Decoding the Future of Dental Care: AI, Technology, and Patient Communication (E.251)

“In spite of all the modern conveniences of life in 2024, good communication and friendly people are still what we need to meet the needs of our patients.” ~Dr. Thomas Giacobbi

In this episode of Everyday Practices Dental Podcast, host Regan Robertson sits down with Dr. Thomas Giacobbi, the editorial director of Dentaltown magazine, and a practicing dentist with more than 25 years of experience. Dr. Giacobbi offers unique insights into the evolving world of dentistry, discussing the impact of AI on dental practices, the enduring importance of patient communication, and the future of dental technology.

As you listen to this episode, we want you to think about the following questions:

• How can I leverage online dental communities like Dentaltown to enhance my professional development and stay current with industry trends?
• How can I stay better informed about new materials and techniques to provide the best care for my patients?
• How can I prepare my practice for future technological advancements while maintaining a focus on quality patient care?

EPISODE TRANSCRIPT

[00:00:00] Announcer: The Productive Dentist Academy Podcast Network.

[00:00:03] Thomas Giacobbi: In spite of all the modern conveniences of life in 2024, good communication and friendly people are still what we need to meet the needs of our patients.

[00:00:19] Regan Robertson: Welcome to the Everyday Practices Podcast. I’m Regan Robertson and my co-host, Dr. Chad Johnson, and I are on a mission to share the stories of everyday dentists who generate extraordinary results using practical proven methods you can take right into your own dental practice. If you’re ready to elevate patient care and produce results that are anything but ordinary, buckle up and listen in. Doctor, are you living the dream or just dreaming of living? It is my honor to announce the PDA 20th anniversary special conference this September 12th to the 14th in Frisco, Texas, the nation’s leading course on dental practice growth. If you feel isolated as a leader who is frustrated that your schedule is unproductive, maybe your team is disjointed or your systems are inefficient. This is the conference for you. The PDA 20th anniversary conference has all new features, including keynote speaker, Emmett Smith, who is a pro football hall of fame, running back, and entrepreneur. You can choose your own educational track to customize your learning experience. Go to www.productivedentist.com and click the pop-up or select Productive Dentist Academy conference under the dental CE and events tab. That’s www.productivedentist.com. Seating is limited register today, and we look forward to helping you make your dreams a reality. Become reality.

[00:00:19] Regan Robertson: Welcome to another episode of Everyday Practices Dental Podcast. I am your faithful host, Regan Robertson here. Chad will be joining us mid-stream today for this episode because he is dentisting right now. He’s working on some clinical hours and I just got the text. So we are going to go ahead and kick it off anyway, because I cannot wait to introduce to you our guest. If you’ve been following along for the past month and a half or so, you know, that coming up in September at PDA’s 20th-Anniversary Conference, we are doing something we’ve never done before and I don’t think our editors have ever done before in the dental space. We’re holding a media round table with five of the top editorial folks of Dentist magazines, Dentaltown being one of them. My guest today, Dr. Thomas Giacobbe, editorial director and practicing dentist and owner is joining us today to talk about some of the things that he sees in dentistry, his wealth of knowledge from a doctor’s perspective, as well as an editorial’s perspective and what we can hope to see coming up live here in September, Dr. Thomas, welcome to our show.

[00:02:39] Thomas Giacobbi: Thank you very much. I really appreciate that Regan. Thank you.

[00:02:42] Regan Robertson: It is an absolute honor to interview you. I cannot say enough. I believe you said you’ve been active in Dentaltown since, did you say 2000?

[00:02:50] Thomas Giacobbi: Yeah, in the year 2000, uh, I started working for Howard as an associate. I graduated dental school in 95 and I did a general practice residency. I’m from upstate New York, so I went to dental school in Buffalo and then moved to Albany, which is where my wife’s from and then we had the, uh, bold idea to move West to Arizona, 1998. Once we got out there, you know, we started working some jobs and I had actually met Howard on my honeymoon, which is kind of a fun story. My wife is a dentist as I mentioned to you earlier and so, uh, for our honeymoon, I should say the tail end of our honeymoon, we went to the ADA meeting in Orlando because we were already going to be in Florida for our honeymoon week. So we stayed an extra few days at the honeymoon to go to the ADA meeting.

[00:03:36] Regan Robertson:Wait, so you went, you went.

