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DDS GP: The iPad “Killer App” for Dentists

January 11, 2011 by Charles Payet

Do you have an iPad? If not, WHY NOT!?!?!? 😀

We got our iPad right after it came out in 2010, and I must say, it has essentially replaced my laptop for any time I need a computer but am not sitting at my desk. There’s a darn good reason Oprah named it one of her Ultimate Favorite Things.

But for dentists, IMO, there is now a completely different reason for the iPad to become one of YOUR ultimate favorite things, and that is one particular app: DDS GP.

Use Your Own Photos to Educate Your Dental Patients

One of the best features of this app, is the ability to add your own patient photos to individual presentations. All you have to do is create a folder of pictures to sync to the iPad, and from within the app, select the photos to add to each presentation, with no limit. So add Before/After Portraits — composites, amalgams, CERECs, and more! Then put the iPad in your patients’ hands and simply WOW them!

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Customizable, Portable, & Easy-to-Learn for Dentists and Dental Teams

The DDS GP app currently has more than 200 different presentations, and more are being added regularly. They include such procedures and diagnoses as:

Bleaching: In Office
Bone Graft with Extraction
Bridge: Porcelain, Anterior
Crown-Lengthening
Brushing: Bass Technique
Cracked Tooth, Cusp
Crown: CEREC
Invisalign
Nightguard: NTI
Veneer, Single: Porcelain, Lab

Affordable Dental Case Presentation Software vs. CASEY or GURU

Unlike Patterson Dental’s CASEY (which can run up to $8000) or Henry-Schein’s GURU (not sure, but I have heard about $2000?), DDS GP is truly affordable — only $399! No, I am not kidding, AND that includes free lifetime updates! No, I am not kidding about that, either.

Email Treatment Plans, Add Fees, Include the Presentations, & More

From directly within the app, you can create treatment plans and add presentations from the app, then send it right to your patient via email, or if you have a compatible printer, print it directly from your iPad. This makes it easy for husbands or wives to show their spouses the same, easy-to-understand presentations that helped them make the decision to move forward on treatment.

A Ring Flash Technique for Tooth Shade Matching

January 10, 2011 by Charles Payet

In response to a question on DentalTown regarding how to get rid of the excessive flash on the central incisors when taking a shade for lab restorations, my colleague Dr. David Cook responded with this trick to solve the problem. The description and photos are both courtesy of him.

One solution when you get too much perpendicular flash returning directly towards your lens is to alter the angle of your lens to the flat facial surfaces as others have advised.

Another solution is to still shoot perpendicular to the flat facial surfaces, but remove the ring flash from the front of your lens, hold it on top of your lens and angle it down 30-45 degrees. The flash is the same distance from the teeth, but the light angling down will not give you as much reflective washed out areas.

This image, the lens is perpendicular to the flat facial surface and the attached flash is perpendicular. Note the large reflected washed out facial areas on the centrals.

This image, the lens is still perpendicular, but I removed the ring flash, held it above the lens and angled it down 30-45 degrees. There are still highlights, but not the large washed out areas. You can also see the incisal translucency better and characterizations when the flash is taken off and angled down.

As others pointed out, another option is to use a twin-lite flash, such as the Canon MT-24EX TTL Macro Twin Lite or the Nikon R1C1 Wireless Closeup Speedlight system. These are generally more difficult to use for anything except the anterior teeth unless you are very experienced.

Wacom Tablets Make Photo Editing Easy

January 9, 2011 by Charles Payet

Have you ever tried hand-writing anything on a photo using a mouse? Or using the mouse to make a selection in Photoshop/Photoshop Elements? If so, you know just how frustrating and difficult it can be. Your wrist probably also knows how strenuous it can be. A few years ago, I was doing so much photo editing and typing, even with an ergonomic keyboard, that my wrists were starting to hurt, and at 2 points I had to wear a wrist-guard for support. Needless to say, putting on latex gloves over one of those things didn’t work too well!

And that’s why I highly recommend you get a Wacom graphics tablet. By using a natural hand-writing motion, you can paint, select, write, draw, etc. far more accurately and comfortably.

Wacom Intuos4 Graphics Tablets are Ideal for Dentists

I love using my tablet particularly for cosmetic corrections on big cases, as demonstrated here. This is a CEREC smile makeover case, 10 units of Empress MultiCAD shade BL3. To be completely frank, this was my first 10-unit CEREC case, and while I felt pretty good about how it came out, it wasn’t quite good enough to bond in.

So I took some photos, put this one in Photoshop, and started drawing out the corrections I want to make. I’ll send this to the patient to see if she agrees with me, then I’ll sit down in the lab to correct as needed (will have to redesign/remill a few of them) with this in front as a guide.

Here’s another case from a few years ago – using a Wacom pen/tablet, I can mark up photos as much as I want by using separate layers. Send pictures like this to your lab in preparation for your diagnostic waxup, and it’s a lot easier for them to know what your thought process is and where you’re going with the case. (Just so you know, this was one of about 4-5 pictures sent, not the only one, in case you were worried.)

After all……..how many have ever had a lab tell them they sent “too much” info for a big case? 😆

2011 and LOTS of New Info Coming!

