Dr. Jeff Rohde: Good afternoon, everybody. I'm Dr. Jeff Rohde.

I just am really excited to have you guys here at the DentalCompare live webinar series. We're excited to bring you this inside look into the world of digital dentistry today. Before I introduce our speaker, Dr. Emmott, I just want to give everyone a heads up on a few things.

The program will last about 45 minutes, after which he'll respond to your questions to round out the hour. You'll have the opportunity to ask questions really at any time during the presentation using the question box right there on your screen. Just go ahead and type them in

Now, if we happen to run out of time before your question is answered live, we do keep track of all the questions submitted, and Dr. Emmott and I will be happy to provide a follow up response by e-mail. So, don't worry. All the questions will addressed. Also, if there is something you feel like you missed and you wanted to watch this again or tell a colleague about it, it will be available on DentalCompare to watch the archived version of this.

And one last thing. Right there in your window you should see a link that says, in the lower right-hand corner, "Complete continuing education credit." Now, that won't be live until about 50 minutes into the webinar, but that will bring you to the CE questions, the CE survey, and of course that's where you'll get your CE certificate

So, now onto the presentation. Our webinar speaker today is Dr. Larry Emmott. He is one of the most entertaining speakers in dentistry. He has over 30 years of experience as a practicing general dentist in Phoenix, Arizona and really considered the leading high tech dental authority in the country.

Dr. Emmott has presented hundreds of talks to dental groups across the US and Canada on the subject of high tech digital dental offices. In fact, he's been a featured speaker at every major dental meeting in the country.

For 10 years, he was a technology columnist for DPR. He currently is featured as a tech writer in Dental Economics Magazine. He has even written three books on using technology in the dental office and has been a pioneer in online publishing with his blog, Emmottontechnology.com.

So, today he's going to help us understand how we can create paperless records to save you both time and money. Dr. Emmott, thanks so much, and welcome

Dr. Larry Emmott: Thank you, Jeff, and welcome, everybody. Well, for the next 45 to 50 minutes, I am going to show you how you can create a paperless record in your office, show you how your team members can use it to make it work, and will ultimately save you a lot of money.

Well, as Jeff just told you, I'm a dentist and I tell people about technology. I say, "Well, I'm a dentist, but when it comes to computers, I'm actually over the edge." Now, if you see me in this picture, I'm not over the edge, I'm just on the edge. That is me with my mountain bike at the Grand Canyon. But, of course the real reason that's there is for the contact information.

And so, while you're taking a look at that, I also want to say once again, thank you, Jeff, for that great introduction. I appreciate that. Thank you to DentalCompare for putting this kind of--this series on. I think that's wonderful. And I also want to extend my welcome to you to be here. And hopefully you'll get a lot out of the next hour.

Now, we have an hour to talk, and I talk fast. Nevertheless, I know there's going to be some questions and some follow up, so that's why the contact information is there. This is my address here in Phoenix and, of course, here is my toll free number. And far more importantly nowadays is my e-mail and my Web page address. So, I'm going to talk to you a little bit about some other resources that will be available as well after we get through this

But, first of all, what are we going to do in the next 40 or 50 minutes? Here is the agenda. We're going to talk about practice management systems, a little bit about using the electronic schedule. And that's kind of old-fashioned, but I want to go through it because it kind of informs us as to a lot of the issues that people are facing today with paperless records.

So, then I'm going to spend a lot of time on actually how do you create a paperless chart and why you want to create a paperless chart, and then a little bit of the workflow on how that changes once you go to electronic records. That's sometimes called front desklessness.

So, that's the agenda for today. Now, I mentioned that there are some other resources. And I'm going to give you my best stuff over the next hour or so. The fact is that there's other things if you want to catch up with that.

The main one is my Web page. You can see the address there. It's just my name, Drlarryemmott.com. I think of the Web page as kind of like a handout. So, although you can go back and review this, you can also go to the Web page and get to lots of information there

In addition, there's the technology guides and the blog. Jeff mentioned my blog, emmottontechnology.com. I've been blogging now for years. And you're familiar about blogs now. You know what they are. It's like an online newsletter.

So, once again, the blog is available. It's totally free and I add to it virtually every day. And there's all kinds of information on there about using computers in dentistry in all kinds of way [sic], and particularly going paperless like we're going to talk about today.

And finally, the last thing, the last resource I want you to be aware of, and I'll come back to this, Jeff mentioned the three books I've written, one of which is on going paperless. And so, although I'm going to give you my best stuff, the fact is that sometimes it's nice to have a paper resource you can go back to. And the Emmott on Technology guide, "Going Paperless," is available, and you can buy that through the Web page. I'll talk to you a bit about that in detail

So, that's it. There is the plan. Let's get started.

So, we'll just talk about a digital patient record. We're going to be looking at these topics, practice management systems, using electronic scheduling and how that relates to paperless records, paperless charts, and as I said once before, front desklessness, front desklessness

Now, before we get to any of those detailed topics, I want to start with some basic sciences. You know when you were back in dental school, before you actually got to work on teeth, you had to look at basic sciences. Well, this is kind of like that. This is a core concept which I like to get out there because I--once you understand this, it's going to help you understand and make choices as it relates to using paperless records or digital records and using them effectively

Because part of--this is all part of what you've probably commonly heard as the digital revolution. And we talk about digital this and digital that, and yet I want to start with this basic question about what does digital mean. What does digital mean?

And although it's obviously a pretty basic question, I find that there's a lot of misunderstanding and dentists often don't know what it means. In fact, I mean, typically if a dentist comes to me and says, "Hey, Larry, I'm going to go digital this year," what does that mean? I mean, when a dentist says he's going to go digital, it usually means he's going to get digital x-rays. Well, yeah, that's part of it, but there's so much more to it.

So, basic question, what does digital mean? Well, in the most literal sense, if you digitize something, you turn that thing into digits or numbers. In a more practical sense, if you digitize something, you turn that something into the electronic language a computer can understand. If you digitize something, you turn it into the electronic language that a computer and a computer network can understand.

Now, what does that mean? Well, three very significant things. Once you've digitized something, you can store it, you can transmit it, and you can enhance and manipulate it using a computer. You can store it, you can transmit it, and you can enhance it using a computer and a computer network. And that's huge

If I can store something electronically, that means I no longer have to have a paper chart. I can now store my records, my information on a computer hard drive. I can store it electronically.