[00:03:38] Thomas Giacobbi: That’s what dentists did.

[00:03:39] Regan Robertson: Yeah, your honeymoon and ADA, that’s it. That’s very, that’s nerdy in all the right ways.

[00:03:41] Thomas Giacobbi: Very romantic. Yes, that’s right and we, we happened to be, when we were checking into our hotel for the meeting, we happened to be in the same hotel as Howard and I saw him there. I had never met him before, but I have an older brother who’s a dentist and I had seen some of Howard’s videos, which back then were on VHS and my brother had one of his books and so I recognized him and I went over and introduced myself to him. He was just such a warm, kind person. Meeting this stranger dentist, you know, he gets people chatting him up all the time but at the time we had, uh, toyed with the idea of moving to Arizona, so I wanted to ask him about it what his life was like out there and he was very encouraging. So fast forward a few years, I was looking for a job in the year 2000 after I moved there in 98 and I sent a resume to his office because I figured what the heck, I might as well try and uh, lo and behold, they interviewed me and they hired me as an associate and that was the time when they were, had just launched Dentaltown and so, uh, in addition to our days of practicing dentistry, all of our time in between patients was spent talking on Dentaltown and being on the website. In 2002, I opened a practice of my own with my wife from scratch, but Howard and I continued our relationship, and about a year later, in 2003, I was asked to join Dentaltown to become the editorial director for Dentaltown magazine, which is the position I still have.

[00:05:04] Regan Robertson: And what year was that again that you were asked to be editorial director?

[00:05:07] Thomas Giacobbi: That was in 2003.

[00:05:08] Regan Robertson: Oh, okay. One of my big questions before I met you was how on earth do you balance? Being a doctor owner that in and of itself is a challenge. It’s awesome that you get to work with your wife and so you get to share some of those burdens, but I assume you have a family as well, or at least an active social life and then I thought to myself, how on earth is this gentleman managed to do editorial directing as well but it sounds to me like since you started it so early on, it’s almost like muscle memory, like you didn’t know any different way. So you just sort of worked it in. Is that how it felt to you?

[00:05:40] Thomas Giacobbi: Yeah, in a big way. I mean, it’s a lot of nights and weekends and in between patients kind of work. Even back then, many things can be done over email and we would have meetings at the office, you know, typically weekly, but I worked four days a week. So if we had the meeting on my day off, I would go in and do it on my day off. My day off became a lot of dental town work and then the nights and weekends in between is when I would do my dental town homework, because that was the only time that I had to do it and my work consists of a number of different things that’s changed over time, but some of the core things are reviewing content that’s going to appear in the magazine each month in the magazine, we’ll select some message board threads and we’ll edit those down to a size that’s appropriate for the magazine and that’s one of the roles that I continue to do so I select those threads and I edit them kind of take out parts of the conversation that might be repetitive or off topic and just kind of condense it down so that the reader is getting a nice sample of the great interactions that happen online every day at Dentaltown. I write a monthly column. I write questions for our poll. I’ve produced various videos over the years for Dentaltown. I’ve done some interviews and obviously I travel to all the major trade shows throughout the year so that I can stay in touch with what’s happening and I’ve been fortunate to attend some key opinion leader meetings with various companies and get additional insights into our profession. You know, the thing that makes the work worth doing is it gives great insight into what’s happening outside of my operatory outside of my practice, but also keeps me engaged with my profession. So it’s been a nice second job. I mean, I joke with a lot of people that there aren’t many dentists that need to have two jobs. Being a dentist is usually enough of a profession that you shouldn’t have to work extra, but I’ve held off on taking an Uber gig. I’m going to stick with two jobs is my, that’s my limit, my upper limit.

