Practice Management

Editor's Note: This is the web follow-up to our January cover story, "Looking Ahead: Industry Insiders Forecast Future Trends."   There is no sure way to predict what to expect in the year to come. launches get delayed. economic issues reshape expectations. Patient behavior can be…unpredictable.

It’s been said that death and taxes are certainties of life. Add change to that list. A new generation of dental lab operators are adapting to trends in the industry that include incorporating new technologies, using different methods of marketing, and coping with downward price pressures from overseas.

A Michigan dentist has filed a lawsuit against his former employer, Midwestern Dental, for discrimination after being advised not to wear a yarmulke to work.

We all have the need for marketing collateral materials designed to help present our business to prospective clients. Many laboratories have “starter kits” or “presentation pocket folders” while some laboratories have no materials to help them distinguish their laboratory services from the competition.

Kool Smiles, a network of local dentists in the U.S., was an early adopter of SIP trunking.  SIP trunks have become a simple, cost-effective way for businesses to transition from traditional telephony to Voice-over-IP (or VoIP), which essentially shifts all phone calls to the Internet.

Nuance appears translucent at incisal edges but mimics dentin-like depth when applied to the tooth body. A single shade is all that is needed to capture every essence of the human tooth. Multi-faceted fillers reflect and refract light mimicking the optical properties of surrounding tooth structure for an invisible composite restoration. Nano-filled composite offers high strength, low shrinkage and easy polish for optimal esthetics and universality.

The subject Nine months into a rough year, Dr. Everyman walks into his morning huddle, already feeling far from successful. He has been watching a lot of TV and has heard all the news about job layoffs, bankruptcies and other economic issues. On a personal note, last month he was unable to draw his normal salary and he has never been able to put away as much money in savings as he would like. At huddle, the team seems distracted and unresponsive to his concerns.

Doctors Allen and Kelly Smudde of Valencia, CA-based Smudde Dental decided to go paperless in 2007. The improvement in efficiency for the 6,000-patient practice has been noticeable. The same patient exam that used to take between one and a half hours to two hours now takes 45 minutes.

Dash is an in-office, non-light-activated whitening gel providing immediate results at a price point that beats the competition. The all-inclusive kit provides clinicians with everything they need for whitening procedures, and that means no more hunting around the office for the 5-7 required isolation materials.

These practice building marketing tools are designed to help you develop a marketing plan that goes beyond traditional phone calls and mailings.

Where is it written that going to the dentist can’t be enjoyable? Or that a patient can’t sip a glass of beer or wine while waiting for an appointment or even borrow a laptop to surf the net? It’s not in any book that Dr. Clint Herzog, founder of Floss Dental, a practice with eight locations in Dallas and Houston, has ever read.

Just as a full row of healthy teeth offers your patients the biggest bite and brightest smile, your practice thrives when your employees are a happy, highly skilled and loyal team. Among the best ways to attract and retain members of your dream team is to demonstrate how important each of them are by providing them with excellent employee benefits. Why good benefits matter

VIOlight prevents cross-contamination of bacteria from one toothbrush to another and from airborne bathroom germs caused by sneezing, coughing or toilet flushing. Conveniently sanitizes up to four toothbrushes at one time. The UV bulb lasts more than 2,000 hours and only needs replaced every one or two years, depending on use.

Dentist Bia Kunze had a simple idea: If you can't make it to the dentist, the dentist will come to you. Kunze is a mobile dentist in Brazil, treating house or hospital-bound patients in and around the city of Curitiba. To manage her practice on the go, she uses Bento for iPhone.

01 Eleven years ago, Smile Reminder was the first company to introduce patient messaging. Where did the idea come from? Jim Higgins, our company founder, was working on a mobile messaging platform for the banking industry when he was approached by a dentist who wanted some help with last minute appointment reminders in the hopes of reducing his no-show rate. After some initial testing and success, Smile Reminder was born.

With so much technology out there, which practice systems get first dibs? I recommend approaching your technology integration efforts as a puzzle, with each system acting as a piece that needs to fit into an overall strategy so that, when the puzzle is complete-and individual products selected-it reflects the right picture for your practice. The systems to evaluate are:

Changes in Reporting S Corporation Earnings It may have been too good to last. Even though there were many pitfalls regarding the S corporation and how earnings were reported after the dentist’s W-2 compensation, many still used that type of business entity because of the savings in payroll taxes not charged to the dividend portion of the S corporation’s earnings that flowed through to the owners.

In this Article we tackle the second key to a successful website, namely, attracting the visitor. Before your website can encourage patients to visit your office, they first must find your website. For this to happen, you need to position yourself so that, when people and businesses in your community are searching for dental care, it's your website, or a page within your site, that they find. Access Paths

January 2010 | Dental Products Report Products in practice Talk should be cheap Online communication is an economical way to reach out to your patients and bring extra money into your practice. by Renee Knight Photo: Asia Images Group/Getty Images

The science behind Cone Beam Computed Tomography (CBCT ) sounds complicated. Technology jargon is filled with words such as resolution, signal-to-noise ratio, collimation and voxel sizes.

Dental professionals, out of necessity, must pay close attention to detail. It is surprising, then, to learn how little attention is paid to monitoring and evaluating the effectiveness of dentistry marketing tactics.

What is a blog, and why should a dentist care? “Blog” is short for “blind frog,” and if you believe that, I have some oceanfront Internet real estate that you’re going to love. Seriously, folks, “blog” is a word that Peter Merholtz created in 1999 from Jorn Berger’s term “weblog,” coined two years earlier. By definition, a blog is an online journal that can contain text, videos, and audio.

With the economic prosperity of the eighties, and advances in esthetic dentistry and technology, many dentists became of the opinion that treating new patient emergencies was a waste of the dentist’s and team’s time. Symptomatic of this is what one heard when calling such a dental practice after hours: “If you are a patient of record with an extreme dental emergency you may call xxx-yyy-zzzz.”

January 2010 | Dental Products Report 10 questions: Rich Hirschland Q +A: Rich Hirschland President, Dental Systems Group for Carestream Health Inc.   Photo: President Dental Systems Group for Carestream Health Inc. 01 What sets PracticeWorks, a division of Carestream Health, apart from the rest of the industry?

Dental practice management software has become ubiquitous. Most practices today are computerized at some level, whether they are using computers simply as an internet portal or facilitating the completely paperless office. Dental practice management software is useful on a daily basis in addition to becoming increasingly critical in the evaluation of a purchase opportunity. Here’s how.

A team at the Vienna University of Technology recently set a speed record for 3D printing on a nano-scale with a new "two-photon lithography" technology that uses a focused laser to print solid objects from a liquid resin.

The total just keep climbing for the partnership between Heraeus Precious Metal Refining and the Foundation for Dental Laboratory Technology, as today it was announced that last year donations from the refining branch of Heraeus Kulzer to the foundation were close to $20,000.

ImageWorks is pleased to announce its agreement in principal to sell its NewTom distribution division to Cefla.

When parents and their children walk into a dental office in Minnesota on Feb. 3 and 4, they won't need to worry about how much the care their child needs cost, of if their insurance will cover it.