nine to 12 months into using DentalMonitoring. And this sounds silly because a lot of people say that after three months they see their schedule clearing up a little bit. As you’ve gone appointment on demand, you start to recognize that two, three weeks out your schedule’s pretty light, and then of course it’s filling up as you go. But that happened for us probably within the first six months. But what totally changed was that as we started to open up our schedule, we started to open up more opportunity to get people going and get people started. And so we started almost in terms of just this leap or this big jump, and everyone who’s been in practice and pays attention to numbers has looked at their starts and said, “Hey, it looks like it’s an exponential increase right now,” and then all of a sudden we’re plateauing or we’ve hit our saturation, right?

And then all of a sudden you hit another leap. And so what happened was we really jumped at that point and we jumped about 150% and it was to the point where it had freed me up so much more to focus on all these other things that I needed to be looking at that it just really turned into a rocket ship. And that was the moment that at least I felt like we were starting to see the real benefit or the real return on our investment because from the beginning I felt like, again, like I said, I’d hired another employee, it was just an AI employee, but now at this point we were actually getting the return and so we really took a job.

Alison Werner:
At this point, you’re about two plus years in, you’re not quite at three. What’s the lesson you take away with those two years of experience on your belt with this technology?

Dr. Blake Davis:
We touched on one of them earlier that being that you have to deep dive, you have to go all in. There’s no substitute for that, otherwise you won’t change your model. And it’s just a fun way to look at patients. Number two, I would recommend doing it with aligners and with your fixed appliances. And I would continue that beyond just braces. I would do that for appliances like expanders. I would do that for appliances that you feel like you can adequately assess and have enough oversight to take care of your patients properly. And once you start to do that, then you can start to build out more systems. And I don’t think we’re there yet, within a monitoring yet, but your recall system and you can actually start to market within DentalMonitoring to those patients. The same thing can be set on the back end with retainers if that’s a goal in your practice to increase or drive more retainer volume and everyone’s goals for their practice are a little bit different.

But the biggest thing of all of this that I would say, Alison, is that you change your schedule. So a lot of people I think start to deep dive, but they don’t change the way they actually care for their patients. So what I mean by that is don’t continue to see your patients with braces every eight weeks, go 16 or do it on demand. Create systems with the way you do your aligner setups so that you strategically see them for one, two or three appointments and then otherwise they’re just scanning. So I think what happens is people get locked into doing things in the ways they’ve traditionally done it for years and years, and that’s just what they know. But you actually have to go back and rethink the whole system itself. And so if you do not invest the time and energy to remodel your systems, it won’t work.

And we were at the AAO a few weeks ago and I talked to a number of docs about this, and I think what might be a little bit misleading is if you just plug in with DentalMonitoring that it’s not going to you can’t snap your fingers and start passing them out and start scanning patients and assume it’s going to solve your problems for what you want. You actually have to do a lot of the work as well to reorganize your entire practice, maybe trim a little fat along the way, and also redo your scheduling and your workflows and your treatment plans.

Alison Werner:
I want to go back, you mentioned the fact that the reason you went to DentalMonitoring because it had the AI component. I’m curious to get your view on the role of AI in orthodontics and where has it taken you as an orthodontist and where do you think it’s taking the profession?

Dr. Blake Davis:
This is a great question. This is a global question right now, isn’t it? Not just for orthodontists. Let me phrase it this way. I was talking to one of the residents when we were in Chicago and they were very concerned about the fact that AI was going to take our place. And I told him, I said, “Don’t be worried. The way we set up cases with aligners, that clearly is not something that AI has solved or algorithms have solved. We still need the doctor to diagnose. And so much of it is dependent on diagnosis.” I think in terms of monitoring, it’s the same thing. We still need to intervene and to evaluate. And you had asked this question earlier, I don’t even know if I’d actually directly answered it, but I still get involved with my DentalMonitoring coordinator throughout the week because there still has to be doctor oversight.

As an orthodontist, we are decision makers and we have to be quick with our decisions, but we still have to be the ones in charge that know what is the right decision. And so there is no substitute for the doctor, but there is a way to help AI support what we’re doing. And I think as this continues to grow and we get more and more data, I think what we’re going to find is that a lot of these things that were unknowns before. For instance, biologically, when should you bring back your patient with braces? In residency, you were probably trained that was every six to eight weeks or maybe even four weeks depending on which program you were in. But who’s to say it shouldn’t be 24 weeks? You have one wire the entire time. You know what I mean? So I think these are the data points, and I think this is what’s so special about DentalMonitoring is I look at it like an education piece too, is that we’re actually getting more and more information.

And of course they’ve revealed insights and all that great stuff, that’s helped me to actually change attachment design, change staging and sequencing, and all this information is actually making us better orthodontists. The other thing that I would say that has been lost in the last five, 10 years is that a lot of the studies coming out of universities aren’t being funded the same way. And so we aren’t getting the data, the information or the evidence you might call it, that we need to make the right decisions in our practice. So there’s still all these artifacts that exist in orthodontics because that anecdotally was what some older orthodontists said we should do, right?