[00:07:33] Regan Robertson: You know, what’s fascinating to me about passion in particular is when you have it, it’s something that can be all-consuming at times and it can drive you forward. It can make the evenings. I wouldn’t even say fun necessarily. It’s more mission-based than anything else and you started to answer my query that, that was forming in my head, which was why, what fuels you when you get to do this? And, um, and I love that you said, you know, there’s a couple of reasons why it keeps you in touch and I can relate to that personally, because my role, my career is definitely full, full, full, full time. I’ve got children, I’ve got a life and I, and I definitely try to do the, the cliche balance with it. There is another element to me. There’s a, there’s a hero on a mission that I do as part of my business made simple coaching and I do it for the company, but I am so driven. I’ve taken multiple executives through it, but I’ll do it on the weekends. I’ll do it in the evenings. It doesn’t matter. So I’m, I don’t know if I’m projecting onto you or relating to you, but I feel that. Like it, it doesn’t, it doesn’t matter. You do it for a reason. Why do you feel that this is important? Why is the Dentaltown community and being involved in it important from your perspective? And by the way, I’m going to pause you before you answer. We’re going to bring Chadwick Johnson in right now. He’s in the waiting room.

[00:08:47] Thomas Giacobbi: Ladies and gentlemen, Dr. Chad Johnson.

[00:08:50] Regan Robertson: I cannot wait to hear your answer from that so that Chad can hear it too. He’s going to, he’s going to love that.

[00:08:56] Thomas Giacobbi: Hello, Chad. How are you?

[00:08:58] Chad Johnson: Hello sir. Good. How you doing?

[00:09:00] Thomas Giacobbi: I’m doing very well. Thank you.

[00:09:01] Chad Johnson: Excellent

[00:09:01] Thomas Giacobbi: I’m sorry you had to work today.

[00:09:03] Chad Johnson: That’s his life right now. So yeah,

[00:09:05] Regan Robertson: My question for Dr. Tom was there’s, this is obviously you’re pulled forward with passion, Tom, and being pulled forward by passion means that evenings and weekends, you’re happy to do it because there’s, there’s some sort of mission driving you for it. And I want to know very nosily, what is it about the message form? What is it about dental town? That’s so important. Why do you do this?

[00:09:23] Thomas Giacobbi: Well, there’s There’s two areas. Um, one is I have a family as well. I have three kids, two boys and a girl, and I want to do my best to reflect to my children, a good work ethic, and I want them to see that I’m working hard, not only to provide for the family, but to, uh, you know, to serve others and I think that’s part of that mission. The Dentaltown specific side is the feedback that we would get from dentists was just fuel. I mean, Howard, in the early days of Dentaltown, he was lecturing literally every single week and he would come back, and Chad, I know you weren’t here a minute ago, but I was working as an associate with Howard from 2000 to 2002. So we spent a lot of time in the office together talking about Dentaltown and practicing dentistry and so on but when he would come back every week from those trips and talk about what he was hearing from the dentists in those audiences, and how it, the website had provided them an outlet that changed their practice, it changed their lives.

[00:10:29] Chad Johnson: Oh yeah.

[00:10:30] Thomas Giacobbi: And for so many dentists, for so many dentists that were practicing alone, uh, this was an outlet to be able to interact with other dentists and share their concerns, their struggles, their triumphs, right, and it continues to be that. So many years later, I mean, people get on there every day and they have the ability to ask a silly question

[00:10:53] Chad Johnson: Or to search.That’s my favorite thing is I can search back the last 10 years on what people have said about a certain product and see if it’s changed because they improved. I mean, so it’s not static. That’s what’s cool. Well, it records. The history of it, but then it’s not static and the answer is this product is bad. It’s no, it was bad. And then in 2015, they revamped and it’s awesome. Now it’s like, Whoa, okay.

[00:11:16] Thomas Giacobbi: Yeah. I love news. That’s part of, you know, why I probably am in this editorial stuff as well. And I like to look at, like, Google News or Apple News on my phone. And Dentaltown’s website, we have something called Today’s Active Topics, which are all the threads that people have commented on in the last 24 hours. Or you can adjust the time frame, but 24 hours is the shortest. And it literally will be the dental headlines for the day. I’ll read you a couple from today, because I think it’s really fun. There’s one, How to Really Get Into Great Shape. Now, this is a thread that’s been going on forever. It’s had 287, 000 views and over 25, 000 comments. Yep. So that’s one of these legacy threads.

[00:12:00] Chad Johnson: Yep.

[00:12:00] Thomas Giacobbi: There’s video camera for procedures. Should I redo this crown? Can an apicalectomy reduce the pain coming from an extruded file? People are asking about single use diamonds

[00:12:13] Chad Johnson: Or Tom, you know, the one that always pops up, get the F out my door.

[00:12:15] Regan Robertson: I knew you were going to say that. I was waiting for somebody to say that.

