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T-Bone Speaks
T-Bone Speaks
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tagarwalnc
tagarwalnc

#AskTBone - 5 Must Attend CE Courses

6/4/2016 3:33:01 PM   |   Comments: 0   |   Views: 462


#AskTBone - 5 Must Attend CE Courses


Hello and welcome to another episode of ask T-Bone. Today we have a great question, and quite honestly, they all great questions, but we have a question that I can't answer exactly, but it's an important one that I want to kind of give my thoughts on. And the question was submitted was:
What are your top five must attend CE courses?
And I can't necessarily say which specific courses are must attend, but what I would like to do is spend a few minutes talking about my thoughts on see classes. So the first thing I always like to say is: ultimately I break see it down into three different categories. One there's inspirational CE, and that would be a weekend meeting that you attend with your team, that has hit multiple speakers added, that the sole goal of that meeting is to really motivate you, to make you aware of the different options that are available, and to kind of let you pick and choose what speakers appeal to you and what topics appeal to you. A good example of this was the town meeting  dr. Smith and  I started that in 2002 and dr. Howard is running that now. It was always a great meeting where you could come, and you could bring your team members, and you can meet other like-minded dentist and you could hear 20-30 different speakers to choose from, and you could have a wonderful time. And then you would go to that and then leave saying “okay, this are the people that I'd like to learn more from, and these are the topics that like to learn more about”. So that's more of an inspirational type of meeting. Second, I look at as an implementation workflow type of meeting. And that’s more of a workshop, and quite honestly, that's what we do here at 3D dentist, and that's what I focus most of my attention now is on the implementation workflow. And DC events a different in the sense that the focus on DC events is more about very specific procedure, very specific clinical procedure, and how to implement them into your office. I'll take for example sleep apnea. Sleep apnea is one of those things where you probably go to meeting,  you hear somebody talk about 2 hours on sleep apnea and you're like “wow that does make sense I want to do that” And then you like okay where do I get started? What do I need to learn? How do I bring this into my team? How do I make my hygiene is part of the process? How do I handle the front office admin side of this? How do I handle some the clinical aspects of it? And that's what a good two to three day workshop training is about. It's a deep dive on a very specific clinical procedure and how to bring that and Implement that at a high level in your practice. So that would be an example of a implementation workflow type of CE event. And then the third type of CE event, I break down into the scientific CE event. And to kind of clare on the sleep thing, that's where you say “you know what? I listen to Somebody I've got interest in sleep, I've gone to a workshop which successfully implementing into our office and we're really doing well with it, and we're doing the low-hanging fruit cases and now I really really really want to become a sleep expert”. And that's where things like the American Academy of Dental Sleep Medicine, we go to meetings and the 2-3 day meetings are solely focused on that one clinical topic, sleep for example, or TMJ, or implants, or whatever may be that really allow you to expand your clinical cases, your clinical reach through significant, very specific education to allow you become an expert. So again, the three types of CE events are inspirational, implementation workflow related and very scientific in nature. So you know, to me the area that I personally focus in is the implementation and workflow part of it. But ultimately one of the things that you have to ask yourself is: what do I want? What is it that you're looking for? And you need inspiration, are you burned out? Are you feeling like you know, I'm just doing the same things and nothing really big is happening? And then I would say you know it's time for an inspirational CE event. Take a team you've got to go with your team and see what's going on. And then have fun and enjoy yourself and don't come back expecting to have learned a lot of things about a specific thing, but come back expecting to say “You know what? This is great, let's learn more about this, let's make a plan of action of how we want to implement this one thing. And honestly in today's world all CE doesn't have to mean going somewhere. You can do so much through podcasts being there so many Dental podcast now, you can do so much through YouTube, this slideshare.net where you can have people that place their PowerPoint presentations on line, for you to listen to and have them narrated through, So there is so much that can be learned, there is Dental town, there is Facebook there are so many different forms where you can learn online. So now, to the kind of the 5 must attend CE courses, you know, I would say that my number one must attend CE course, and by that I mean the John Ross CE courses, is one that I firmly feel that not enough dentists spend enough time on, and this was really ingrained in me by my father when I got out of dental school and he saw me taking lots of clinical CE to expand my clinical skills set, and he said to me “Well that's great that you can expand your clinical skills set but you still don't have patients saying yes” and I think the number one area that we can all use help in, consistently not just once, but consistently is on leadership. And when I say leadership most of us think immediately of, how we lead people? How we are boss? how we are manager? And I don't look at leadership in that way I look at leadership as more about how we communicate with people. How you communicating with your patients? How you communicate with your team? How are you leading your team to communicate with your patients? what words are you using with patients? Are you asking patients what they want to do? Are your patients Centric focused, or are you dentist Centric Focus? Are you always  suggesting things that you want to do, not necessarily, you know, worrying about what the patient is going on, what is fitting in their life and those things. And I know that there are many wonderful speakers out there for this, but someone who is really hit home with me is dr. Paul homoly, and I