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Are Solo Dental Practices Headed for Obsolescence?

Dentists currently practicing — whether in solo practice or group practice — and their political and commercial vendor organizations, will become more and more irrelevant if they fail to adapt to future changes in dentistry.

Shopping malls are becoming irrelevant due to online shopping.  Landlines are becoming irrelevant with the growth and development of cell phones. Physical business meetings are becoming irrelevant with the advent of Zoom and Skype. Irrelevance happens when the speed of change outside an organization is greater than the speed of change inside an organization.

In clinical dentistry, soon electronic patient records will be integrated into all dental management software tying dentistry to medicine and risk; reimbursement based on value and outcomes, not reimbursement per procedure will become the standard; highly specific diagnostic codes will be needed for providers  to get paid;  the ability to generate “Big Data” via cloud computing will arrive shortly defining best practices; evidence based algorithms that deliver correct diagnosis and treatment plans are hitting the market now, as well as innovative self-diagnosing tools. Further, genomics, immunotherapy, and the early alteration of the biofilm will change everything about clinical dentistry.

Google, Microsoft, Tesla, Amazon, Apple and Uber are spending billions and billions of dollars on artificial intelligence (AI). AI will change everything with its convolutional neural networks, machine learning, analytics, deep learning, and data generated sensors.  As machines continue to increase their ability to talk to each other, as they continue to increase their depth and speed of learning and understanding, every aspect of life will be touched. (Don’t miss my video on Artificial Intelligence – link below).

The emergence of the flexible workforce, the gig economy, the culture and mindset of millennials and generation Z will totally alter how dental practices are staffed, trained and maintained.

Dentists are a conservative bunch. They cling like glue to the past, hoping things won’t change. But the future doesn’t care about what dentists want or what they don’t want. And the changes the future is bringing are coming hard and fast.

But we see a wave of emerging dentist entrepreneurs, professionals trained in dentistry and with an entrepreneurial mindset, able to see how these future changes can be embedded into dental practice to make dental practice an expression of this future.  And these are the individuals that will dominate the industry. As John F. Kennedy, our 35th President said: “Change is the law of life. And those who look only the past or the present are certain to miss the future.”

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Don’t miss this video with Dr. Marc Cooper and Charles Jennings on Artificial Intelligence: ​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​

https://youtu.be/Vu5wuyJUb8Y

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