If I can transmit it, that means I can capture some information or some data or, you know, chart information in a treatment room and the person at the front desk can see it. I can transmit it. And not just my front desk, but of course I can transmit it to a colleague, to an insurance company, or to the patient themselves using the Internet

And finally, enhance it or manipulate it. That means, of course, I can just add to it. I can put a chart entry in. I can chart a chart. I can chart a tooth or, better yet, I can do some amazing things with virtual three-dimensional teeth, which brings me to the last part of this

And I said, okay, what does digitize mean? Turning something into electronic language a computer can understand. So, what are those some things? And that's where it's really exciting.

That's where we've seen the incredible change in the last decade or so, because we can now digitize everything. You can certainly digitize information in the form of numbers and data, I mean, words. That's--we can make a digital chart.

But, you can also digitize sound, of course. That's what, you know, CDs were and now MP3s. You can digitize movies. We had CDs and DVDs and now, you know, flowing digital on the Internet.

So, we can digitize movies. We can digitize sound. We can digitize photographs, of course. When--you know, we haven't used film for years. We all use digital photographs. And it's a very small step from a digital photo to a digital x-ray

And the finally, the last one I just alluded to that I think is one of the most exciting ones in the last few years, and that is we can digitize solid objects. We can make a digital version of a solid object. That's what's behind CAD/CAM. That's what's behind digital impressions. That's what's behind Invisalign.

So, we can digitize all of that stuff. So, that's what digital means, turning something into an electronic language a computer can understand. And when you do it, you can store, transmit, and enhance that something.

So, with that in mind, digital records and digital chart and going digital means a whole lot more than just x-rays. So, let's look at what those things are. I'm going to start off first with practice management software, because that's the key element to creating a digital record, of course, is having the software to do it

So, you want to have good, integrated practice management software, the key word there being integrated. So, what I'm going to do now is ask you, as one of our first questions here, is, well, what kind of practice management software do you have?

And you can see there's--I think there's six--see those six questions up there? So, which practice management system do you have? So, kind of just click there and kind of fill that in, and we'll kind of see who is using what.

Now, the--and I said the key word there is integrated. What that means is that every aspect of the software communicates with every other aspect of the software. So, for example, if you put in tooth number three in your chart, when you go to put that in the schedule, you don't have to write in tooth number three again. That is the--that's what integrated practice management software means

Okay, let's talk about results. Here's what came up. Thirty-seven percent, which is about the national average, about--between 30 and 40--35 and 40 percent of dentists use Dentrix. And that is one that I am very comfortable recommending. I know Dentrix will in fact work and do that

The second one that came up is Eaglesoft. Eaglesoft also is a very good product, of course sponsored by Patterson. And then, PracticeWork and Softdent. These are 7 percent each, which is about 14 percent, and that's really about where that comes in. Both of those are from the Kodak Company

Interestingly, we see Mac came in at almost 4 percent. And although there's a lot of interest in Mac products nowadays, the fact is that in dentistry Macintosh is not well represented and really isn't a good choice for most dentists, although Mac users are kind of cultish, you know? But, the fact is Mac in dentistry has a relatively small footprint.

And then, of course you can see we have almost 24 percent of other.

So, I'm very comfortable recommending Dentrix, Eaglesoft, PracticeWork, and Softdent. I know others will work, I'm just not as familiar with them. So, first step, good, integrated practice management software.

Okay. I'm going to turn this into a little talk about scheduling, because this kind of reflects where we are now in electronic records and kind of some of the issues we're facing. And we can kind of look back to, say, a decade ago when we were facing a lot of the same issues with electronic scheduling.

So, some of you may have been in dentistry as long as I have and you remember that time. Remember back in the olden days, last century B.C., before computer? And we used to schedule people on a paper book. Remember those paper books? Okay, of course you do. And we'd write the patient's name in

And scheduling is such a huge, incredible part of a practice. It's what drives the engine of productivity, all kinds of things with the scheduling. And so, going from an--from a paper book that we were so comfortable with to an electronic book, which is kind of scary and you weren’t sure if it was going to work.

And so, what people would tend to do is they would do both. Either the dentist was afraid of the paper book or the dentist's administrator was afraid of the paper book. But, one of the other was afraid of it, and so they would do both. They'd have a paper book and electronic book simultaneously.

There is a word for that, stupid, because it never worked. They were always both wrong. You got one in one, not in the other, back and forth. So, I begin with the phrase, "Just burn the book." Just do it.

And of course, once you all made that step and went to electronic schedule, and now all of you use it, or most--almost all of you use it, I know, the fact is you're never going to go back, that once you understand the power of electronic scheduling, you're never going to go back.

And so, that's kind of where we are now. A lot of dentists I know have mostly what they need to go paperless. They're just afraid to do that next step, or their team is afraid to do that next step

So, that's one aspect, but another aspect that relates to this is, well, what were the advantages of the electronic schedule and how does that relate to electronic records? And again, this easy to understand because we've been through it

Back in the olden days, the last century, B.C., before computer, I had a partner, two dentists. We had three hygienists. We had five books. You couldn't even see the front desk. Then we got smarter. We put the dentists in one, hygienists in one. Now we had two books.

In some ways it was better. But, in other ways it was worse, because now we have three hygienists scheduled in one book and we have two people checking out, one--two people on the phone, four people trying to get in the book, and it was just a huge bottleneck.

So, once we went from a paper book to an electronic book, we eliminated the bottleneck because the fact was we could now schedule from wherever there was a computer. Certainly at the front desk like we always had, but now we could do it in multiple locations so we didn't have this bottleneck

But, you know, if we wanted to, we could schedule from the treatment rooms. We had computers back there. In fact, we could schedule from a different building. You no longer needed--had to be "in the book." So, it eliminates the bottleneck, and it's exactly the same thing with your electronic records

How many people can view an electronic chart at one time? I mean--I'm sorry. How many people can view a paper chart at one time? One person, and you've got to have the chart in front of you. But, once you go to an electronic chart, you can view it anywhere, anytime.

Okay. The second advantage is listed there under what's called data mining. Data mining, that's one of those--a term of art in technology. And basically what it means is getting information back from your data. And here's a good example of how that would work in scheduling.

We can get all kinds of information back. You know, when's our next opening? How much is scheduled for today? Or, here's one which you front desk people will truly recognize and identify with. My front desk people tell me this happens all the time. I find it kind of hard to believe, but they said it happens every day

A patient calls up, and they say something like this. "I have an appointment in your office. I know it's coming up soon, but I don't remember when. It might be this week, might be next week, might be next month. Can you tell me when my appointment is?"

So, you say, "Okay. Are you going to see the dentist or the hygienist?" "I don't know." "Okay, sweetie. Let me look at these five books and I'll call you back in half an hour, jerk face."