[00:12:18] Chad Johnson: You know, I tell you what, there’s something cathartic about reading some of those.

[00:12:22] Regan Robertson: It’s just the acronym.

[00:12:25] Chad Johnson: Correct, but I thought for reference, for the newbies, if they heard that, that, you know, you could go spell that out in your mind in the first letter and that will bring you to the thread.

[00:12:34] Regan Robertson: I didn’t realize I have you on this show and I’m telling you how excited I am in talking with you. I, I have such gratitude and I didn’t know that it would be you in particular. I mean, we know we have moderators as well, but dental town message forum was where I got a lot of my own education. I’m not a dentist. I’m not an assistant. I’m not a hygienist. I had no dental training before I joined PDA 13 years ago and I joined in the marketing division and was basically given access to our productivity workshop and Bruce and Victoria, that’s. Really phenomenal crew to be mentored by, but you got to get up to speed fast. I don’t know when I joined joined, but I have used it daily. Today’s active topics is a great one. I have poured through it because I need to know what are on dentist’s minds. What are they struggling with? What are they curious about? It’s a way to make professional relationships for me. Bruce has been around 20 years. Victoria has been around 20 years. They both have longer, but I didn’t know Sandy Pardew until I started seeing her responding on everything and, and even though she’s a consultant and you know, you can still be friends with people that technically compete with phenomenal woman. Um, and I see her contributing and it’s just amazing. You can subscribe to like individual contributors to see when they post on different threads. So I can tell, I love Tom that you said you used to go in during like your breaks in between patients and you would go and respond. I see that in my email because with certain doctors that I follow, you’ll notice. They’ll come in and you’ll be like, ding, ding, ding and then it’ll be quiet for a little bit and then ding, ding, ding.

[00:14:03] Thomas Giacobbi: Yeah, it is. It’s fantastic and Sandy’s a great example of people that literally built a business on Dentaltown. I mean, people that want to be consultants, people that want to be clinical speakers will start sharing cases and answering questions and talking to people. We had Samir Puri and Tarun Agarwal, who used to host the townie meeting, which we had for 15 years, and they’ve gone off to do great things after starting at, yeah, T Bone, after starting on Dentaltown. So it’s launched a lot of great things and to your point, also, I’ll tell people all the time that are coming into the profession, whether they be sales reps, consultants, you know, anybody that’s new to dentistry, if you want to get up to speed on what this profession is all about, it’s a great place to just hear, I mean, what a great opportunity to be a fly on the wall and listen to it and read dentists. talking to each other about their challenges every day.

[00:15:00] Regan Robertson: So since I have two esteemed dentists in my virtual room, my question for you is one of innovation and, and Dentaltown being around as long as it has, uh, and, and the message form, the online presence. I know that the media has, and I mean, magazines, print magazines in particular, have been pretty beat up and it’s been, um, becoming more and more difficult. I, I grew up in journalism and watched that happen here with our own little daily newspaper. What challenges have you tackled and what do you foresee as the, as the future? What’s on the horizon for dentists and how they get their information and interact with each other?

[00:15:34] Thomas Giacobbi: Well, you know, we’ve seen the evolution to more online behavior everywhere in society. I mean, it’s not just limited to dentistry for sure. Dentaltown, you know, we like to call it the Facebook for dentists before Facebook existed, because we launched in 1999 and,

[00:15:50] Regan Robertson: You should tagline that just to get the cease and desist.

[00:15:53] Thomas Giacobbi: Yes, exactly. Well, just so you know, Mark Zuckerberg’s dad is a dentist.

[00:15:58] Regan Robertson: That’s right.  He couldn’t even pull a favor, a little string there.

