It certainly doesn’t always seem that way, but new technologies really are created to make it easier for you to provide better patient care.
Sure when something is brand new its wonderful new capabilities also come at a premium price and packaged with a handful of compromises. Early adopters gain new diagnostic or treatment possibilities and work out the kinks of the system along the way.
For some those compromises are just fine. There are numerous clinicians comfortable with adapting to new technologies and at ease with deciphering a new interface and learning a new protocol. But for the majority of clinicians, those difficulties equal a barrier preventing the new technology from becoming a part of the practice.
It’s because of this cautious approach to new things that revolutionary technologies are slow to take hold in dentistry. Whether it’s digital radiography, digital impressions or even something as seemingly simple as intraoral cameras, the technology needs to mature before it’s widely embraced. The more revolutionary a product, the more likely it is to face significant adoption challenges.
Cone beam is a great example of this type of product. 3D imaging opened up new possibilities for diagnoses and treatment planning for implant, orthodontic, endodontic and other cases, but because it created an entirely new imaging paradigm, it arrived with a new learning curve, and the growing public concern about radiation exposure from medical imaging added another adoption obstacle.
But these concerns that prevent clinicians from embracing a transformative technology such as cone beam do not fall on deaf ears. Most manufacturers listen to their customers about what could make a product better, but many also are talking with clinicians who have shown interest but did not make the investment, and then they are setting their R&D departments loose to turn those roadblocks into speed bumps and eventually into smooth pavement.
During the recent Chicago Dental Society Midwinter Meeting, Imaging Sciences International joined DEXIS to launch their latest innovations—the DEXIS go iPad app and ISI’s new i-CAT FLX cone beam system. The app is a solid add on to the DEXIS software platform, but the FLX is the epitome of a company working hard to develop the technology potential customers have been asking for.
At the event Senior i-CAT Product Manager Kalpana Singh explained how development of the FLX began by working to lower radiation doses and design an easier to use software platform, the features clinicians generally site as the biggest obstacles in the path to cone beam. Singh’s team developed the i-CAT FLX with new software to smooth out the learning curve and a new scan setting that captures 3D anatomy with less radiation exposure than a typical 2D digital panoramic x-ray.
“The radiation dose keeps coming up because doctors are concerned for their patients,” Singh said in an interview following her presentation. “With the i-CAT FLX we’ve taken care of the damning part of it.”
The product still isn’t going to fit into every dental practice. No product does. However, it diminishes the radiation exposure barrier and makes cone beam technology a fit in more practices than it was prior to the arrival of the FLX.
The products and technologies that fit each dental practice are unique. But providing the best possible quality of care requires careful examination of new options that hit the industry. If they seem promising but obscured by a barrier too large to ignore, talk to the people who make them. They’re listening, and working hard to develop an improved version that just might be the one you’re ready to put to use.