Or, better yet, I may--oh, this is even better. I mean, I mentioned that I had a partner, two dentists. And so, that would go something like this. "Hello. I have an appointment next week, six months." "Which doctor do you see?" "I don't know." We think we're so important. We're nothing

Oh, wait. Oh, then one time it went like this. Say, "Which doctor do you see?" "I don't know, but I do know I see the tall blond handsome one." My front desk person was on it. She says, "I know. That's easy. You have a wrong number."

Okay. But, now it goes like this. "When's my appointment? Next week? Next month?" Click, click, "Here it is, Cindy. We have you scheduled for next Wednesday at 2:30. We're looking forward to seeing you."

"By the way, I notice on your record here your children haven't had those sealants done yet. We talked about the kids getting sealants. That's important. Let's get them scheduled right away. Let's do that right now. And by the way, did you know that your husband hasn't had his teeth cleaned since 1998? Are you kissing him?

Okay. In other words, it's access to that information. The data mining, the access to information allows us to deal with our patients and treat them in a more effective way.

So, that's the process we all went through going from a paper book to an electronic book 10 to 15 years ago. Now we're looking at the same thing, going from a paper chart to an electronic chart. So, let's look at how that's going to work

So, let me ask you a question. Does your desk look like this or this? And the fact is, far more of us can relate to this, because what happens in our chart?

I mean, let me ask you. What do you do every day with your charts? I mean, how many of you spend every day looking for a chart? And they're always there, right? Oh, they're not always there? They're missing? Well, where are they? The number one answer I get to that question, by the way, is they're on the doctor's desk. And I'll admit sometimes they end up on our desks.

But, when we had paper charts, they were everywhere. We had stacks for this, you know, call the patient on that one, check the insurance on that one. Doctor does a treatment plan on that one. Do a--we need to do collection calls on that one, you know, find--get x-rays on this one. We had stacks. We had no idea where those charts were, okay?

So, the fact is that we--oh, and then at the end of the day, what do you have to do? You have to put them all back, all right? So, we're all kind of overwhelmed with this paperwork

And one of the things--one of the other things I get from people, they say, "Well, Larry, you know, I've got this great system now. It doesn't cost me anything. Why would I want to, you know, go to all this fancy computerized stuff?"

And part of my answer to that is it's not a great system. The fact is that all that paper takes a lot of time to work with. You--it's easy to lose things. We're always going in and out of that chart, and the fact is that it's not a great system.

And as I'll show you, it's not free. The fact is you've got to pay for the paper. You've got to pay for the chart, those file cabinets. You've got to pay for your staff time to do it.

So, with that in mind, let's look at that. Here's the process we're going to go through to discuss paperless charts, real life in the dental office. What's really going on and what's in that chart? Then, how can we take all that stuff and make it digital? Remember what digital is. It's electronic information the computer can understand. Okay, so what's the process of doing that?

Then, we're going to spend a little bit of time on a very special area, forms and signatures, and then a little bit on the Internet before we get to front desklessness. So, with that in mind, real life in the dental office, what do we do? How do we actually use those charts

To do that, I'm doing a little process I call follow the crown, follow the crown. You all do crowns in your office, right? Everybody? Everybody, crowns? Oh, well, maybe not, not if you're a specialist.

Any specialists, endodontists, orthodontists? You know, really orthodontists aren't even really dentists. You know that, don't you? An--you know, really if you're not stabbing someone with a needle every day, you're not a dentist. But, that's okay. You're--I'm glad you're here anyway.

Now, but--you endodontists, did you do a crown in dental school? Okay. So, you kind of remember. So, this is the process

Now, we're not going to be talking about technology yet. That's coming real quick. But, just what do we do when we do a crown? Well, we do these things. First of all, we do a diagnosis. That means three people in a small room. One of the--you know, one's in a big chair tipped way back, bright light in their face, mouth wide open. That would be the patient.

The dentist looks in the patient's mouth, pokes around, and says something like, "Tooth number three needs a crown." So, the dental assistant sitting next to them takes a piece of paper, a Dentigram, a chart, takes a pencil, almost always red, and circles, crosshatches, makes a little mark, "Tooth number three needs a crown."

Then you say, "Wait a minute. I got to check out their health history, make sure this won't kill them." So, we grab the paper, we shuffle through that, then we grab--and we look for the x-rays. Got to make sure we've got the recent x-ray, the most recent one. Is that going to work? Then we do a treatment plan. And this may be something long and involved or just a little note next to the number three crown.

Oh, we can--and sometimes we do a schedule note. I used to do schedule notes. I learned this from Jennifer de St. Georges. And what--a schedule note is something like this next to the number three crown. "This patient's a gagger. Give me an extra 10 minutes." Next to the tooth number three crown, "Check on the insurance before we schedule." Next to the tooth number three crown, "This patient is a golfing buddy of the doctor. Give us an extra 20, 30," whatever minutes' time

Okay. So, you may or may not do that, but we always did this on the schedule. You go to the schedule and you write up, you know, the patient's name and all that kind of stuff, and then write a little card so they know when they're coming back.

And they say, "Well, wait a minute. What's it going to cost? What's my insurance going to pay?" And, you know, you should have told them that anyway. But, again, in the olden days we take a little card, write down the tooth number. They say, "Well, my insurance said if it's over $100 I got to send in one of these things." Say, "Okay," so you do that.

So, you create a predetermination. Back in the olden days, I remember actually we used to write these by hand before--not even typewriter. And then, make--oh, then a copy of the x-ray. So, the staff member goes running back, locks themselves in the darkroom before they--just before they asphyxiate from the fumes, they came with a copy of the x-ray, which really isn't very usable.

Then we get a financial arrangement to show they're going to pay for it. Then we have them sign a consent form, then we're done, right? Well, no, they got to come back

So, they come back in a day or two, a week or two. We do the daily schedule once again. We have to retype it, review their health history, check the treatment plan, check the x-ray. We do the crown finally, and then we do chart notes. We write those out, the same thing over and over and over and over again.

You do over and over and over and over again the same thing, go back to our tooth chart, change the blue mark to a red mark, take--I mean, sorry, red mark to blue mark. We do our lab slip, treatment plan was brought up front, day sheet, ledger, invoice, insurance form, resubmit the form when they lose it, send the billing statement. And eight, 10 months later you might get paid. Ah, we're done.

No, we're not. This is a crown. They have to come back to get the crown delivered. Ah, a whole 'nother set of communication documentation steps. If you are keeping track, there's close to 30 of them.

And you might be saying to yourself, "I don't do all of that." And you might not do every one, but you do most of them. So, even if you don't do 30, you're probably doing 20 or at least 15. You're doing 15 to 20 accesses or entries in that chart for one procedure on one patient.