[00:16:02] Thomas Giacobbi: He was, I believe, probably a member of Dentaltown. So he might’ve told Mark, you know, what to do. I’m starting Facebook, but anyway, I digress in terms of the challenges. Yeah. I mean, I think the print media world is tough everywhere, dentistry, as well as, you know, any other print magazine. Uh, we all have digital versions of our magazines. That’s kind of one way that we bridge the gap between where people want to consume the information. I think where the magazines, uh, as a category are still important is that there’s a difference between what you’re going to get and what you’re going to In a online forum like Dentaltown or in a Facebook group or in somebody’s Instagram feed, pick whatever channel you want. The format that that information comes through is specific to that platform and not every platform is ideal for certain kinds of content. If you want to have a, an article that’s worthy of a CE credit, you need a long form article and that’s really still going to be in a magazine or a digital magazine unless you’re doing a video CE. You know, it’s another big portion of our website, our CE courses. Um, but I think over time, as people are migrating more and more online, it’s really a matter of continuing to develop features and ways that people can interact because that’s where they want to be. So the issue that we find a lot of people will have with other platforms versus ours is that on dental town, you’re just doing essentially dentistry. I mean, this is a community of dental professionals. Howard called it Dentaltown and not dentist town because it is not just for dentists. It’s for anybody that’s in the dental professional, and it allows us to all interact with each other, share ideas and talk about issues. When you’re doing dental content in other places, like I belong to some dental Facebook groups, for example, but I’m looking through my Facebook feed, which is a mix of college friends, family members, random ads, and then a post on from a dental group and I might see that post and be interested in it but the next time I pick up my phone, it’s a new feed. I mean, I, I, You know, and unless I do a little bit of work, I can’t find that thing again. No,

[00:18:21] Regan Robertson: Even if you go to the group, I belong to several on Facebook. Also, I just exited one. They finally went too far. They finally pushed me to the edge, but I’ve gone back into groups because I’ll, you know, have seen a post and been like, Oh yeah, I wanted to comment on her. I wanted to go see it again and then I can’t find it because it’s not in chronological order and I’m scrolling and I’m scrolling and I get so frustrated and I also don’t like how even those groups can be moderated, but I don’t, I can’t vet the quality of the moderation and if you go into dental town, you are going to be pushed to prove yourself. Uh, you are really going to be put to the limits and I appreciate that the moderators are really pretty stringent about it. So there is that to me is a stark, uh, difference. Yeah,

[00:19:02] Thomas Giacobbi: we’ve we’ve created a number of ways for people to engage with the content in that way. You know, we have a thumbs up and a thumbs down like a lot of sites do, which just helps if something’s getting a lot of thumbs down, they can tell you, Hey, you know, the audience. isn’t happy with this. Now they may just disagree with it, right, or it may be problematic. Then we also, uh, have a report post button. So if somebody, you know, comes across something that they just find is totally out of line, they can just hit that button, and then somebody in our organization is notified so that we can, We can address it with the, with the member, but you had mentioned earlier too. One of the nice features we have is that you can subscribe to things on dental town. So you can subscribe to an entire forum, which would be a category like endodontics, or you can subscribe, subscribe to a particular conversation and, uh, just follow that conversation or you can subscribe to certain people that you like and, uh, again, choose how you’re notified when something new is happening in that thing you’re subscribing to. So it’s a nice way to keep track. and when you comment on something inside your own profile, you can see your recent activity. So anytime you, you say, “Oh, you know, I commented on something the other day, I need to find it,” you just go into your recent activity, and you can find it pretty quickly. So I think that people use that a lot.

[00:20:17] Chad Johnson: All right. So that’s the functionality of the software, but like, um, in your own practice, what do you see as the advancements in dentistry lately? Like, you know, AI, 3d printing, digital work, technology, stuff like that. Uh, what’s exciting

