I’m driven by a passion for the use of the Internet and all it’s tricks and toys to learn faster, more pervasively and eliminate the clear and present danger of hired gunslingers, paid advocates and pseudo-arms length royalty accruing purveyors of the “next best thing”. In the process of finding relevant material for this blog, it opens a literal treasure trove of informatics and innovation.
Take a minute to watch this animation – it’s analogous to the use of stereolithic models and surgical stent creation for implant placement from Materialise and it’s subsets and to digital impression taking and CAD/CAM restoration, Invisalign, anon……..a simply brilliant teaching modality and one I sincerely hope will come to Oral Health – reaching out to www.optiopublishing.com for some form of strategic collaboration.
I’ve been making a lot of noise about encryption coming to Ontario dentists with the hope that someone may comment, respond, send a blog entry saying, “shut up,you know not of what you speak”,but with no success.
Encryption, not unlike the creation of a Canada wide mentorship online forum, is going to necessitate some standardization from third party providers of the software for the cyphers, encryption keys anon that are mandated. However, let’s live in the real world, companies don’t talk to one another, and in the same way that Eatons doesn’t tell Simpsons, you have to be old enough to remember that axiom, there is simply no way that one provider is going to tell another what they are doing and share code. It’s a pipe dream, a colossal SNAFU and a catastroke to quote Jimmy Durante in the offing.
The cost of upgrading to encryption is an unknown. The cost considerations are going to be passed onto the patient as sure as December comes after November and Herman Cain has no idea who is running Libya. Perfect timing; the economy has been in the toilet for a few years, Europe is ready to break apart, the Middle East is exploding and imploding simultaneously and we live in a bubble here in Canada assuming that Mr. Harper and his black Prime Minister’s plane (think Hef in the good years) are going to fly us to Waterworld.
It’s time for transparency in education, in politics, and in governance. There is no point in determining which platform to use, it’s time for an agnostic approach to platforms and to absent malice and bias and realize that you either change with the times, or the times change you. Resistance is not only futile, it’s damaging.
Standard of care in diagnostics and practice are changing in dentistry because of technology and at the same time, privacy laws, protection of records and correspondence must change. However, if we allow it to occur in private, or without a truly transparent sense of the seismic shifts, you may well be standing on a fault line and looking for some pitons to climb out of the chasm you find yourself standing in.
I want to share a simple thought to make this sound less pontificatory and clueless. The curing light is as much a treatment room standard as the handpiece. I am in the process of purchasing the Valo – why? you ask? I’ll tell you. Cordless is kewl, there are superb handpieces on the market of equal value, but to replace the battery in the Valo is going to cost me $13.00. To replace it in the various competitors is going to cost me in the range of $100.00 to $300.00 dollars. Cheap is dear in many instances, but when you start buying equipment in the range of tens of thousands to hundreds of thousands of dollars, cheap could be fraught with incredible danger……and thus begins the slide down the slippery slope of diminishing professional standards.
Open call to all who wish to use this forum to share ideas, change and commentary – post away.