So, how many of those do you do? How many patients do you see a day? Do you see 20 a day? And that's not a lot, I mean, 20 for general dental between the dentist and the hygienist. The hygienist'll see eight to 10. The dentist'll see 10 to 12. Twenty a day is not many. So, if you're doing 20 entries, that's 400, 400 entries a day. The paperwork burden is staggering.

So, I just went through the crown, but there's--other things hide in that chart. We've got, you know, the patient information, the forms they fill out, their financial information, their periodontal probings, copies of prescriptions, photographs, correspondence with us and the specialist, signed HIPAA forms, insurance EOB, special reports, payment history, and of course the good old pocket lint

So, all of that is in the chart. So, how can we take and turn this stuff into electronic information?

Oh, and then we're all faced with this, too. I know you've all faced this. You find these everywhere. You find them under the telephone, lying on the floor, in the chart room someplace, the orphaned x-ray. It's fallen out of the chart, fallen out of its holder.

And we all do the same thing with the orphans. I know we do. You pick up the orphan and you walk around holding it, walking around to people in the office, hold it to the light, say "Do you recognize this person? You know who this is?" "No, but, you know, it looks like they need a crown on number three."

Okay. Oh, by the way, the experts on this, the people that really--supposed to know about this tell us, well, when you have an orphan, the best thing--what you're supposed to do is throw it away, I mean, because if you got it in the wrong chart or identified the wrong patient, it could be dangerous.

Now, I--that's what you're supposed to do. We never do. You know, I mean, these are important. It's a record, but we--so, we have like a shoebox full of orphans, all right? Once all that becomes electronic, you will eliminate all of those issues

Okay. So, let's go back through this. So, we've talked about real life in the dental office and what's in that chart. So, now what's the process to turn this stuff into an electronic record? Well, there's two things

One of them is to in fact create the system. And that's what I'm going to spend the next 20 minutes showing you how to do is how to create the system. But, the second thing on this list is just as important, and that is you stop making paper. You stop making paper.

It goes back to my example I was--I gave you earlier of the electronic schedule. We were just afraid to do it. And so, we kept a paper schedule and electronic schedule, and they were always confusing. And we're really in that phrase right now with electronic records

I talk to many dentists who really have everything they need to go with a paper record. They're just not sure of the next step. They're not quite sure what to do. And once you have that in place, you just need to stop making paper.

And I got to admit, here I am, I'm the biggest geek in dentistry, and I had this problem. I've--I had electronic records in '95, electronic digital x-rays in '98, and here it was in the early 2000s and I still was pulling out those paper charts.

And I have to give credit to one of my staff members who kind of got me to finally see the light. She goes, "Dr. Emmott, why do we have these charts?" I’m going, "Well, because I'm a dentist. Dentists have charts." She goes, "You don't need them. You're not using them." I go, "Well, yeah. I mean, yes, they're my charts." You know, I was kind of--I was attached to them

She goes, "You don't need them." I go, "Yes, we do." "No, you don't." So, I said, "Okay, we'll try it. Tomorrow we will not pull charts and see what happens." We had a whole day full of patients and we actually needed two charts. I was right. Well, of course I wasn't really right. We didn't really need those charts. We just had a very rare occasion to refer back to them

And so, that's what I want you to do as you--I'm going to show you how to create the system. Then, once you have everything in place, you take a go-live date. And from that date forward, maybe it'll be the first of December or maybe--you know what? A good one to shoot for would be the first of next year. So, from January 1st, 2012, everything forward is going to be electronic, and then you have your archived paper records going back in history. So, create the system and, more significantly, stop making paper

Okay. So, how do you create the system? How do you digitize all that stuff? Well, there's really four steps to it. The first one is you simply enter is in a digital form. That means you never go through a paper chart. You simply enter it with a mouse and a keyboard.

So, you--an example I'm most familiar with, Dentrix. You click on a tooth, you click on a--on an icon that shows the crown, for example, you click on a treatment plan, and you're done. Three mouse clicks and you've entered everything you need to know about that treatment plan for that tooth and that procedure

So, no paper forms, no writing notes, no putting red circles on teeth. You simply enter it electronically. And that's good for chart information, for correspondence, other things.

The second way you digitize stuff is you capture it. Now, once again, that's a technology term of art that means you create a digital version. You capture a digital version of what was done in an analog form before, analog meaning non-digital.

Capture in dentistry is mostly diagnostics. For example, you can capture a digital x-ray. You can capture a digital photograph, and you can also use it to capture digital periodontal probing.

But, for the most part what we're going to be looking at here is digital x-ray. So, you need to be--capture it. So, again, what you need for that is a specialized piece of hardware like a camera or a sensor, and you capture the information.

The third way you digitize all that stuff is you scan it. I mean, most of you are familiar with scanners. It's a piece of hardware that turns an analog item, piece of paper or an x-ray, into a digital version of that same item. So, for example, if you get a piece of paper from a specialist, you can scan that and make that part of the patient's digital record

And the last one, number four, is import. Now, importing is not creating a digital record, but it's taking something that's already digital and making it part of the patient's chart. So, for example, you might have a digital photograph sitting--floating around in some photography software. You want that to be part of the patient's chart, so you can import it into the chart.

Or, you might get a digital report from a specialist about a patient and it's floating around there as a digital report, as a PDF or something. Then you can import and make that part of the patient's record. You can think of it as, again, if you got a letter from a specialist, and you took that letter and you went to the patient's chart and you put it in their folder. You imported it into their electronic information

So, those are the four ways you create digital stuff. You enter it, you capture it, you scan it, or you import it if it's already in a digital system.

So, what is--what are we going to digitize? Well, in a dental chart we have four areas of information: personal, financial, treatment, and diagnostic. Personal information is things like the patient information themselves, their name, their address, their insurance information, all that kind of stuff.

For the most part, you're going to use your practice management system, your Eaglesoft or Dentrix, to gather and store that information. Much if it will be done with a keyboard and mouse

The new way of doing this is capturing it on--directly on the forms. And that's a whole section I'm going to come back to on that, some specialized forms and systems to make this even faster and easier.

Financial information. This could be what the patient owes you, their insurance claims, their EOBs. Once again, practice management software like PracticeWorks and Dentrix is designed to manage and maintain this for you, financial arrangements, those kinds of things.

Once again, most of that will be done with a keyboard and mouse for insurance claims. You're going to want to send those electronically so you're going to have to have a--electronic claims, e-claims service, and connect to that with the Internet. And then, EOBs are for the most part being sent by paper. So, you're going to need a scanner to scan those into electronic form and then shred the EOB.

