Six months in 10 minutes!

Good morning YouTube. I know it's been a little while since I've uploaded any new content to YouTube, but I wanted to share a few thoughts about the last six months to a year, the adventure that I've had. So as many of you know, if you follow my channel at all, I have been at a practice associated with Pacific Dental Services for the past, it was about nine years in Albuquerque, maybe eight years in Albuquerque and St. Louis combined. Had a very good experience, great people, loved the company, nothing negative to say about that experience, but I had an opportunity to come along to partner with Lumio Dental, which is an up-and-coming, technically a dental support organization, but it's a group of dental practices that are all collaborative and work together in a similar fashion to a DSO. It's been a very different experience, a very positive, wonderful experience to partner with Lumio Dental here in St. Louis. So let me tell you a little bit about how things have been going. So we, me and the leadership at Lumio Dental, you know, negotiated and talked and discussed and worked through a game plan of me transitioning out of Pacific Dental Services out of my office in O'Falun Modern Dentistry, which I sold to my previous associate, Dr. Haley Gulley. She purchased my interest of that practice in the beginning of April. And so in April, I was unemployed for a month as we were working on the transition for me to go into the new practice, which is in Baldwin, Missouri, a little bit of a drive for me. So in that intervening one month, April 1st essentially to the first week of May, I got to spend a lot of time at home on the farm with my wife, doing a lot of farm chores, which was great. So we, during that intervening month, spent some time, you know, setting things up, planting, cleaning up. You know, we have 20 rows of flowers, maybe 21 rows, and those rows are four feet wide and 60 feet long, covered and filled with flowers of all varying sizes and shapes and colors, and they're great. Lots of flowers. You know, we have some chickens on our property too. One of my big adventures when I was there was working on a walk-in cooler. So, and this is kind of fun. I'll put together a video here when I have some time. So we got a 20 foot by 8 foot by 8 foot storage shipping container used. It looked like it had been used all over the world. So we got a storage unit and I insulated it and put in a large, not a huge, but a larger air conditioning unit with a module called a CoolBot, and that CoolBot essentially over cools the room. So it's an AC unit like a window unit, but the CoolBot confuses or tricks or programs the AC unit so that it cools it below what the AC unit normally would be able to do. So right now we keep that at about 40 degrees. It's essentially running all the time. Now in the winter it doesn't run as much, of course, because the outside temperature is cooler, but it runs most of the time and it worked really, really well. So there's about five inches of insulation on the inside of that. It's waterproofed and it works really well. So that was my adventure. It took me about a week to finish that project. Probably the biggest and most interesting thing that I did with that was getting that 5,000 pound steel shipping container into our barn. So it's actually inside the barn and it fit, but just barely. I had to move a couple of rafters, not really support rafters, but some cross beams of wood to get it in in place and so now we have it inside the barn. Anyway, so essentially it took a month off, did a lot of farm work, and then started with Lumio Dental at Baldwin Family Smiles. Now this is previously the practice of Dr. Kevin Postel and he built a very high-end, great practice. He is now specializing in focusing on TMJ and sleep. And my understanding, he's the president of the Dental Academy for Sleep Medicine this year in 2023-24. Not sure how long his tenure will last. I'm not sure what that timeline is, but he's currently the president and that's most of what he does now. And so part of the transition was me buying his general dental practice from him. So we came on board in, let's see, the first week of May. And as I said, it's been a great experience so far. Dr. Postel's team and my team overlapped for about six months. They were in the process of building out a new building and transitioning his sleep medicine practice, TMJ's sleep medicine practice, over to their new office location. And it took a little bit longer than they had planned, but we had negotiated and discussed an overlap period. So that office currently has five operatories. I'm sorry, six operatories. And we were allowed to use four and sometimes five on Thursdays. And he used one or two, which is all that he needed to use at the time. I believe the office they built out has five operatories and he's planning on bringing in an associate to do more TMJ and sleep. But currently they only have, or at the time, they only had access to one or two ops. So we had the other five or four ops, which we used in conjunction with them. So it was tight sharing all that space, small waiting room, small parking lot we had to park next door. Fortunately, Firestone next door was very gracious and allowed us to use some of their parking spots. So let me give you a little bit of feedback about some things that I've learned. So previously in Pacific Dental Services in my office in O'Falun Modern Dentistry, I used CEREC, which I loved. Used CEREC for, you know, 10, 15 years. Really enjoyed it. I took three months off of CEREC and same day crown restorations. So I used a lab essentially for everything. You know, we were prepping and temping and prepping and temping, which was a unique change for me. It'd been a while. Now, I have to admit it was quite, what's the word? Refreshing to not have to worry about the production time and, you know, designing and manufacturing the crowns on site in the same appointment. The stress was a little bit lower there while we were doing that. And then I had an opportunity, again with Lumio, to beta test the Glidewell FastMill system. FastMill is similar to CEREC, except it doesn't come with a scanner. They use any number of scanners. The scanner that we use currently is the iTero scanner, which I've been very pleased with. We have an iTero 5D with the Neary, which every patient that comes in the office gets a full mouth iTero scan. And we use that for our internal photos. We use that to annotate and identify concerns and help the patient understand what we're seeing as opposed to taking a bunch of internal photos. Because we can now manipulate it in 3D and show them the actual photos and the 3D rendered photos. So, we use the iTero to scan and then it automatically uploads the file to the Glidewell FastMill fast design software, which we have on a computer next to our mill in the office. And again, I'll give you some more detail and data and I'll show you those pictures and some video of the process. The FastMill right now, we're using it to mill fully centered zirconia. So there's no firing required. These are zirconia blocks that are fully centered. Each of the blocks, you know, it's shaded A1, A2, B2, you know, all the normal dental shades. There are aesthetic, Brexer aesthetic crowns for the anterior and the shades are a little bit more translucent and the blocks are slightly smaller. But that's what I've been using for about three months now. I've had a very positive experience. Those crowns, because of the milling process, the cycle, as well as the hardness and just the processing in general, don't require any polishing afterwards. You know, for an anterior crown, yes, we'll do a little polishing, but as many of you know, with zirconia, if you over polish it, it can become very, very shallow. You know, it gets super shiny, very kind of pearly, which many of us don't like. So we don't necessarily need to polish these and they still look great and they're very smooth. So all we do is cut off the sprue, which is about one millimeter by one millimeter on the little square. We smooth that off with a high grit diamond, a fine diamond or a super fine diamond. Adjust the contacts as needed, if needed, and then bond it in place. It's been a very positive experience. Now, the milling time does take 30 to 45 minutes because it's fully centered zirconia. And we use one burr per crown. So each of the blocks come with a new burr if we're using zirconia. Now, there is an obsidian, which is essentially a lithium disilicate-like block. And that'll require fewer burrs. But right now we're using primarily zirconia. Exclusively zirconia with that machine. And it's been very, very good. The AI that designs them, it's very simple. We can do biocopy. We can design under a, you know, under a partial or whatever. It's been working very well. So today my plan is to purchase some new artwork for the office. We got the holes in the wall patched up and everything covered and everything's great. So the walls are a little bit bare since Dr. Postel and his team left. They had some artwork that went with them. So I'm here at the art store. I'm going to buy some artwork hanging up in the office. And I'll give you a little tour of the office and continue to give you some data and detail about how things are going with the office and the new adventure I'm having. So thanks for watching. See you later.