But there’s no real evidence. When you have a sample size of 20, how’s that really helping you make a decision? So when we have thousands and thousands and thousands of case examples that show you what’s happening, how this is playing out biologically, what’s the right thing for this patient? I think we’re going to get it so much better. So if I was to answer your question most directly, I would say I think it’s going to make us a lot better as doctors, and I think it’s going to trim a lot of fat in our practices, and you’re going to see people totally simplify the way that they actually move teeth. And I think that’s what’s going to probably change the most is we’re going to get so much smarter about the way we take care of patients.

Alison Werner:
You already mentioned what was going to be my next question. It’s the insights now that you can get with DentalMonitoring. You talked a little bit about attachments there. What have you taken from your data? Is there anything that you’ve acted upon because of the data you’ve gathered about your own patients, your own practice over the last two years?

Dr. Blake Davis:
So first thing first is attachment design, particularly with my maxillary lateral incisors, my upper [inaudible 00:27:56], as well as some of the posterior attachments and the way we’re using those. Staging, that is really critical in terms of the way I’ve designed our aligner sequencing. In terms of brackets, we’re discluding almost all patients now to the point where we’re getting more freedom for tooth movement. In terms of the way in which we see patients with braces, our intervals have become customized. So it’s not, hey, every eight weeks we see them back. It’s dependent on where they’re at in treatment with which wire and what we need to accomplish. So these are all things that have changed a lot for what we do. It’s also meant for me as I’ve looked at all these cases, and I’m even monitoring patients in elastics, like take a class two patients and you’re seeing class two cases treat out when they wear their elastics properly.

And then you study what actually happened and you find that actually wasn’t that much different than some of these class two correctors that we are using and complicating our treatment plans with. And so I’ve even changed things that way. So again, I’ve really simplified. The other thing that’s happened as we’ve used customized appliances is we can control teeth so much better with so fewer side effects along the way that you also recognize that you can do things very differently. So again, it’s just simplifying the process so much more in terms of putting a lot more effort in on the front end with digital design and then simplifying the treatment process and then changing all these little things or systems along the way to tweak and make them better. So I’d say there’s probably at least five or six things that have directly come out of insights that I’ve changed.

Alison Werner:
Well, we need to wrap it up shortly, but I wanted to ask you taking a global view of this and of the digital orthodontic practice, we’ll say most practices today are using probably intraoral imaging. What do you say to practices that need to take the next step that are reluctant to go further with a digital practice? How does a digital practice really impact or can really change, grow or accelerate their practice?

Dr. Blake Davis:
One of my favorite lines in our practice is what’s best for the patient is best for the practice. And really all decisions that I’ve ever made since I started my practice have been based upon that. And so I think people have to understand what’s best for the patient and what’s best for the patient is not to come in every four weeks. It’s not to see the orthodontist 20 times during a routine treatment. It’s actually to have lighter forces on the teeth, go longer in between appointments to dial in better outcomes because you’re digitally designing everything. And frankly, that is the case when you start to digital design is you become a better orthodontist that way and then to actually be able to have a better culture or better feel in environment in your own space. And so for those people that are on the fence right now, I think I would just ask them, “Hey, are you seeing too many patients per day to the point where you feel like you don’t get a chance to actually talk to them and sit down at the chair and engage with the family that’s there?”

You feel like it’s been a long time since you grew. Do you feel like at this point you’re either fluctuating between growth or actually maybe even declining in terms of your production? And if so, are you finding yourself constantly grasping at straws with new marketing, poise, trying to build new relationships that might not be there when really all you need to do is just take better care of your patients to grow? And so I think the pandemic was that strategic inflection point they talk about in business. And for those that actually decided to invest in technology and modify their practice, so they increased their lab bill but decreased, but they’re paying in terms of staff wages, they’re going to grow and they’re going to explode. I think that the practices that continue to do the things the same way are going to become the dinosaurs where they might actually go out of business.

I don’t think you can continue to do things the same way. Take glasses, you’re wearing them right now. I am too. We can see each other on the screen. We want options. I don’t want just two different options. I want to be able to customize the way I look. I want to customize what I wear. Look at sneakers now. That’s a phenomenon. People want to have a personalized approach to their care, and I think the most important relationship and practice is between the doctor and the patient and everything else just gets in the way, to be honest with you. So if you can find a way to connect even closer, however you want to say that, and improve that relationship, I think that then those are the things that you’re going to see when you become a digital practice. Obviously there’s on the back end, so many other benefits in terms of your production, revenue, growth, quality of life, number of days you work, all that good stuff. But I think that if you do not change, you are going to go into a decline. And I already see practices doing that.

Alison Werner:
Well, Dr. Davis, thank you so much for talking with me today and sharing your experience with DentalMonitoring and also just what it means to have a digital practice today. So thank you so much for sharing your insight. I really appreciate it.

Dr. Blake Davis:
Yeah, thanks for having me, Alison. Appreciate it.

Alison Werner:
Great. And to our listeners, thanks for joining us for this episode. Be sure to subscribe to the MEDQOR Podcast Network to keep up with the latest Orthodontic Products podcast episodes, and visit orthodonticproductsonline.com to keep up with the latest orthodontic industry news. Until next time, take care.