I'm just beginning to see electronic EOBs. And there's no reason we shouldn't be getting them as electronic attachments. They'll be sent and then you won't even have to go through that scanning step right now

Treatment. Of course, that's--in dentistry, that's the big thing. That's what we do. I mean, we're dentists. We treat teeth, and so treatment is the biggest.

Again, the majority of this will be in your practice management system like Softdent or Eaglesoft or Dentrix. And much of it'll be in the tooth chart. Treatment plans, treatment history, all of that is made part of those systems. You do that with keyboard and mouse

Prescriptions. Electronic prescriptions are enormous. You can do those, again, through Dentrix. You just click and make a prescription, then print it and sign it, although the next step, and we're just beginning to see this take a hold, is to actually do your prescriptions like an e-prescription and send it electronically to the pharmacy. There are still some issues with that, but many states are now making that easier to do

Lab slips. You can do those through Dentrix, but you might actually want to do those, again, online directly through your laboratory. Correspondence, like a letter to the patient or to a specialist or to a referring dentist, you would do those with some sort of word processing software. And then, your reports and referrals you get from others, you need your scanner to scan those and make them electronic or digital.

Once again, that's the way it was. The way we're going is going to be all those last things, lab slips, correspondence, referrals and reports, will be electronic right from the beginning. They'll never go through a paper phase, so you can eliminate having to print them, mail them. You just do it electronically.

And the last one is diagnostics. These are the ones that are most specific to dentistry, like digital x-rays. These have a--require a specialized bit of hardware, although photographs not really because you can just get a digital camera. But, definitely x-rays and perio probings provide specialized hardware which then will connect to your computer with specialized software to allow you to capture these and make them part of the digital record

Now, I've gone through all of that and I've tried to kind of line it out as to what you use in hardware, what you use in software, what you're using, what the process is. But, to try and do that step by step by every item, it really gets confusing. And that's where the guide comes in.

So, I've written the guide. And the full guide is 60-some pages. And the one--if you see those four sample pages there, the one that's got all the color on it to the right-hand side, that one outlines everything I just went through.

It goes through the personal, financial, treatment, and diagnostic information. And it's about what hardware you need, what software you need, what the process would be, alternative processes, those kinds of things. So, I think that's one of the most effective pages on that whole guide

And to make that easier for you to get, I've actually created a shorter version of it which is only six pages. And it has that colorful guide in there and some basics on how to create a--these digital charts. And so, I'll gladly e-mail that to you.

If it's going to be a guide to going paperless, it's going to be a paperless guide. So, we'll do it via e-mail. So, if you've signed up for this, I will be sending that to you in the next day or two. And you have that, the free guide, and then if you want the more detailed one, that's available. And I'll give you a coupon code to get it at a reduced price on my website as well

Okay. So, where are we? We've talked about the process. And the process starts by creating the system, and it's--and then we stop making paper. Now, we still have an issue, though, because the world still sends me paper.

I get paper from specialists. I get paper from insurance companies. I get paper from the patients. And so, how do we deal with that patient--paper? And that is you scan it. So, you scan the incoming

So, you get a--for example, you get a report from a specialist. The front desk person simply gets it, they open it up. They put it on the scanner right there. It becomes part of that patient's chart, and then you shred the paper. No running around, keeping a chart, trying to find the chart, putting it in there. It's a simple one-step thing. You never have to leave your chair and you scan the incoming

The last slide on--this slide, though, is the one that's most important, in my opinion. And that is that you will continue to pull charts for six to 12 months. Going paperless is not an event. It doesn't simply happen on a weekend.

Now, let me restate that. The create the system and then you stop making paper, that's an event. That's a one day. But, the fact is you're still going to have to be looking at some of those old paper records because I do not want you to scan all the old paper.

And I make such a big deal of this with a big slide and a big red "not" because I've frequently had people come to me and say, "Larry, I'm all ready to go paperless. I got everything I need but I just can't face scanning all those old records. I've been a dentist for 15 years or 20 years, and I've got thousands of records. And scanning them all is just such a job I just can't face it.

And the answer is don't do it, okay? That's not part of going paperless. You don't have to scan in all the old records. Now, you don't throw them away, either. You keep them as an archive just like you're doing now, but you just--everything for the future is going to be electronic and everything in the past is going to be paper

And so, that means in the beginning you may, every now and then, have to go back to an old chart. But, here's what I'm going to tell you, it's not going to happen very often. I was shocked at how seldom we looked at those old records

Now, as dentists, we think we're referring back to them all the time, but we really aren't. Now, the one thing we do look at is x-rays. And if you've got digital x-rays for the last couple years, you're already set.

And if you're just converting now from film to digital, yeah, that's going to be more of a burden. But, even then, after about six months and you've gone through a recall cycle, and particularly after a year, you just--you don't get--you don't do it anymore

So, the fact is we rarely look at those old charts. There is just no benefit to scanning all that old paper. That's why I make such a big deal of it. In fact, just recently at one of my lectures, I can't remember when, one of--but it was just within the last year, I got to this part of the lecture and one of the offices raised their hand. I think it was an orthodontist's office. She says, "Well, we've--our doctors decided it was important, and we are actually doing that."

So, I said, "Oh, okay. Good. How's it going?" She says, "Well, we've been working on it for about a year and a half, and we're getting close to being done." I said, "What's it costing?" She says, "Well, we figured out recently it's about $50,000 we've spent on it so far." So, $50,000, a year and a half, they're not even done yet. I got to tell you, it's just not worth it, okay?

Now, if you want to scan in the occasional chart of a patient in the middle of a big treatment on--you know, and scan in their last treatment plan or whatever, yeah, fine. But, the fact is for the most part you do not need to do that. So, that's why I make such a big deal of it.

Okay. Let's see where we are now. Okay, we already did real life in the dental office, what's in the chart, what's the process. Okay. Next step is kind of the--again, one of the things that is a hold up. I see people all the time that say, "Larry, I'm ready to go, but how am I going to deal those forms?" So, let's do that.

There is kind of three levels to paperless forms. The first one you can all do by the end of the week, Monday for sure. And that is you continue to use paper forms just like you do now, but then you simply scan the form and shred it.

So, you hand the patient the same form you've been doing on that same old clipboard. You know, we've got these special clipboards. You get them from Patterson. They're made just for dentists. They're a brown Masonite with a chipped corner. They come with the corner pre-chipped

And then, you have your form on there, their name and their health history and all that kind of stuff, and you've copied it so many times it's kind of speckled and twisted, and then a pencil tied onto the clipboard with dental floss. Okay. So, we're been doing that for years. You can still do that.

