Bite Point

eCharts: We Are Now Paperless

Today, 3/5/2012, was Der Tag. "The Day." The moment when we transitioned from paper charts to eCharts.

Everyone survived!

We've been working with digital images for about five years now. We've been emailing letters to specialists and recieving theirs back in turn via electronic means. We've been treatment planning in our Dentrix software for quite some time as well. So this wasn't all new to us. Still, it took a leap of faith to change in this way. Now that the day is done it feels pretty good.

There are major advantages to this:

Faster! Because we work from pre-written Templates that we modify to fit the specific situation as needed.

Neater! Because no one has to read my meshuggenah handwriting.

More thorough! Because we don't have to worry about space concerns. The real world is often one of scarcity. We didn't want to waste paper because we'd have to order more. The digital world is one of abundance. We still won't waste space. But if we wish to write more- we'll write more. It entails no cost.

Environmentally friendly! We use a bit of power to run our computers, of course. But we turn them off at the end of the day, except for our server. And we no longer consume: paper, ink, the energy and chemicals required to make paper and ink, the energy and chemicals required to transport paper and ink, plastic in the casings of pens, etcetera, etcetera, etcetera.

Der Tag went well.

 

Write

Read and you may be enlightened. Write and you WILL be empowered.

Protests, Both Sides of the Story, and the Internet

I went to Penn Dental in Philadelphia, graduating in the very late 80's.  Hey- very late 80's, I'm not that old!  I did not go there for undergrad; I attended Muhlenberg College, a small and truly remarkable college in Allentown.

The University of Pennsylvania is an excellent place to get an education; it is, however, a very... corporate place.  It's the Ivy League school with the least heart and soul, in my considered opinion.  I state that simply to increase your appreciation of what was happening when I was there.

In those days South Africa was in the throes of Apartheid and severe unrest, as the ruling class of white peoples struggled to keep an iron grip on the black population.  P.W. Botha was still president, the relative reformer F.W. de Clerk hadn't yet come to power, and Nelson Mandela was still in jail, not being released until 1990 after many social and political upheavals had occurred.

More here for those who love their history:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/South_Africa_under_apartheid

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/P._W._Botha

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frederik_Willem_de_Klerk

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nelson_Mandela

So anyway, U Penn's massive endowment was invested rather heavily in South African business interests.  Students got ahold of this and started to protest, much as the Occupy WallStreeters have done today.  They set up actual shanty towns, just like in the Districts in South Africa, and in an astonishing move to show solidarity with the suffering people there, many well-off middle-class students started to actually live in their cardboard and sheet metal constructs:

http://dla.library.upenn.edu/dla/archives/image.html?id=ARCHIVES_20070627005

http://articles.philly.com/1986-04-09/news/26078005_1_penn-students-penn-officials-penn-board

(I'm sure their parents were thrilled about paying for room and board at the same time haha.)

Here's the thing, and my point in telling you all this: there were two extremely different viewpoints that came out of this protest.  

The students said, "Divest from South Africa, it's wrong to be invested there when they treat people the way they do under Apartheid."

The Trustees of the University said, "By investing there, we can make a difference."

Wow.

If we think about this objectively, without coming in with any assumptions, each point of view has a chance of being valid.  There really could be two partners in a tech or manufacturing firm, real people, people who would be happy to talk to you, named, say, Cecil Benoist and Kenward Fitton, who were gradually but steadily using their influence to change things for the better, and being absolutely transparent about it.  I doubt it, but there could have been.

The thing was, in 1987 you needed an army of reporters, working for a mega-corporation news organization, running through insane levels of money and resources, to even have a tiny chance of finding out.  Even then, they might be locked up by the repressive regime themselves.  Game over. Nothing learned.

Now?  Now, the free exchange of information via the Internet, and even more importantly, the ability of people to connect and make a difference, has changed that game, probably forever.  As an example, the multiple revolutions in the Middle Ease in 2010-2011 all had as their proximate cause: the ability of people to really know what was going on outside of their narrow part of the world; the ability to know what terrible things their governments were responsible for, and what they were stealing from their citizens; and the ability of those citizens to connect and organize via technology.

The Internet.  It's not just for posting Red-Cup Party Pictures anymore...

Actually, of course, it never was just for frivolous things, and although there is a great deal of misinformation and clutter out there, even evil things, we should respect all that and beware of it, but mainly we should be focusing on how it can connect us to folks who want to move forward together, and use it to change the world around us in ways big and small.

It is now extremely difficult for anyone- a government, a business, a person- to do evil in the dark.  Not for long.  The bright light of free flowing information brings everything out in the open in time.  It's all a matter, though, of where we direct our precious Attention.  Attention is a fixed quality, as there are only 24 hours in a day for all of us, and that's the thing that limits us.  

If today's information technologies had been available in the late 80's, all the activities that UPenn's investments were leading to, good or bad in their effects on South African society, would have come to light.  The trustees would have a choice to proudly trumpet their accomplishments, through the means of business investment there, or they would have had to divest and retreat in horror at the public relations scandal that their investments had caused.  Back then, they successfully hid the truth, whatever it was.  Now, they couldn't.  Simple.

The Occupy Protestors are apparently trying to hide much of their own goals and tactics, falling into much the same pattern as the corporate entities against which they protest.  Not a great strategy in today's world.  Sigh.  People as individuals learn so fast.  People as large groups- they never seem to learn.

