Since this blog began, its focus has been to determine what those who visit it some 8.5K times a month want to read. Clinical content is by far the #1 area of interest. Unfortunately, a simplistic mechanism to ensure an ongoing content stream has not as yet been developed. The shared material needed is nothing more than a few sequential images of a procedure, with accompanying explanatory text. What is not being sought is an extensively researched article with Discussion and Conclusions, but rather a documented case that I’m sure most do daily. In this way, the scope of the service mix provided across this country is shared and through this sharing, standards and baselines will emerge; we all learn endlessly by example.
From the late /90’s, I was peripherally involved with those who developed icanaden, an intranet that has a membership of I would guess several hundred Canadian dentists. I split off from it many years ago to focus on ROOTS which is a global intranet for endodontists in particular although the bulk of the membership do not limit their practices to endodontics, but rather are very passionate about practising it at the highest possible level. The current message count on our server at the juncture is close to 3 million. These archives can be searched, much of the material has been shared for journal publications and there are those who have archived it personally in our own country and in many others as a resource for collegial access. With the geographic breadth of this country, with the presence of one of the world’s largest broadband networks, with one of the seminal smartphone developers in our midst, it seems to me inherently logical that something perhaps as simple as ITRANS.CA be the email domain for every dentist in Canada to talk to every other dentist in Canada. Categorize the discussion forums by topic – clinical, technology, governance anon if need be, but the most effective and relevant manner in which to practice dentistry is expressed so well by Howard Farran – no dentist should ever practice alone.
On the most rudimentary level, response through the comments section of this blog has always been an attempt to simulate a discussion forum. All it takes is a response followed by another by another to establish a collective voice; the collective voice is heard, opinions shared, and those that could create such a network for Canadian dentists have a mandate. The nature of the discourse is endless; trouble shooting, assistance with treatment planning, opinions on diagnostic data, new products anon. The most simple description of the raison d’etre for such a network is MENTORSHIP. And that in this era of a mobile hyper-connected populace where information undergoes generational change in the blink of an eye, ensures that we are never alone, never unaware, and never without resource for finding what we need.