So, you hand them the form, they fill it out. Name, address, insurance. "I don't know what that is." You know, are you pregnant? "Oh, that'd be a miracle. Periodontal? How do I spell that?" They fill out the form. Then they hand it back to the front desk person and he or she, usually she, takes it and what now? Types in the information. So, we're doing dual entry. The patient does it, then the front desk person does it

Now, up until now what you did is you took that piece of paper and put it in their paper chart. But, in the future you're not going to have a paper chart, so you shred it. Well, you scan--sorry, scan it, scan it, scan it, and then you shred it

So, now you have a digital copy of the piece of paper with their signature and then you shred the paper. No paper charts. You can all do that as soon as you have a scanner. You can do it tomorrow if you have a scanner. If you don't have a scanner, go to Best Buy, get one for $200, and you can start immediately.

Okay. The next level is really much better. And it's a little bit more sophisticated, takes a bit more setting up. And that is that you do a direct digital entry. That means why give the patient a piece of paper? Why not just give them a computer, okay?

And you can do this in a couple different ways. Just have them sit down at a computer terminal that's available to them and they type in the information. So, rather than have the front desk person--and the patient can type their own name in. Why not? So, they just enter their own information.

They can enter their name. They can enter their--you know, fill out their forms, that kind of stuff. And then, they sign it and so you have a digital signature. And we've all done that. You know, you sign for FedEx packages, and more and more I sign for my credit cards with electronic signature

So, electronic signatures are available and you can put those in your office. The little pad like you can see here on the slide is about--well, they run up to $200. You can get them even less than that.

And you can certainly have one at the front desk, one in the conference room, maybe one in the back depending if you want to take credit cards, those kinds of things. Oh. Also, Doctors, you can use this same pad to sign your chart notes if you feel that's important.

Now, I mentioned that you can put the--you give the patient a computer. You know, I told you you can sit them down on--at their own little workstation. And that's what--we did that, among other things, and I've seen that done quite successfully.

If you want to be a little cooler, you can hand them a tablet PC like an iPad. I mean, just having an iPad gives you three or four extra hipness points. I mean, it's so cool. And you can set an iPad up to run through the Internet and you can have them fill out their forms on the iPad. They can just tap in the information and then sign, once again, electronically.

I like the iPad idea. The problem is that they're--can walk away or get dropped or those kinds of things. Another thing I've seen which I like, I think, maybe even better is a kiosk. Dentrix has a kiosk. XLDent has kiosks. There's a couple people that do it already. And you--the advantage of a kiosk and/or the tablet PC is you can set them up to be very secure so that the patient can only access their own information.

And you can have it at the front desk. They can use it to check in. So, example, you come in and you check in, and you can say, you know, "Sam Jones. I'm here," check in. And then, the kiosk would alert Sam that he needed to upgrade his health history or of any change in your insurance information, those kinds of things, and Sam could actually do it right there. It can be connected to the internet--I mean, sorry, to the network through a wireless connection and actually update the chart as they fill it in. And they can sign it electronically as well.

So, step number one is you continue with paper and just scan and shred. Better step, you have a dedicated computer in the office, either a dedicated workstation, a kiosk, or a tablet that patients use to fill in the information themselves with electronic signature.

The next step, and I think the best, is they can actually go with their forms online with paperless forms. Now, there is kind of several steps to this as well. When we first go with a digital version of something, our tendency is to just make a digital version of what we used to do on paper.

And I see this, for the most part, when people go with electronic forms is they just like have a PDF. PDF, by the way, is just digital paper. They have a PDF of their forms online. Patients download it, fill it in, bring the paper, and they still have to go through that data entry and signature issue.

A better way is just to have the forms online. So, the patient goes to your website, they fill the forms out electronically online, click a button, and it gets downloaded and linked directly to your office and creates and updates the patient's form immediately. Wonderful for new patients, but also wonderful for existing patients.

I mean, if you want to get a--you want to upgrade all your paper health histories to digital health histories, just set this up and then you funnel every patient as they come in for an appointment to your website. Creates huge Web traffic which, by the way, helps your Google juice and helps get, you know, your Web page up on the search engines and--which, by the way, is the next webinar I'm going to be doing for demand--for DentalCompare in a month or so.

Well, you could look it up. But, we're doing one on all that, on how to get your Web page noticed, all that kind of stuff. That's coming up next, and this is one of the tricks that you can in fact do, which reminds me, let's go to our next question

Do you have a practice Web page, yes or no? I'm kind of curious about this because I've--if you're going to have your forms on a Web page, of course you have to have one. And then, you have to have one that you're actually proud of, and then you can actually put the forms on there.

And it's interesting, because I--these are kind of some numbers that are kind of hard to get the results on. Oh, let's look at this. Wow, okay.

You know what? I should have known this. This is a very advanced group. Look at that, almost 82--well, 81 percent of you have Web pages right now. That's far and away ahead of the national average, so you guys are ready to go.

For those of you that don't have one, I understand why you're waiting but I think the time is up. And again, if you come to the next webinar, I'll tell you why and how to do that and how to get a good Web page and what to do, what not to do with that as well.

Okay. One quick topic and then we'll get into the last one, which is going to be paperless workflow or front desklessness, and that is the next step on forms. And these aren't quite ready yet but they're in development. I think we'll be seeing them in a year or two, and that is smart interactive forms.

What's that mean? Like a smart form means if I fill it out and I say I'm a man, the form will not ask me later if I'm pregnant, okay? It's smart. Or, here's another. These are even better. I go to my health history and I have a question, "Have you ever been treated or diagnosed with diabetes?" If I say no, another question comes up on a different issue.

If I say yes, the form asks me about diabetes. When was I diagnosed? What kind do I have? You know, what drugs am I taking? Is my blood sugar under control? You know, the questions that we would want to ask as dentists to get that information, you know, that's important to us to treat that patient properly. Okay, those are smart and interactive forms.

Okay. So, we've talked about real life, what's in the chart, forms. Okay, last quick thing is Internet. And again, I'm going to do this is great detail in the next webinar.

But, the final step in the truly paperless office is going to be using the Internet in more creative ways, all the little bits of paper we have now like insurance EOBs and those kinds of things, payments. I have some amazing statistics on online payments. When you give the patients the opportunity to pay their bill at your website online, they pay much more rapidly

Insurance eligibility. There's no reason to be spending, you know, 15, 20, 30, 40 minutes online to find out insurance eligibility. That's a great thing to be done with an e-service, Dentrix, for example. Well, I use Dentrix and that's what we--and it makes it so much easier.