[00:20:31] Thomas Giacobbi: you? Boy, most of those, I would say in various ways. So AI, let’s take AI first. I’ve been, uh, demoing an AI X-ray software. People that are familiar with this will know there are a couple of vendors out there that provide a software that essentially will read your x-rays and will highlight areas of suspicion, be it areas where there’s bone loss, suspected decay, poor margins, calculus, things of that nature and at first I was pretty skeptical of it because I think a lot of people say, well, 29 years. So is this software really going to help me find something I couldn’t find myself? And I’d say the answer’s probably no. I would also say that I have, over those years, developed my own criteria for what’s actionable but what I’ve found in the time that I’ve been using this software is that, number one, it’s kind of fun to, you have a new patient in, and we take an FMX on them, and I look at the FMX inside of Dentrix. Then I’ll go over to the software. What did they see that I saw? You know, where are we together? Where are we So that’s kind of a fun you know, self-check kind of a little quality control for yourself but the other part is when you see a cavity on an x ray and you, you’re not necessarily having trouble finding it, but one of the things these software can do is you hover over that cavity in the software and it’ll tell you it’s this percent into Denton and this percent, you know, this percent into enamel or that sort of thing. So it gives you a very objective value for how big it is. Yeah. You know, a lot of times when I’m talking to patients, I usually will tell them, “You know, a cavity, I generally call it small, medium or large,” and that’s sort of a nice way to say, you know, this particular cavity is a small, this one’s a large, we’re doing the large one first, that kind of a thing. So to be able to put numbers to it, it’s kind of nice and to be able to show it to patients, uh, sometimes in the right context is good. You know, people always say, “Oh, don’t show patients x-rays. They don’t understand them.” I understand that, but I also will routinely show people things because whether they understand it or not, the fact that you’re willing to show it to them and not just expect them to take your word for it. That says a lot. I’d say the other element of that is I take intraoral photos of everything. Yeah. So everything I diagnose, every tooth I’m going to work on, I take a picture of it and if I can’t show you, you know, if I’m showing you a picture and you’re like, man, I don’t see what you’re talking about, then there’s going to be doubt there. So if we can, if in one way or another, you’re either going to see it on the x ray or you’re going to see it in a photo, if you can’t see it in either of those places, then there’s going to be some distrust there. I think those sorts of tools are helpful for that

[00:23:09] Chad Johnson: Yes, it is. I would like in being able to show the patient to. I don’t want to see the code of the dental town app on my phone because I couldn’t understand it, but I want to see the app on my phone. And same with, okay, showing patients x rays x rays, they might not be able to understand it, but an app that helps them see it, that’s presentable, you know, that’s where I think the patient communication would help. I know too, I asked one of the companies. Uh, of this because over jet and Pearl are two of the, you know, big ones. Uh, the two big players right now. I asked one of the companies what’s on the horizon. Or 3d imaging helping, you know, like CBCT, uh, reading. And they said, yeah, it’s coming. Like, and so that will actually be, I think the most advantageous where a lot of, a lot of dentists that are scared of reading CBCTs in full, um, would have a software assistance. That’s pretty cool.

[00:24:08] Thomas Giacobbi: Yeah, and so the other, the other, uh, element of that, which I think is one that you don’t see a lot of people talk about is that this software that can do these wonderful things is also, you know, used by insurance companies, right? You know, in the, in the insurance world, they’re looking for ways to process claims faster. Okay, if the, if they have something, you can just read the x ray I’m submitting, uh, then they don’t have to have a person do that but the AI is also going to help the insurance company profile you and figure out who you are and what your diagnostic behaviors are and whether they’re,

[00:24:41] Regan Robertson: I was going to say, yeah, is that a good thing

[00:24:43] Thomas Giacobbi: Inside or outside of their accepted parameters. So, I mean, I think there’s a lot of interesting things happening with AI, you know, it can be.

[00:24:50] Chad Johnson: The cat and mouse game.I was going to say, yeah, is that a good thing

[00:24:51] Thomas Giacobbi: Yeah. Okay,

[00:24:52] Chad Johnson: So insurance has it. We probably should have it too to make sure that we’re playing on the same level. Uh, yeah,

[00:24:57] Thomas Giacobbi: Yeah, and then I think, you know, I, I think AI is pretty exciting and I know a lot of people say, “Oh my God, it’s going to eliminate all these jobs.” Well, I mean, talk to any dental office right now, and they’re having trouble hiring in any position in some markets. Now everywhere is different. It depends on whether you’re in a little town, big town, all that, you know, the ability to help the staff or support the staff and I don’t want to say replace staff because that’s not really the goal, but let’s face it, there are many things within the practice that staff do on a daily basis. They don’t necessarily love doing some, there’s some very repetitive tasks that you’re just doing over and over and over again, that if you can pass that off to something, that’s going to do it for you, then why not? I mean, it’s just take, dental claims, for example, nobody’s wishing that we were folding them and sticking them in envelopes anymore. We’re sending them electronically and nobody said, “Oh my God, that’s going to take my job.” They said, “Thank goodness I’m not printing and getting paper cuts every day because I’m having to lick stamps and envelopes all the time.” So I think there’s a lot of upside there. The other place where AI is going to really play a great role is with. Uh, restorative. So, you know, as an example, uh, Glidewell has a, you know, chair side milling unit, and their design software that goes with their milling unit is informed by the literally thousands, if not millions of crowns they’ve designed. Over many, many years. So they’ve taken all those designs and they bake them into their software. So now the design proposal you’re getting for a crown is that much better because it’s been informed by all of these other, all of these other designs. I think, I think with 3d printing, which was the other element that you mentioned, and we’re starting just a little bit though, we’re starting to print, you know, starting to print crowns. I see that you have a, a CEREC milling unit in the background there. Uh, but that whole chair side thing, which I think has had some ups and downs. I, I had a CEREC blue cam for about a year and, uh, I’ve switched to trios. I currently have the trios five. I love it. I like scanning and sending to the lab because when I was doing the CEREC workflow, I didn’t have the time to really spend time on a design and wait for the milling and wait for the baking.

