I want to take this moment to talk about our implant offerings through Imagen Dental Partners.   Let me first start with the Why.  If you haven’t seen the famous Simon Sinek video “Start with Why” I highly encourage you to do so.  The why of why we do implant education is the same as they why we do any education here at Imagen –  Better Patient Care. Period.

Now you may wonder- well what about the revenue, the growth in the practice, more profits? Yeah, all that is important, no doubt.  But if we don’t start with better patient care, then we lose sight of the long-term vision.

If we just focus on increased revenue that may indeed happen for the short term. Simply start screwing titanium anywhere there is a missing tooth, you will have a lot of revenue potentially. But what happens to that revenue when you have remakes, failures, upset patients? All that short -lived revenue and profitability is out the window.

This is exactly the reason we focus on the WHY of implant education- better patient outcomes.  Focus on that and the rest will follow. This leads me to how we have set up the implant curriculum at Imagen.  Knowing that our goal as an organization is to increase implant production by roughly 1.2 million for the year and knowing that we have over 200 providers, all with different skill sets, interests and experiences, our goal was to provide a comprehensive pathway for education for multiple different needs.  We have docs that have never placed and implant and want to learn how to do so and we have docs that are proficient but now want to tackle more challenging, complex cases.

The foundation of our education starts with learning the proper techniques and concepts of extraction and ridge preservation.  The first course will focus on that and will allow all doctors to get a baseline understanding of how to ensure you set up the ridge in an edentulous area for successful implant placement.  My ask is all doctors who have been targeted with an implant growth plan for their offices to attend this first workshop in Scottsdale.

Now as with anything in education, there is no one size fits all and certainly if someone feels they should be exempt from taking this first workshop, please shoot me an email and lets discuss your individual situation.  I will concede that for some this may be redundant but I cant tell you how many doctors came through my CEREC workshops, with 5, 10,15 years experience and thought the introductory course would be a waste of time only to go away after 2 days with tons of nuggets and shortcuts that allowed them to gain a better understanding of their CEREC system.  Learning and in some cases reviewing the fundamentals of implant dentistry, aka extractions and grafting, will not only help solidify your knowledge, but the sheer act of engaging with our community will ensure that you not only learn from your colleagues but also have the opportunity to mentor and coach some of our newer, younger providers.  This community-based approach will help all of our providers take better care of their patients and grow our practices collectively.

Once the grafting course is complete, we will assign you to one of two pathways. The first pathway will be for those new to implant dentistry and have very little experience in implant placement. The workshop will focus on model surgery and the fundamentals of implant placement.  After that will be individual one on one instruction with some of your fellow Imagen partners where you will have the opportunity to visit partner doctors and learn side by side, assisting in implant placements.  As you go through this pathway the end goal is to be comfortable enough to place your implants and provide a service for your patients that has now become the standard of care for tooth replacement.

For our advanced doctors who are already placing implants, we have two options.  The first is to focus on restoring implants with your CEREC.  This will help to reduce our lab spend and provide convenient same day care for those cases where its appropriate to restore chairside. The second option is for those doctors looking to do more advanced cases and full mouth reconstruction.  Whether you do your own implant placement for a full mouth case or work with a surgeon to come into the office to help with the surgical aspect, if more of our doctors are able to treat full mouth cases with implants, our outcome will be better patient care and our goal of 1.2 million in additional implant production will be met with ease.

In summary, start with the grafting course.  Beginner, intermediate, advanced – come to the grafting course to not only learn but participate in our community.  From there, the education team will work with you to develop a customized next step for your education.

Questions? Reach out to me and our team if you have any questions. Looking forward to crushing our education goals and taking great care of our patients.

-Dr. Sameer Puri, Chief Clinical Officer