believe his website is Paulhomoly.com and I think it behooves each of you listen to this little episode to purchase his book making it easy for patients to say yes it's a great book you can buy on Amazon and I don't know the exact cost of it but it's probably $30-$50, maybe $100 for the book. It's a fantastic book and he also has a downloadable MP3 that I keep on my iTunes on my phone that I listen to on the airplane, and I listen to it, I would probably say I listen to the whole thing every other month or so. And it’s an audio recording that he did of a speaking event that I think it's like 6 or 7 hours long, and I believe you can download them for $10 or $15 through Paulfomoly.com and it's great, I firmly think it's great. It's not about learning every little thing and doing every little thing the way he does it, but conceptually it's more about understanding how to divide patients into two categories: Your complex cases, you're not so complex cases, how you find out what's ready for your patience life, how you communicate with them, how you take them from being unaware to aware, and all the different things that are involved in that. So I would I say that is my number one CE event or class of CE events that you must attend ot must take to learn about and quite honestly doesn't involve going to anything it's just a matter of learning and reading. So number two I would say is what that your practice need? I would say that before you learn fancy procedures, are you doing molar endo? if you're not doing molar endo, take some good CE on how to do molar Endo. From what I've heard the gold standard is Steve Buchanan for molar Endo, Cliff Ruddle is fantastic you have so many good options Coke and brave, there's so many good options for molar endo, and I think even today an area that I don't think we utilize enough is a local reps, manufacturer reps, dentsply, those companies that sell endodontic equipment they often hold one-day or two-day CE events in your local area for very reasonable cost if, a few hundred dollars even. And while their goal is to sell you something they're still unbelievably good information to learn, this technique to brush up on. I look at myself, how long has it been since I'm taking a molar Endo class? you know I’ve started doing molar endo 10 years ago, and I haven't taken a class on it in 10 years, I'm sure something has changed in 10 years. and you know that that's an emphasis for me to go to learn more about it. Number three. I would say what can you do to expand your practice? And by that I mean how can you add a new you item to your menu of services? And for me, you know, right now the biggest one is sleep apnea. What can you do to add sleep apnea to your practice? What is the potential? And to me it was don’t realize the potential and I've covered that ad nauseam in my different podcast and different podcast I've been interviewed for, is you got to go learn something about sleep apnea, how to implement it. I'm not a big Science Guy, I don’t think that you need to learn all the signs in the beginning of a big implementation and workflow person; That's why I think your starting point is, and then once you get started, once you see this success, once you are doing 3 to 5 appliances per month and is bringing in new revenue for your practice and then, I certainly believe that you should dive in deeper and take a more comprehensive export approach to it. Number four. Where are you with dental implants? To me without question that you should be doing as a general dentist you should be doing dental implants in your practice. The numbers prove that there's about 15 dental implants in every dental practice and only 20% of the general dentist are placing implants. So go learn dental implants. My recommendation for dental implants and even though I have implant training, our implant training is very technology specific so it's for those who want to do computer-based dental implant placement and using 3D technology. My suggestion is dr. Arun Garg, at implantseminars.com. He has a wonderful multi weekend didactic course, and then he has a phenomenal life patient program in the Dominican Republic, where you can go to the Dominican and you can have the opportunity to place multiple multiple implants on many many patients there, and watch your fellow colleagues doing the same. And then certainly once you get into the game, placing implants and utilizing CBCT and utilizing CAD/CAM, then we certainly invite you to come to our training center to learn in my opinion the best learning for integration and workflow are utilizing CEREC and CEREC on a 3D cone beam technology. Ann my last area is a medical billing. I would say to you why we are not billing medical. My goal is ultimately for your practice to raise your fees, but many of us are under insurance so we can't raise our fees so we have to look to other insurance companies, sometimes dental insurance companies they all have different fees, just like medical insurance companies allow many times higher fees than dental, so I would say medical billing is an unbelievably important way to learn for your practice. And of course that many options there, here we have a wonderful program with myself and Hootan Shahidi on implementation of medical billing for exams, X-rays and minor surgical procedures, there is dr. Sarabella out of Chicago, she does a wonderful program also on more complex surgeries, and a deeper dive into medical billing. And there is my friend dr. Chris Farrugia out of Florida. He has wonderful programs throughout the country that you can learn medical billing on. So you know all those things exist and it's a matter of you figuring out what it is that you want. But you'll notice that the overall in my my suggestions for CE. Very rarely are they based on trying to Market and getting it new segmentation of the population as patients. My goal is for you to add services, and services that fit within your existing patient base. If I would add a number of six to this I would say that we need to get you into TMJ therapy. How can you assist with TMD TMJ? How can you add that to your practice? Not necessary at the highest level of dealing with the patients at a problematic but dealing with a relatively easy patient how to recognize who is easy, how to recognize what your therapy options are, and that's an area that I'm expanding into right now. So, thank you again and if there's anything I can do please don't hesitate to reach out the best way to get to us www.tbonespeaks.com and we look forward to additional questions Thank you!

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