[00:27:22] Chad Johnson: How many chairs do you run in the, in the practice altogether? If you don’t mind me asking about it, you know,

[00:27:22] Thomas Giacobbi: I don’t mind you asking. We have, uh, we have three dentists total in the practice, myself, four days a week, my wife, three days a week and my associate three days a week, we have seven operatories. So there’s two dentists working every day, but we have four hygienists every day, Monday through Thursday and three hygienists on Friday. So the dentists only have three chairs to share.

[00:27:47] Chad Johnson: And that makes it tough too, because CEREC kind of requires, in essence, a dedicated chair.

[00:27:47] Thomas Giacobbi: It does. Yeah and that, and so that was my challenge, but I think moving forward, what you’re going to probably see is a little more of a hybrid [00:28:00] approach of I could do the scan in my office somewhere that’s going to be designed and just sent to my printer or my unit. And I think because there’s a lot of great collaborative tools that exist now that really didn’t exist back when I had the blue cam many years ago and the ability to do that, I think is there, there’s also some great AI tools for designing like in three shape, there’s a thing called automate, and I use that to design night guards, which I then print in the office. So there’s an example of an AI workflow that already exists and that software can also design copings and crowns and other things. So I think those things are very exciting. The printing, the AI and the combination of those and, you know, materials continue to make headway. I think we don’t, we haven’t heard a lot about materials because they’ve just gotten so good, but there’s still the Holy grail of composite with built in bonding agent. You know, we, we went from, you know, 50 steps down to like, okay, it’s one bottle and it has the etch and the adhesive and the primer all in it and, you know, eventually. Um, with, we have single shade composite now that, you know, has this effect that really works pretty well. It may not work in every situation, but if you’re doing a posterior class to a lot of these single shade composites work reasonably well.

[00:29:24] Chad Johnson: And Tom, I know Howard would be proud of me for saying this, you know, you’ll, it’s the, and the termites thing, but I wish that the glass ionomer. Was more aesthetic, wouldn’t that be nice, you know, I’m sorry, Regan, right. So let me ask. Okay. So like what’s, uh, with patient expectations of all, all of dentistry and whatnot, what steps should dentists take to meet the new demands in terms of care, communication, technology, stuff like that? What do you see on the forefront for dentists to do to meet patient expectations?

[00:29:57] Thomas Giacobbi: Yeah, you know, it’s, it’s funny. As I said before, you know, I’ve been doing this a long time. Our practice, we started from scratch 22 years ago. We’re blessed to have a very busy practice and we have an incredible staff at our practice and so part of answering your question is in spite of all the technology, and I’ve got a lot of us, I mean, I, I’m doing all these things but the things that patients mentioned, my gosh, your staff is so friendly. We use sunglasses for their safety glasses when patient’s in the chair. Oh my god, nobody’s ever put sunglasses on it, helps with that bright light you’re shining in my face. We use the intro camera, as I mentioned, all the time. Oh my, nobody’s ever showed me that before. Nobody’s ever taken the time to explain that. So. In spite of all the modern conveniences of life in 2024, good communication and friendly people are still what we need to meet the needs of our patients. I would say that is, to me, always going to endure and in fact, the more people retreat inside of their phones and, you know, we’re seeing this with how phones are affecting kids as they’re getting them at younger and younger ages for the ability to communicate face to face is critical. I mean, I had a kid in the other day for a couple of extractions and this kid’s 10, 11 years old. I go in the room, say hello to him. His head’s down, his face is, you know, inches from his phone. His dad is sitting there in the corner and you think, you know, and I usually will just kind of, you know, I’ll say hello and I’ll wait a second. I’ll take a beat because I’m giving mom or dad the opportunity to say, “Junior, give me the phone. There’s a, there’s another adult in the room that would like to talk to you, give him the attention that he deserves. You know, he’s here to help you,” and, uh, you know, that’s the kind of stuff that I think we’re faced with, uh, overcoming. Moving forward. We use technology in our practice in many ways. Some of the great things that have come over the years, again, in the name of using technology and not taking somebody’s job, but appointment reminders. Everybody’s doing appointment reminders through text and email, and patients are saying, I’d love that. I get a text reminder for my appointment because that’s the way they wanna communicate. And nowadays you can’t call anybody anyway. Every time you make a phone call, you’re only going to get voicemail. They’re afraid to answer the phone cause I get so much spam. So communication is still the core element and place where the technology is going to come in as you’re asking is communicating maybe in ways that work for your patients.

