Before You Look at a Single Vendor

Most software in a dental practice was bought in the wrong order. The demo came first. A colleague posted about it, or a rep caught you at a meeting, or the booth was on the way to the coffee, and soon you were watching a screen and asking the only question a demo invites, which is "what does it do?" The practice signed, and later found out what it had actually needed, which was not always the thing on the screen.

I have bought software that way. I have also sold it, so I know what a demo is built to do, which is to let the product describe the problem for you. A good demo makes you feel a need you had not named. That is not dishonest. It is backwards, because the practice is the only party in the room that knows what its problem is, and it has usually not written that down.

The ADA's guidance on business planning makes the same point about a bigger decision. Its page on developing a business plan opens not with a template but with "Before you begin, ask yourself these key questions," and the questions are about the practice, not the plan. For an existing practice thinking about a change, the ADA's list of what an updated plan needs ends with "an analysis of your current costs and your 'break-even' point." Cost of the current state first, everything else after.

That is the order this post is about. Not which vendor, not even whether to buy. Just the internal conversation a practice owes itself before it evaluates anybody, because a practice that has had it buys well, and a practice that has not buys whatever was demonstrated best.

Say the problem so someone could see it

"We need AI" is not a problem. Neither is "the front desk is overwhelmed" or "we should be more efficient." Those are moods, and a mood can be satisfied by almost any purchase, which is why a demo works on moods.

A problem is something a person could stand in the office and watch. The phone rings out while the treatment coordinator is on a financial call and the scheduling coordinator is checking someone in. The new hire asks where the fee schedule is, gets three different answers, and uses the oldest one. The list of unreturned calls at closing keeps getting longer and nobody owns it. Those are observable. You could count them. Someone could disagree with you about them, which is the sign you have said something specific.

Write the problem in that form, one or two sentences, before any vendor sees you. Then keep it in front of you during the demo, because the demo will try to widen it, and the vendors who try hardest are telling you how well their product fits the problem you brought.

Name who owns it today

Every problem in a practice already has an owner, even the unassigned ones. If the answer to "who owns this" is "everyone," the honest answer is "no one," and no one is who will own the software too.

This matters more than any feature. In an earlier post on seven questions to ask before buying AI, I argued that question three, who on your team changes what they do, is the best predictor of whether software survives its first year. Software does not do work. It moves work from one person to another, or from a person to itself, and the person it moves work away from has to agree. If that person has not been in the room, the practice has bought a tool for somebody who does not want it.

So before the demo, name the person. Not the role, the person. The office manager who catches the unreturned calls. The hygiene coordinator who keeps the recall list in a spreadsheet she built herself. Ask what they would do with the hour back. If they cannot answer, the hour may not be worth the price. If they answer instantly, you have found the reason to buy, and it will not be on any feature list.

Decide what doing nothing costs

The ADA puts break-even last on its list and I would put it first, because it is the number every vendor is guessing at on your behalf. The cost of doing nothing is what you already pay for the problem, in the only currency that matters to a practice: hours, and the appointments that did not happen inside them.

You do not need a spreadsheet for this. You need one honest week of noticing. How many calls rang out. How many after-hours voicemails waited until the next business morning. How many times the same question was asked at the desk and answered from memory. Write the numbers down without deciding what they mean yet. If they are small, that is worth knowing before you spend anything, and no vendor will tell you that. If they are large, you have the only thing that makes a purchase decision easy, which is a picture of what the status quo costs.

The ADA's page on digital dentistry says, in a single flat sentence, that "implementation and use of dental office technology are often challenging." It is right, because implementation means somebody's day changes. If you cannot say whose, you are not ready to evaluate anybody. If you can, you are ready to evaluate everybody, because you finally have something to evaluate them against.

What the conversation looks like afterward

A practice that has done this walks into a demo with a sentence instead of a wish list. "Our phone rings out during lunch and after hours, the office manager owns the callbacks, and we lose new patients we never hear from." That sentence does three things at once. It tells the vendor what to show you. It tells you what to ignore. And it gives you a way to know afterward whether the thing worked, which is a question that deserves its own post.

It also changes who is asking the questions. A practice with a written problem asks the vendor to prove fit. A practice without one asks the vendor to explain the product, and the vendor is happy to.

Where we fit, and where we do not

I would rather a practice arrive at AiroDental with the problem written down than with an interest in AI. If the sentence you wrote is about the phone, the calls that ring out, the after-hours voicemails, the new patient who reached a recording instead of a person, that is Laine, and we can show you what changes for the office manager who owns those callbacks today. If the sentence is about the team not knowing where things are written, the new hire with three fee schedules, the doctor's standing instructions living in one person's head, that is Saige, and we can show you what changes for her.

And if your sentence does not match either of those, we will say so. A practice that has named its problem deserves a vendor who will admit when the answer is somewhere else.

When you are ready, book a walkthrough and bring the sentence. There is no long-term contract and no onboarding fee, which is our way of saying the sentence should keep being true after you sign, or you should be able to leave.

Deren Flesher, DDS. Founder, AiroDental.