Financial approval is like we use CareCredit. We go online for CareCredit to get our financial approvals. So, that's the final step. And again, next webinar will go into great detail.

Now, how do you make it work? Why is it valuable to the front desk? And part of what--why I come back to this is because, in the early days when I first became a geek and got involved and excited about technology and I was looking at what we were doing, and--I had a lot of management systems in my office that I was proud of. I'd spent a lot of time learning to do them well.

And I'd heard from other dentists and I picked up on this, that it's good technology. I would not have to change my systems. It would simply enhance the way I did things. And I bought into that and I believed it for a while, and I even told other dentists that.

I now think that was a mistake. As I said before, when we first use technology, we just try and do what we used to do digitally. And that's a good first step, but the fact is that a car is not just a faster horse and digital records are not just electronic paper. It does allow us to do things, in fact, differently. And so, you know, digital or paperless workflow, or what's sometimes called front desklessness

So, what is it, or basically what it's not. You know, some people think, well, it means you have no person at the front desk. You have--you know, it's just a way for dentists to be cheap and not hire people. And that's not true. Dentists aren't cheap, we're just value oriented

And then, of course the moaning thing that comes from the front desk person saying, "Wait a minute. No front desk? You know, who's--that's just stupid. I can do--who can do what I do?" Okay. Well, it doesn't mean that you don't do the duties of the front desk, but you do do them differently

So, what is the human sense of what actually does the front desk person do? What is a front desk? Is it a person? Is it a place? Is it a thing? Because we treat it like all of those. We say you want to--"Go up to the front desk and she'll make you an appointment." Well, is the front desk that person?

But, we actually send them to a place. I mean, there really is place, a desk someplace out front. Is that what we're talking about? Or, is it a thing? Is it really the process of charting and scheduling and all that kind of stuff? Are all of those things the front desk?

And the answer is kind of yeah, it is a person, place, and a thing. I think what the front desk--what you can think of it now in modern terms is the front desk is or was the data center of the office. The front desk is the data center of the office. And when everything we did had to go through that data center, it all went through the front desk. We had to--all our paper, our charts, our scheduling, answering the telephone, dealing with customer communications, all of that was at the data center.

So, as we went from paper book to electronic book, eliminated the bottleneck and allowed us to access the data more effectively, the exact same thing happens when you go from electronic records--I'm sorry, the other way around, when you go from paper records to electronic records.

The front desk--now, the data center is now not just that person, place, or thing, the front desk. The data center's now the computer and you can now access the data center from wherever you have a computer, at the front, at several stations at the front, in the back, or from a different building. So, it then frees up and allows us to do all kinds of things

So, what does that mean from a workflow point of view? Well, phones. Why do we answer the phones at the front desk? Because that's where the data was. If a patient calls you and wants to make an appointment, wants to check their balance, wants to find out what their insurance paid, wants to know when they were in last, all that data was on paper at the front desk, so we answered the phones at the front desk.

Once the data is on the computer, we can answer it literally anywhere in the world as long as we have computer access. So, you no longer have to answer the phones at the front desk. You can, but it changes what we could do.

Also, other things like confirmations. You know, I talk to staff members all the time. They say they spend hours a day on the phone calling people to confirm their appointments for the next couple of days. Why not just do that electronically?

I've had people--like that question I gave you, you know, "When's my appointment? Next week? Next month?" That's a routine question that they can get online through an interactive website. So, it eliminates a lot of that busywork that we do at the front desk

So, that's the idea. It's just using our technology more effectively so--and we can use the Internet more effectively. Communications, rather--again, rather than, you know, calling, we can send text messages.

We can communicate with e-mail. By the way, the vast majority of your patients, surveys says about two-thirds of them prefer to be contacted through e-mail, not through phone calls or letters. We don't send recall cards. We sent e-call cards.

And all of this comes under the interactive or what's called Web 2.0, using our charts in a more--I mean our Web pages in a more effective way to communicate with patients. Once you have digital data, it allows us to do that.

I'm going to--I'm getting to the--I want to make sure I got plenty of time for questions. Actually, I'm doing okay. I'm looking at my time here. I got some time for questions. I was going to rush, but I'm not. I'm going to stop, back up here.

If--I mentioned--we've talked about some of these services like, you know, being able to check for the appointment online so the patient doesn't have to call you to confirm the appointment, so the patient doesn't have to call, make a payment, update their medical histories. All of these services you can do online.

All of those come under the umbrella of electronic or e-services. And I know there's some good ones. One of the ones I work with personally is Sesame Communications. They do all this stuff for you. They help you set it up. So, if you have a current Web page that you want to be able to put these services onto, you can do that.

Another one I work with I've mentioned several times is Dentrix. Dentrix has a very complete e-services package that will do it as well. I'm not as familiar with Eaglesoft, but I know Eaglesoft also has some e-services as well. So, all of these are available to you to purchase and kind of plug in to your existing Web page and Web services.

And then, finally the idea of going paperless, that means you don't have to pull charts, don't have to hunt for the lost chart, don't have to replace the charts when they wear out, don't have to create new charts, don't have to add to charts or purge charts and get them all out of that. So, once again, front desklessness just allows you to do thing differently

So, let me say that once again and then I think we'll have some time for questions. Some of the misunderstandings about front desklessness, some of the things that I've heard is that, you know, you don't know the front desk, you don't do what the front desk does, you know, the--your patients walk in, there's no desk there. Everybody walks around with a cordless phone on their hip. When the phone rings, they answer it

I've heard of dentists--you know, what I call the chainsaw approach to the front desk, front desklessness where the dentist goes in a with a chainsaw, cuts out the front desk, and literally there is no desk. And people have written books about that. People lecture about that. And if someone has done it, it is, in fact, possible.

But, when I talk about that, that's not really what I'm referring to. What I'm talking about is the ability to just do things differently because the technology allows you to do that.

Okay. Before we get to questions, I mentioned some specials that are available to us. Anybody that has signed up for this, I will e-mail you the six page guide to going paperless. If you want to do the--get the full book, I normally charge $99 for that. It's a download. But, I will send you the coupon code to get a $59 version. So, you get $40 off.

And the last thing I'm going to talk a little bit about, it's in the wrap up after we do the questions, and that's the three day meeting I do every spring in Sedona, Arizona, just a glorious place. I'll talk a little bit about Sedona.

But, it involves my favorite hobby outside of computers, which is mountain biking. Remember that picture me out by the Grand Canyon? Yeah. So, if you want to go mountain biking, I'll take you. But, there's lots to do in Sedona besides that as well

So, three things. I will send you the free six page guide. I'll send you a coupon code that, if you want to get the full guide at a reduced rate, that's available to you. And just let me know that you're a DentalCompare client, you've seen the webinar, and we'll give you the reduced tuition to the Sedona meeting coming up in May of 2012 [sic].

