Meeting Minutes: 5 Takeaways from Recent Conferences

The Dentist’s Money Digest® editorial team made trips recently to the Hinman Dental Meeting in Atlanta, Georgia and the American Association of Orthodontists Annual Session in San Diego, California. In addition to interviewing key opinion leaders in the general dental and orthodontic fields, editors also covered continuing education sessions. Here are five quick tips gleaned from the expert speakers.

Dentistry, there’s an app for that: At the 2017 Hinman Dental Meeting, Martin Jablow, D.M.D., discussed apps for dental offices. Keep your patients entertained with a practice Netflix or Amazon subscription. Hiring new staff or assistants? Use Dental Dictionary to bring them up to speed on terminology. Maybe you’re fresh out of dental school and can’t remember the steps to a procedure. Dentistry ProConsult will give you a tutorial.

Cloud calamities: Cloud computing apps are handy, but they may be sapping your practice’s internet connection, said Steve McEvoy at the American Association of Orthodontists Annual Session. If you’re using Dropbox to share patient files among practice computers, the constant uploading and downloading, multiplied across however many computers you use in your practice, could be causing intermittent internet slowdowns. That’s what your server is for. Use it.

Negating negative reviews: What do you do when your practice receives a negative review? If your usual answer is “grouse about it,” then you need to take a different approach. Social media marketer Rita Zamora told Hinman attendees that you should have a negative review crisis plan in place. Have a standard response on hand that you can use to reply — succinctly — to negative reviews.

No excuse not to: Armor Dental rolled out a new product, called Mouth-Mate, at the AAO Annual Session, to help braces-wearers brush. Its flexible head can help patients retract lips and cheeks to reach hard-to-brush places. But Mouth-Mate also has applications outside of orthodontics. The device’s flexible rubber heads, which come in different shapes, can cover oral wounds so patients can brush comfortably after surgery.

Lead the way: Want to increase case acceptance? Don’t ask your patients, said dental-practice specialist Lois Banta at the Hinman Dental Meeting — inform them. You’re the doctor and you have the clinical expertise. It’s up to you to recommend the best course of treatment. Let the patient decide what they do and don’t want to do. The patient should be made to feel in control of their destiny, said Banta, the CEO of Banta Consulting Group.