One industry trend that we’re keeping a close eye on is the growing role of data in dental.
Now, data has played a huge role in dental marketing (or at least how we do dental marketing here at SMC) for years. But that data-driven approach is increasingly moving into the clinical sphere as well.
Why? Because thanks to patient management software and dental AI programs developed specifically to collect and analyze vast quantities of patient data, there is just so much more information to work with than there was even a few years ago.
We’re well on our way toward a world where dentists will be able to discern best practices not from clinical studies that involve hundreds or thousands of patients, but through AI-driven research that can aggregate data on literally millions of procedures.
Of course, as we’ve noted before, this could lead to the opening of many a can of worms, from ranking dentists based on performance to unreliable reporting and threats to clinical autonomy. But we do think that the possibility of using large-scale data sets to help inform treatment decisions could be a boon to our entire industry and improve both treatment outcomes and our reputation with the general public.
If we can get it right.
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