Last week one of the largest dental conventions in North America convened: the Pacific Dental Conference in Vancouver, British Columbia (where they just had the Winter Olympics). At this conference (which hosted over 11,000 attendees!), one Dr. Samson Ng and one Dr. Chuck Shuler presented using VSee for UBC Tele-OralHealth (tele-dentistry).
Dr. Samson (a certified specialist in oral medicine and pathology, clinical assistant professor at the UBC, and director of the Oral Care Program for the Medically Complex Patients (OCPMCP) at the VGH Department of Dentistry) and Dr. Shuler (Dean of the Faculty of Dentistry at the University of British Columbia) gave a three hour presentation to a packed house. 50 conference attendees had to be turned away because of fire regulations. The packed audience had a great time, laughed, and went away with some great ideas on how video collaboration tools can improve the quality of dental care in not just British Colombia, but anywhere with a large remote population.
A specialist in BC, Dr. Ng discovered many patients are sent by their dentists or dental hygienists from the rural areas where they live to specialists in the Lower Mainland for consultations. The Lower Mainland is the highly-populated region of BC that includes Vancouver, and is more than three hours away for many of these dental patients.
Due to the inability of these dentists to communicate directly with dental specialist colleagues, any questionable sore in a patient’s mouth would lead to that patient taking off a day of work, spending money on gas and food, travelling in a car all day long…perhaps to hear they just had a cold sore.
At the Pacific Dental Conference, Drs. Ng and Schuler presented a solution to this: VSee.
Rather than have patients drive in regardless, specialists can now take a preliminary look, in real time, at the patient’s mouth, consult with the dentist right there, right then, and decide if the patient really needs to make the trek to the nearest city big enough to have a specialist. Likewise, the specialist can share back to the local dentist lab results, microscope slides, etc., without having to “store and forward” images and data via email…enabling the dentist and specialist to confer synchronously on the data being shared. This also reduces the necessity of waiting for results to be delivered before the consultation.
As you can see, this should be both a revenue driver and a cost cutter for remotely working dentists and their patients. Dentists offering this service will have a one-up on their competition as well as better outcomes, and patients will save a lot of time, money and headaches on potentially unnecessary travel.
Thank you, Drs. Ng and Shuler, for championing video collaboration for such a useful purpose. We’re proud to be the vehicle you’ve chosen to promote this tool.
For more information on Dr. Ng, please visit his website at www.opusoralhealth.ca. For more information on Dr. Shuler and the UBC Faculty of Dentistry, please visit www.dentistry.ubc.ca. For more information on the Pacific Dental Conference, please visit www.pdconf.com.
Hey, great information! I’ve used this technique a number of times already and i’ve had great success. All dentists should take note of this. Fast with a good end result, what more could you need? Thanks.
Very interesting application of this software platform. I would imagine that VSee would be a very applicable addition to my practice as well. Thanks for the share.