[00:32:26] Chad Johnson:Yep. Good point.

[00:32:28] Regan Robertson: I’m doing a, there is an authentic marketing presentation that I’m doing at the. Upcoming conference. And I did a 21 touch point infographic this time to really nerd out. And I highlight how many of these 21 touch points have been replaced by texting alone and it’s really mind blowing. Tom, thank you so much for this. This time has been incredible with you. I’d love to have you on multiple times. Speaking of in person, it’s going to be amazing to see you in person alongside Kevin Henry and Stan Goff and Ann Duffy and Dr. Pamela Munoz of Dental Economics. I really am grateful that our attendees are going to get to experience all of your wealth and knowledge together.

[00:33:07] Thomas Giacobbi: Yeah. I appreciate it. I want to make a plug too. There’s another thread that was on Dentaltown and if people want to search for it, it’s, is it worth it? PDA review, Productive Dentist Academy. Right. It’s 138 posts, people sharing their thoughts, but it’s an example of how incredible a community like Dentaltown is that people will get on there and they’ll share their experience. They’ll say, I did this, it transformed my practice. I’ve never been happier, more productive and it’s just, In their own words, you know, that kind of exchange is what gets me excited about being part of dental town for so many years.

[00:33:47] Regan Robertson: So tom, if people want to get a hold of you, they can go to dentaltown.com

[00:33:53] Thomas Giacobbi: Yeah, my email is just tom@dentaltown.com. That’s easy If you want to send me an email or you catch me online. Don’t call my office because there’s a lot of other patients call in the office

[00:34:02] Chad Johnson:  No, no, I just said that I just said that like you say that almost like, well, someone must have done that before,

[00:34:11] Thomas Giacobbi: you know, it’s just hard, you know, it is hard. I can’t be, I can’t imagine someone being, you know, like I need to get ahold of him that thread that you just wrote. Yeah. Cause when I’m in clinic mode, I, you know, I need to be in patient mode cause we go all day.

[00:34:13] Chad Johnson: It almost seems audacious. That someone would do that but it’s funny that you have to say that. Like, it’s like, no, it’s a joke.

[00:34:26] Thomas Giacobbi: Yeah. I’m saying it partially and

[00:34:33] Chad Johnson: It is, but it’s just like, yeah, well,

[00:34:38] Regan Robertson: Thank you. Thank you so much, Tom, uh, listeners, uh, you, I think this will go out in time. We still have, I think it’s 12 seats left, uh, available. You can go to productive dentist. com and register you in your team. That would be amazing. If you want to come in and see Dr. Tom, the other media round table folks, and the. Best curriculum. I’m not even biased. The best curriculum you’re going to see at our 20th anniversary. We will see you soon, Tom. Thanks everyone.

[00:35:02] Thomas Giacobbi: I’m looking forward to it. See you in Frisco.

[00:35:06] Regan Robertson: Thank you for listening to another episode of Everyday Practices Podcast. Chad and I are here every week. Thanks to our community of listeners, just like you and we’d love your help. It would mean the world if you can help spread the word. Spread the word by sharing this episode with a fellow dentist and leave us a review on iTunes or Spotify. Do you have an extraordinary story you’d like to share or feedback on how we can make this podcast even more awesome? Drop us an email at podcast@productivedentist.com and don’t forget to check out our other podcasts from Productive Dentist Academy at productivedentist.com/podcasts. See you next week.