ARE YOU PAYED ENOUGH FOR YOUR HIGH QUALITY DENTISTRY?MAYBE NOT 🙁
Maybe it’s just dentistry, cause we do this ! Most probably it’s the whole world, hidden by the popularity of the top player in each field…but the underlying feeling is always the same.
We feel that quality doesn’t pay as really deserved. What I see on a daily basis is that we are better payed doing things we don’t like to admit.
We have a paradox between ethic and profitability. An insane paradox.
The truth is that, nowadays, we are better rewarded for quantity over quality.
The truth is that we are better rewarded when we extract and replace teeth following the easy path than struggling for saving teeth.
There area many reasons behind this problem, Today i wanna address the 2 main ones.
The first is a lack of proper communication. Some can call this marketing, or whatever you want but the essence of this is always the same.
We “sell” treatments to people that don’t understand the technical details of our work, so we need to change the lexicon we use to make them appreciate what we do.
We all see people buying expensive laptop or smartphone amazed by the incredible number of apps and functions, many of them won’t be ever used at all.
We love the idea of the potential hidden in things, the social value they give (like luxury brands do in their advertising and marketing).
The Apple brand for example has been great in translating technical and raw words like frame rate, Gigabyte, resolution in more ready to grasp words like “all the music of your life in your pocket” , or
the technology behind the camera like HDR4 simply become” so that in each photo everyone looks amazing and full of sharp details”.
The ability to communicate the message for the customer’s benefit is the only way to improve the connection between quality and profitability.
Most of us still struggle accepting this idea, thinking that we as doctors have not to go” down “to the level of sales men, yet the real point is that not accepting this is to negate the essence of how humans beings interact, do their choices and their” real “behavior.
The myth of a rational human being has been already destroyed in the field of financial behavioral sciences decades ago. It’s useless to fight the reality. We have to adapt …ethically but we have to adapt. Also there is no war between” selling “and ethics, they can survive together. Selling is just a skill, how to use it it0s up to the person.
The second is “patient experience”. In contrast to most of the products available in the world where the manufacturing is done far from our eyes, in dentistry we have a very special and unique condition.
The” product “is made in real time by a human working on an other human being, completely awake and with his senses often sharpened by a little anxiety.
This changes completely the rules of the game. Beyond the mere technical quality of the work HOW we deliver the product is even more important.
A painless, relaxed procedure.. maybe seemingly effortless for the dentist will leave a greater sense of quality in the patient and an increased satisfaction.
A quiet environment where you can feel a friendly relation between people working there gives a different feeling than the same treatment developed with a nervous operator, despite the real outcome of the work.
This changes completely the rules of our game. We have to realize that the amount of time our patients are willing to spend in the dental chair and the amount of discomfort they have to bear is limited …so we have to take this in consideration in our treatments if we want our office to thrive.
This places us the question about what is really quality.. cause as dentists we are everyday exposed to some ideas of what high quality dentistry is, without realizing that often we lose ourselves in technical details adding almost zero to the real outcome of the work while consuming like a ferrari the amount of” patience and endurance “our patients have.
We have to make clear in ourselves what really is important and patients care about, and what is instead something useful just for going around with our cases and competing with other dentists.
Nobody in the scientific and academic work will teach you this.
Just people passionate on dentistry but working every day in a real office walk on this balance trying to find the right one.
That is why in the last years i spent my time trying to find the balance between giving high quality in a smart way, a way patient enjoy.
That is why I stopped performing in prostho horizontal preparations and I switched to vertical ones.
Because I ve been able to deliver great quality patients care about in a efficient way.
That is why I changed my restorative approach, far from the” detailed anatomy and colors “to a plain biomechanical friendly approach.
We like to think in absolute terms yet here we have to face that quality has two faces, the dichotomy of quality.
We have to find this balance in order to thrive.
If you wanna see how I got my balance in my office and how vertical preparations changed my life don’t miss the chance to take a seat at my next in person course in syracuse, 3 more places available or prebook my next virtual course (soon in 2023, first has been sold out in 2 weeks). Send me a private message for further informations.
