I have a small practice in the northern suburbs of Chicago. We don't have great visibility from the street, we don't get 40 new patients a month, and I practice in an area where there is no available land for housing development construction. What that means is that I practice in a town where a whopping 19 new homes were purchased, and that has to be split among 16 dentists. Not easy to survive, but we do.

One thing that keeps people coming to our practice is that we are known for technology. We had two new patients come to our practice because they were unhappy with the fact that the dentist they were seeing for many years was not keeping up with technology. Both patients were discussing their dissatisfaction with respective friends, and were told how I did crowns with a computer on the same visit. The friends talked about how I took digital pictures of their teeth and they had never seen that before. They spoke about how I offered them TV or satellite radio and headphones to minimize the sound of the procedure. They also talked about how I e-mail and text them reminders and confirmations. In the cases of these two patients, technology was the tipping point.

We are living in a world where just about everyone uses technology in some way, shape or form. You may not think patients understand what our technology does, and maybe they don't, but they do understand that our office is trying to keep up with what is going on in the world of dental technology. Technology may not be valuable in the eyes of every single patient, but it is likely more important than you think.