January 3, 2011 by Charles Payet

Happy New Year! 😀

I just want to say that I am very excited about this coming year and what will be added here for your use. Since I will be lecturing on an effective digital photography workflow for dentists, that will be the primary focus for the next 4 months. As a person with ADD, blogging is a great way of helping me refine my thought processes and the workflow itself as I put them into a format that should be easily usable for you, my colleagues.

Here’s a little of what you can expect:

Video tutorials
Portrait photography tips and settings
How to use your photos in Social Media
Creating website galleries and building online photo galleries
Creating MP4 videos for your office and websites

While there is such a huge wealth of information to present, my goal is to make this stuff EASY for you, so you don’t have to go through the same learning curve I did. 😉

Saving Your Patient Photos

January 2, 2011 by Charles Payet

When it comes to saving all your patient photos, if you are not doing it through your Practice Management Software (PMS), you need a structured format to make it easy to save future photos and to be able to find past ones. The folder format that I use within Lightroom is one I learned from my Dad, who is a highly organized businessman, with just a few tweaks.

Within the “My Pictures” folder, here is the folder structure I’ve been using for the last 4+ years:

Looking at my folders then, this is how the “big picture” is structured:

Going deeper within a patient’s folder, it will look something like this:

In an upcoming post, I’ll discuss the importance of keyword tagging your photos, and how to create a keyword heirarchy within Lightroom for easy searchability.

Where Do You Get Dental Website Photos?

December 30, 2010 by Charles Payet

A Townie friend of mine, Lisa Weber of ProductionFinder.com, recently related this story that emphasizes 3 extremely important points:

Be sure that your website photos are legitimate,
Why you should use your OWN photos on your website, and
Take the appropriate steps to protect your photos.

I’ll be posting more on how to get your own photos onto your website in an attractive format, as well as on how to protect your photos (within limits) in upcoming blog posts.

And now, in Lisa’s own words:

I thought I’d post a recent situation because my guess is it’s more common than you might think. This will be long so bear with me. This is what happened recently:

Client emailed me to inquire about my services and we agreed to talk by phone the following day. I checked out the name online to see where the practice was and take a tour of the website. A website can tell me quite a bit about a practice, so I usually pop into all of the pages. I looked at the Smile Gallery and saw some very familiar smiles.

The images (all of them) were images I’d actually participated in taking in a practice I used to work in, and now work for on a consulting basis. I knew the names associated with those smiles. What are the chances of my stumbling on those images? Pretty darn close to nil. Before assigning blame to the dentist, I decided to check out the web designer. I found 5 websites for dentists in that same area of Arizona using the exact same images. There were a few additional images on several of them but the galleries were virtually identical. That’s when I assumed the dentists were under the impression they were stock images and the web designer had been the one who had likely just copied and pasted them. They were all small images, saved as jpegs with the different practices names, numbered sequentially.

I saved an archived version of all the sites in question prior to doing anything and then called the web designer. I was unable to get a person, so left a message and also sent an email. I then began to contact their clients and tell them what the situation was, explaining that our assumption was that they had no idea those images weren’t available for use. Each of the offices were able to get the images removed from their sites. I searched again and found yet another dental website using them and contacted that practice last night. Speaking with an incredible OM, I explained the history and that my only purpose is to get the images removed and we do not hold the dentist responsible at this time. I explained that the web designer had placed her doctor in a very precarious position because ultimately it was his liability. I recommended they pull out the original contract to see if the web designer represented that he had all rights to the images he was going to use.

After receiving my message that if I didn’t receive a call by close of business, I would rely on our attorney to make any future communications, I received a call from the sales person from the Web designer. He stated that although he believed he got all the images from a Lumineer site, he would go ahead and remove them. He said his business was no longer in operation, regardless. I asked him if his clients knew this and he assured me that they did. I mentioned that I had spoken with several dentists in the past week who would be very surprised that they were no longer in business. I also mentioned that not only were the images not from a Lumineer site, but none of them displayed a Lumineer, since that is a product that neither doctor has ever used. He seemed to feel it might be possible they were not the images I felt they were until I indicated that by “participating” in the photography, I meant I was actually in the room when those images were taken, cropped them and have them saved on flash drives along with a few thousand other images that I have been recently viewing for inclusion in the new website once it goes live. Those Before and After images being shown in Arizona were born and raised in Middleburg Virginia.

Not only did this web designer copy and paste the images (from an outdated website) but they used the identical images in a competitive market for offices that were geographically close to each other! One image in particular really ticked me off because it was probably the most beautiful after pic I have ever seen of an implant crown on a central after months of tissue development and a dead-on perfect shade and characterization match by the ceramist. Those aren’t easy to do and was a testament to that particular dentist’s skill. That after pic should have been earned, not copied and pasted.

So…..very long story….but…..I would strongly recommend that you verify that images used in your website (all of them) have clear records of having been obtained for your use, either by you or by your webdesigner. This is likely going to be a bigger problem very quickly, and it’s only a matter of time till people run into a dentist who isn’t as reasonable as the one I worked for. I feel like a detective this week, but I’m glad I stumbled on those pics, that’s for certain. I think the doctor that first contacted me is glad I did as well.

I, for one, am grateful that there are people like Lisa out there, who will do the right thing by both the dentists who were ripped off by their web designer, as well as by the dentist to whom the patients and photos belong. Who knows how far those photos might have spread, were it not for Lisa’s vigilance.