It pays to really examine the power of our Attention, though.  If there's interest, I'll do just that in a future blog post.  For now, let me say that our precious Attention is our most powerful weapon, far more powerful than guns or money or yelling in the streets.  For if we turn our Attention away from anything in sufficient numbers, that entity will wither and die.  Examples?  If no one paid attention to those Kardashians, they wouldn't be rich and famous.  If half of the people who now shop at Walmart suddenly stopped, say in protest against their treatment of employees, well then within two months Walmart would be brought to its knees and would change the way it treats its employees  (I'm not saying we should necessarily do that, but we could.)  If we didn't do business at a certain bank- no more bank. If we all voted against the incumbent just one time, on a local, state, and federal level- all politicians would be permanently afraid of us, and would actually respect us for the first time in a century.

Gedankenexperiments, yes.  Impractical "thought experiments"- but they demonstrate, through extreme examples, what could happen.

We all have tremendous power now.  Our Attention is more valuable and powerful than it has been since we inhabited tiny Villages and there were no kings, no corporations, no gatekeepers of information and power at all.

What, then, shall we do with it?

 

Smudgepots and Ends of Eras

Blackwood, N.J. has excellent childhood memories for me. My grandparents on my Mom's side used to live there when I was very young. They had a great yard. They had a gazebo.  One time a cement truck came and, drum rotating with the apparent precision of the Earth spinning on its axis, poured something for them, probably the base of their gazebo.  I got gum stuck in my hair there and my Mom cut my hair as the only way to clean it up.  And more than once there was roadwork on their street, and they used Smudgepots. 'Toledo Torches', if you wish to employ Google. To my cousin and I- to two five year old boys- the dancing of their flames that never blew out in the wind was pure magic. I've seen the end of a number of eras in my day already, and to most of them I say a heretical good riddance. But I feel privileged to have seen the Smudgepot Era firsthand, and I feel sad that it ended.

Except! Now I own two Smudgepots of my very own. I fill them with Citronella rather than kerosene. And their flames dance merrily yet again, and delight us more than any ridiculous Tiki Torch ever could.

You will see many eras end in your life.  Popular culture saturates us with talk and information on the big ones, the vast sea-changing upheavals in our world that we must continually learn to adapt to and live with.

Then there are the small eras, let us call them micro-eras, that rise and fall around you throughout your life.  Favorite businesses closing.  Telephones changing from rotary to pushbutton to cellular.  The local parade that transitions from marching bands and magnificent John Phillip Sousa marches to just a bland flow of local politicos in late-model cars with obnoxious banners on their sides.  Dental amalgam fillings!  My Smudgepot example may seem a trifle silly to some, but dang it, the sight of a dozen or so Toledo Torches lighting up the familiar streets of home at night was a visceral, magical one.

Take note of the micro-eras that end as you go through life.  Tell your children about them.  Write about them in public.  And, when you can, keep them alive yourself.

On Writing In Public

“Do not stand idly by while your neighbor bleeds.” [Lev.19:16]

This ancient concept suggests a superb use for the newfound freedom we all have now, that blogs have given us, to write in public.  We no longer have to ask for permission from someone to publish something.  How many of you who do something that makes a difference are writing about it, in a public place?  Well.  You can help someone in this way, you know.  My main purpose in writing my blog is to send anticipated, personal, and relevant posts to my existing patients, so that they better understand things that we talk about in the office.

But it's also very popular in India and the Phillippines.  Who knew?

If you are doing something that makes a difference in the world around you, write about it.  The people you already serve will appreciate it, and you will also help others farther afield than you ever imagined.

Oh. Right. The Fear thing.

People who think nothing of jumping out of an airplane with naught between them and a sudden and violent death but some string and a piece of silk are often terrified of saying anything in writing that could be criticized, laughed at, or challenged by the legal department.

Oh, just do it.

Inform. Delight. Solve someone’s problem for them, or answer their question. And then simply let them know that you are eager to solve similar problems for their friends and family. 

Starting

Jumper cables are one of those things that are much more interesting than they seem at first glance:

 

Take their duty cycle, for one.  They may sit idle for months, even years, until something comes along for them to start.  A crisis!  Power pack and jumper cables to the rescue!  Sometimes, in certain situations, these things even save lives.

The trouble is, people often think in the same way.  I have.  Springing into action when the crisis looms.  But before that?  Waiting.  Waiting until there's a problem that can't be ignored.  Well, without that severe problem, we wait too much.

Waiting until we're "good enough", or educated enough, or fast enough, slow enough, high enough, low enough.  There's always something to wait for, isn't there?

Why wait for the crisis?  Why be a jumper cable?

Just start now.

Small and Gradual

We notice the big catastrophes in life and pay serious attention to them; that's how we're wired and it protects us to think that way. Yet it's often not the big catastrophes that destroy things. This bridge pillar:

 

-has just survived an earthquake, a hurricane, and further severe flooding.  No, it's the rust, a small, gradual thing, that's eventually going to destroy this massive piece of engineering.

And it's the same with people...

I Am Not Interchangeable

I am not interchangeable, temporary or disposable. And no business, or for that matter government or person, shall treat me as such. Furthermore, I shall never treat my patients that way. My patients are never interchangeable to me.

The Problem With "More"

The current problem with the corporate (and governmental) "More-MORE-MOORRRRE!!!" mindset is that they've screwed up by treating us as interchangeable and temporary and disposable for so long that there isn't any "More" to be had from us. They don't deserve our "More", and we're starting to realize that, and are directing our precious Attention elsewhere.

 

Greedy versus Generous

It hit me like a lightning bolt today:

Greedy people are less interesting than generous people.

And in a world of tremendous choice and clutter, where our precious Attention is vied for by more communication channels than ever before in human history, we are able now to pay Attention to what interests us. It's not like in the old days when powerful gatekeepers of information reigned, where, more often than not, someone else was able to tell us what to pay Attention to.  Now, we have near-infinite choice.  Now, more than ever, we get to decide who and what gets our Attention.

Ergo, generosity is going to become more and more valuable as time goes on.  Because it's interesting.

What does that mean for your business?