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I’m not one to jump on the technology bandwagon right away. I like to let it be refined and run its course, and I’ll get into that a little bit later. Some really big things, we do have digital Panorex, cephalometric, and CBCT machines. CBCT is a cone beam computerized tomography machine. That’s a really cool machine because it helps in surgery.
The big thing that we use it for is our implant cases. What it does is it gives you a 3D view of the bone structure, the jaws, whereas if you take just a Panorex or a little film X-ray, it’s just a two-dimensional thing. You know your width and your height, but you don’t know the depth, the bone.
We’ve had that machine for over 10 years, I think. We were the first ones in the area to have one. I saw that technology and I go, “This is a no-brainer. I’ve got to have this.” What it does is it takes the guesswork out of the treatment. You know pretty much upfront what implant you’re gonna need, so you’ve got that inventory onboard before you even start the procedure.
We do have intraoral cameras too, as well, so you can show the patients what’s going on in their mouth. Just as we’re speaking today, we are in the process of — we’ve already got the computers in place, but we’re gonna be doing the digital X-rays, the small ones in the back, because it’s maybe a year that we’ve been talking about it, but the old, regular X-rays, I still think those are very quality things. I can see a lot of things on those. They’re not distorted and they’re not pixelated or anything like that. I think the digital X-rays are good enough now, we’re just gonna go ahead and do it.
Another thing too, is it’ll help because the number of charts, you’ve got these X-rays in them, and they make the charts thicker, so they’re harder to fit into files. Staff will appreciate that.
The time, probably, only real big advantage I think to that is, over the analog-type X-rays, is that they’ll pop-up quicker, that’s the main thing. The technology’s good.