Thursday, May 2, 2013
Henry Ford is famous for offering the original Model-T in any color you wanted as long as it was black. When critics asked why he didn’t listen to his customers who were asking for a choice in colors he is reported to have said, “If I’d asked my customers what they wanted, they’d have asked for a faster horse.” (He most likely never said it bit it is a great quote.)
Marketing guru Seth Godin has taken the idea a step further with his remark, “A car is not merely a faster horse.”
E-mail is not a faster fax. Word processing is not a faster typewriter. And Google is not merely faster Yellow Pages. At the basic level this is a simple idea and we all “get it” instantly. But when you stop to think, there is a lot more than the surface idea, and it has a lot to say about how we choose and implement technology.
The everyday folks from Henry Ford’s time thought in terms of a faster horse because they had no idea, no vision, of what else might be possible. It is a perfect example of the common tautology, “You don’t know what you don’t know.”
This leads to one of the two biggest mistakes* I see dentists making when it comes to technology. If they do not know what is possible, if they do not have a vision of how they will use technology effectively, they tend to buy random technology that may or may not enhance the practice and may or may not pay for itself. Even when dentists buy appropriate technology, if they have no vision of the possible they tend to implement it in a limited fashion that prevents them from getting the full benefit and the full pay off of the investment.
In pursuit of a faster horse we often implement new technology by simply creating a digital version of what we have done before. We even make the digital version look like the old system. For example Microsoft “files” are made to look like a manila folder sitting on your “desktop.” Dental electronic schedules are made to look like a paper appointment book right down to the spiral wire binding. Once we get comfortable with the change we can begin to see the true potential of the new technology and we can break free from the existing paradigm.
Two good examples of how we are maturing past the faster horse stage in our use of technology in dentistry are radiographs and forms.
For years dentists evaluated a digital radiograph based on how much it looked like film. But the real question we should have asked ourselves is not does it look like film, but is it diagnostic? Now we are learning that a digital radiograph can be enhanced in a number of ways by changing the contrast, sharpening, enlarging, etc., to improve our diagnostic efficiency. Newer computer aided tomography—the CAT in CAT scan—allows us to see in three dimensions and to both diagnose and plan in ways that film simply does not. A digital radiograph is not merely an electric film.
Dentists and others first introduced electronic forms to their websites by making a simple PDF of their existing paper forms. Although a PDF is digital, we often use it in essentially the same manner as paper. A patient needs to download and print the form, fill it out by hand, give it to an office administrator who then types in the data. A truly digital form does not pass through a paper stage; the data typed into the form by the patient is transferred electronically to the patient record.
The horse car analogy is useful in another way. That is to answer the inevitable worrywarts. For example, I sometimes get pushback from dentists who are worried about the security and the cost of digital records. “What if I am hacked?” or “It costs too much, what I have now works just fine.”
Ask yourself these simple questions.
Which is cheaper a horse or a car?
Which is more likely to cause serious damage, a horse accident or a car accident?
If I was traveling across the country on vacation or simply going to the grocery store would I rather take a horse or a car?
(By the way digital records actually don’t cost more than paper records, but that is another story.)
When you are looking to bring new technology to your dental office or if you are trying to use your existing technology more effectively, ask yourself, “Am I looking for a faster horse or am I willing to see and go beyond my current reality.” The future is coming and it will be amazing!
*The second biggest mistake is not to get enough training.