Okay. I think we got a little bit, five, six minutes here for questions, maybe not quite that. So, Jeff, any questions, any issues

Dr. Jeff Rohde: Yeah. Dr. Emmott, thank you so much. This has been fantastic.

You know, one of the questions that's commonly coming in is, okay, now we got a bunch of computers. We have this whole network going on. All the records are accessed by each of these computers. How do you work security? How do you make sure that someone can't just sit down in front of one of these computers, or how do you make sure the data doesn't get out there for, say, you know, HIPAA compliance or just simply, you know, something that might be embarrassing

Dr. Larry Emmott: Yeah. Well, it's--I mean, really, I always go back, when these issues come up, and say, well, look at--what did you do with paper? Because, I mean, the same thing was true of your paper records.

I mean, they're sitting around there. People could look over your shoulder. People could read them. People could take them off the--out of the office. So, the first question is you just have to have people of integrity that--to do the right thing.

On a higher level than that, there are all kinds of security things that you can build into your computer. And, you know, patients have to log in so they don't have access to the computer until they can prove who they are. And then, you can track who did what with the computer. You can--so, you can kind of shut them down

And I could--we could spend a half an hour talking about security measures. What I like to do is give this analogy. Think of it like protecting your home from a burglar. Is it possible to set up your house so that no one could ever, ever, ever, ever get in? Not really, but you can do escalating levels of things that make it harder

First of all, you can just lock the door. That means you have a Windows log in. Secondly, you can lock the door and put bolts on the windows and doors. That means I now have a practice management log in.

Then I can start getting--you know, I can go up to the next step and get a burglar alarm or I can get roving Dobermans or, you know, live guards. Every one of those adds to the expense and the hassle factor, and somewhere along the line you need to decide where you are comfortable.

So, the answer is yes, it can be done. I--certainly it's important to be aware of these issues and--but there are ways you can protect yourself and protect your data.

Dr. Jeff Rohde: And just kind of on that note of protecting the data, what are the legal aspects of keeping digital records? You know, how--it seems like one of the things I know with our practice that's created is you can kind of keep everything. You can trace them. You send off an x-ray, you're not actually losing it. How does that shift of, you know, perspective on digital records change when it comes to the actual digital record?

Dr. Larry Emmott: Well, I think when you say what's the legal aspect, there's kind of two aspects to that. I think one is, you know, how to we maintain HIPAA compliance, and not just with the law but just that's the right thing to do. It's the ethical, moral thing to do, protect our patients' information. So, once again, it's the log in thing.

It's questionable to send these things by e-mail. Dentists do that. But, you can use secure online sites to send x-rays from one doctor to another. There's a couple sites that do that, one is called Dental Sharing, another one is called RecordLinc, that allow you to do it in a HIPAA compliant format

The other question, though, that--I think maybe what you were getting to is when you say is it legal, you're saying, "If I'm ever challenged in court, would these electronic records defend me?" And the answer is yes.

It's absolutely yes with a tiny "but," because when I first start doing this back in the '90s, I was worried about that. So, I talked to lawyers. I said, "Will these records defend me?" They said, "Yes, of course. How could the court deny you the use of this new technology? On the other hand, you do not want to be the first test case." Okay

Well, there's been lots of test cases. And not only have the courts accepted electronic records, but usually the judge will praise them because they are very complete. You can do much better notes and, get this, you can read them, okay?

So, as long as you take basic security precautions, which is that you have a backup of all the information, you have password protections on your computers, and you have a system, which all the major products do, that lock out changes after a certain period of time, you are very secure in the legality of your electronic records

Dr. Jeff Rohde: Perfect.

And we're just kind of running out of time for questions from everybody. We will get to those. I appreciate everybody typing those in

Dr. Emmott, where can we go next? Where can we get help?

Dr. Larry Emmott: Well, again, part of my mission is to help my fellow dentists make good technology choices. So, I've mentioned some of these things. I'll go back in a little more detail here.

Once again, there is the Web page, Drlarryemmott.com, and the blog, emmottontechnology.com. Both of those have all kinds of information that's available for free, and hopefully you'll find it to be valuable.

In addition, there is the technology guides. The one--I've written three of them. The one that's particular for this class, of course, is "Going Paperless." And if you--I'll send you the code. You can get that for a reduced rate. And you'll get the free version, the small version, right off the bat. But, it--this is something you want

And by the way, even though I've tried to give you my best stuff, it's in one hour and I'm talking really fast. And so, I find having a written version of it, just so you can go back to it and refer to and print out and use as a guide, is very helpful anyway.

The next thing is the Technology on the Rocks, the Sedona trip. That's a three day event. So, we had one hour today. We're going to have three four-hour sessions, so 12 hours worth of information. And we'll talk a lot about paperless. We'll also talk about using the Internet effectively, some of the advanced things coming on like digital diagnostics and those kinds of things

So, in the morning, if you're man or woman enough to do it, I'll take you for a mountain bike ride. If you survive, we have a seminar in the afternoon. And I shouldn't say that because there's a lot to do in Sedona besides mountain biking, but I'll take people that want to do that on a bike ride. But, it's a great tourist destination.

So, once again, those are the three offers. You'll get the free short page--the free short six page guide, a coupon code to the big guide, and the reduced rate on the Sedona meeting.

Okay. Oh, I've tried to do all kinds of things. I've talked really fast, but there's so much more. The future, we--you know, we'll be talking to the computer like Star Trek. Wouldn't that be cool?

We going to do real-time claims where you actually just submit the information and the insurance company downloads the money to your account that minute. Have you seen these new virtual patient things we're doing? We'll talk about that a little bit. And we'll do advanced systems later on in the--in another webinar.

I don't know exactly what the future holds, but I do know this. The future is coming and it will be amazing.

Dr. Jeff Rohde: Well, Dr. Emmott, thank you so much for your time.

Again, everybody, we will get to your questions. Also, I'd like to remind you to, if you want CE credit, go ahead and click on that "Complete continuing education credit" link on the lower right of your screen. And just to remind you as well, this will be available on DentalCompare so that you can watch it later, watch it with people in your office or with that older doctor you're trying to convince, sit them down in front of it so they can see how easy this is for you guys to integrate into your practice.

Dr. Emmott will be back with us on November 16th for another webinar to kind of continue this discussion. So, if there is any way you guys would be able attend that, just keep an eye on your inbox.

Again, thank you, Dr. Emmott. And thank you, everybody, for attending.